There is more than one way to skin a cat

Note: no real cats have been hurt while writing this article :)

In one of my previous posts I showed how to update your Joomla/Drupal site using only your iPad. We tend to be away from our computers a lot :).

If you are on Amazon EC2 and have the luxury of ssh access here is how to install/update an Acquia Drupal site on the go.

There are three very important tools for the iPad, as I mentioned before, worth every penny:

1. iSSH - offers the ability to open ssh/telnet and VNC connections to remote computers.

2. Textastic - offers the ability to edit files on a remote machine while offering syntax coloring. While probably one could make it with Emacs or Vim, I would say Textastic is way more comfortable and also providing off-line editing capabilities.

3. MySQL - the iPad (almost) equivalent of phpMyAdmin
It offers the ability to run SQL queries against a configured database. The only iPad MySql client that actually works :)

In this article we will install the Aquia Drupal on Quercus. Follow the steps in this article to get Quercus up and running.

Here are the steps to configure the iPad tools.

1. Configure iSSH to connect to your Amazon EC2 instance

1. Email/DropBox the [key]. pem file you started the instance with.
2. General Settings/Configure SSH Keys/Import Keys.
3. Paste the contents of the .pem file in the text box.

Make sure you delete the e-mail or the DropBox file after you are done. If you are using e-mail, make sure you are using an ecrypted service like gmail.

2. Configure an iSSH connection
1. In iSSH choose "Add a configuration"
2. Turn on the "Use Key" option and select the key you set up at step 1.
3. Enter the VM ip adress and ec2-user as the user name
4. Select Ssh/shell as mode of connection

Save and test the connection. You should get a terminal window open.

Here are the downloads for Acquia Drupal (as of the date of this writing)

1. Aquia Drupal Core

Using iSSH, open a terminal to your Amazon EC2 instance.

$wget http://network.acquia.com/files/downloads/acquia-drupal-1.2.37.5587.zip
$unzip http://network.acquia.com/files/downloads/acquia-drupal-1.2.37.5587.zip
$mv acquia-drupal-1.2.37.5587 ../resin/webapps/ROOT/adrupal

2. Set up the database -

in iSSH

$mysql -u root -p
mysql> grant all privileges on *.* to 'yourfavuser'@'%' identified by 'yourpassword' with GRANT option;

In MySQL iPad application:

Create the database

Create the user

3. Start the Drupal installation program

Http://yourhost:8080/adrupal

Install Drupal in the usual way.

If you cannot get through the first screen most probably either the user name and/or password are incorrect or the user doesn't have the right privileges.

I'll let you discover how nice Textastic can be when it come to fixing your site :)