Installing FixMyStreet and MapIt

A photo of some graffiti saying "SIMPLE"

Photo credit: duncan on Flickr

One of the projects we’ve been working on at mySociety recently is that of making it easier for people to set up new versions of our sites in other countries.  Something we’ve heard again and again is that for many people, setting up new web applications is a frustrating process, and that they would appreciate anything that would make it easier.

To address that, we’re pleased to announce that for both FixMyStreet and MapIt, we have created AMIs (Amazon Machine Images) with a default installation of each site:

You can use these AMIs to create a running version of one of these sites on an Amazon EC2 instance with just a couple of clicks. If you haven’t used Amazon Web Services before, then you can get a Micro instance free for a year to try this out.  (We have previously published an AMI for Alaveteli, which helped many people to get started with setting up their own Freedom of Information sites.)

Each AMI is created from an install script designed to be used on a clean installation of Debian squeeze or Ubuntu precise, so if you have a new server hosted elsewhere, you can use that script to similarly create a default installation of the site without being dependent on Amazon:

In addition, we’ve launched new sites with documentation for FixMyStreet and MapIt, which will tell you how to customize those sites and import data if you’ve created a running instance using one of the above methods.

These documentation sites also have improved instructions for completely manual installations of either site, for people who are comfortable with setting up PostgreSQL, Apache / nginx, PostGIS, etc.

Another notable change is that we’re now supporting running FixMyStreet and MapIt on nginx, as an alternative to Apache, using FastCGI and gunicorn respectively.

We hope that these changes make it easier than ever before to reuse our code, and set up new sites that help people fix things that matter to them.

Photo credit: duncan