Roller's new web UI

Dave Johnson — Mon, 21 Jan 2019 15:59:00 +0000

About three years ago I decided to modernize and improve the Apache Roller web UI by rewriting the JSP pages to use the Struts 2 Bootstrap tags, which use Twitter's Bootstrap v3 components and JavaScipt. I also wanted to replace all the HTML table-based formatting with div's and Bootstrap, do a bunch of other improvements and make Roller's web UI less clunky and annoying.

Converting Roller's eight-five JSP pages was a big task and I did not have much time for it. That's why it took three years. Ironically, the Roller modernization project leaves Roller three years out of date. Still, I think it is a huge improvement over the Roller v5 web UI and I want to get it released in Roller v6. Currently, this work is available as Pull Request #22 and you can find some screenshots there too. Here's one:

Try it with Docker-Compose

I also did some work to make it super-easy to try the Roller v6 snapshot pre-release for yourself, by using Docker Compose. You don't have to fiddle with Tomcat or PostgreSQL. You can find a simple Dockerfile for running Roller v2 snapshot and a docker-compose.yml file linked below. And you can find a Docker image in my DockerHub repo.

If you want to try Roller v6 snapshot, here's what you need to do:

1 - If you don't aleady have it, install Docker

2 - Create a directory on your computer where you want Roller to store it's data.

3 - Save this file docker-compose.yml to that new directory.

4 - Open a shell in that new directory and run:

docker-compose up

5 - Watch the PostgreSQL and Roller startup logs scroll by

6 - When the log scroll slows go to http://localhost:8080 to access Roller and go through the initial setup.

Alternatively, if you want to try Roller the hard way, you can get the regular-style v6 SNAPSHOT release files here roller/roller-6.0/v6.0.0.

Let us know how it goes

I hope you'll give Roller v6 snapshot a try and let the project know how it can be improved for your use. Send feedback to the Roller mailing lists or ttweet at us at @apache_roller.

Powered by Postgresql and Docker Swarm

Dave Johnson — Tue, 7 Nov 2017 21:52:40 +0000

It was somewhat painful but due to some problems with MySQL and Docker, and some general uneasiness with MySQL, I switched this site from MySQL v5.7 to PostgreSQL v10. I also switched over to Docker Swarm. Here's the Docker-Compose file that I'm using now to run this site:

version: '3.2'

services:

   postgresql:
      image: "postgres:10.0"
      ports:
         - "5432:5432"
      deploy:
         resources:
           limits:
              memory: 50M
      volumes:
         - type: bind
           source: /var/lib/postgresql/data
           target: /var/lib/postgresql/data
      environment:
        - POSTGRES_USER=roller
        - POSTGRES_DB=rollerdb
        - POSTGRES_PASSWORD_FILE=/run/secrets/pg_passwd
      secrets:
        - source: db_passwd
          target: pg_passwd

   roller:
      image: "rwo:latest"
      ports:
        -  "80:8080"
      depends_on:
        - postgresql
      deploy:
         resources:
           limits:
              memory: 800M
      volumes:
        - type: bind
          source: /var/lib/roller
          target: /var/lib/roller
      environment:
        - DB_HOST=postgresql
        - STORAGE_ROOT=/var/lib/roller
        - JAVA_OPTS="-Xmx700m"

secrets:
  db_passwd:
    file: ./db_passwd.txt

It was a pain, but sometimes pain = gain and I learned a lot. I'm hoping the site will be a bit more stable now.

Blogging Roller

Roller's new web UI

Try it with Docker-Compose

Let us know how it goes

Powered by Postgresql and Docker Swarm