Meza/Common Meza Test Environment (CMTE)

aka: Installing and testing MEZA 35.x LTS on a local Rock Linux 8 VM from scratch

Preface

About Meza

Meza is an Ansible-based MediaWiki administration software project which provides a simple to use set of automation scripts that automates the installation, maintenance, and configuration management of an otherwise very complex MediaWiki server application. In other words, Meza enables anyone to easily set-up and maintain a full-featured mediawiki site with a just few simple commands.

Meza is short for MediaWiki E-Z Admin (MEZA)

The goal is Meza is to make it possible for everyone to have a modern, fully-featured MediaWiki installation. Standard MediaWiki is easy to install, but increasingly its newer and better features are contained within extensions with more complicated install procedures. Additionally, they may be particularly difficult to install on Enterprise Linux derivatives (e.g. Red Hat, CentOS, etc.). This project aims to make features like VisualEditor, CirrusSearch, etc., easy to install, backup, reconfigure, and maintain in a robust and well-tested way.


 * For the System Admins: Learn More about Meza from the Meza Main Page here on mw.o
 * For the Project Managers: Meza/NASA Technology Report for MEZA (NTR 1654188037)
 * For the Executive Leadership: MediaWiki Application Rationalizations
 * For all:
 * Talk Topic:Xjac81qdj0igo64t - An Analogy for MediaWiki
 * Talk Topic:Xjaci2lu34rbldzw - Some practical concerns when considering Proprietary Software Solution XYZ

The Procedure

In following this procedure you will functionally be installing NASA GRC-ATF's production version of MEZA from scratch on a local Rocky Linux 8 VM running on a computer of your choice.

PART 1 - ESTABLISH A BASELINE VM
The goal of part 1 is to install a fresh new Rockly Linux 8 Virtual Machine using Oracle's Virtual Box that will serve as a convenient baseline VM image for used to quickly spin-up a new clone for testing Meza. You should only ever nedd to perform part 1 once on a given host system. Once Part 1 is completed on your host system, you will always start this procedure at Part 2.

1.1 - Download and Install the prerequisite software
You now have everything you need to create a RL8 Virtual Machine (VM) on your computer.

1.2 - Start VBox and create a new VM named "RL8"
You know have a virtual new platform (virtual hardware only) in VirtualBox that you can use to install the Rocky Linux 8 (RL8) Operating System (OS) on.

1.3 - Prep new VM for a fresh install of RL8
You now have the RL8 DVD Installation DVD (ISO file) virtually inserted into the new VM and are ready to begin a fresh "Boot from CD" install of RL8 upon start-up of the new VM

1.4 - Install RL8 on to the new RL8 VM
You now have a fresh install from DVD of Rocky Linux 8 on your new RL8 VM

1.5 - Perform updates and other post install configurations on RL8 VM
Your new RL8 VM is now fully up-to-date with the latest updates to packages since the install DVD was made.

1.6 - Install Guest Additions
Your new updated RL8 VM now has the drivers needed to communicate with the VirtualBox software so that the screen scales nicely and the clip-board works well between the Host (your computer) and the Guest (the RL8 VM).

1.7 - Perform some final tweaks to new RL8 VM
Your new updated RL8 VM now has all the post RL8 install configuration tweaks needed to qualify as a proper Common Test Environment (CTE) for Meza.

STOP - CONGRATULATIONS
''' Stop! Congratulations!! - Your Rocky Linux 8 VM is finally set-up '''

Be sure to CLONE this system using VBox before proceeding to install MEZA

'''Why? - All of the the preceding steps are rather time consuming and if you ever want to set-up a fresh new VM to test something, you'll appreciate the ability to just start with a clone of this system.'''

2.1 - Clone the new RH8 system
You now have a perfect clone of your perfect RL8 CTE VM. As needed, you can quickly make and destroy as many clones as you wish of the clean RL8 CTE VM.

3.1 - Start the RL8 Clone VM
You are now logged-in to a properly configured CTE for Meza and are ready to do some official testing of Meza

3.2 - Install Meza on the RL8 Clone VM
At this point.. you should have a fully installed and fully updated Rocky Linux 8 Linux Workstation with all the VBox Guest Additions installed.

Now its time to install Meza 😎 ..

'''Important!!! -''' Always use a fresh new clone of a completely clean new Rocky Linux 8 VM VM (such as the RL8 Clone VM you just created in the previous step, right????!)

So assuming you are here with a fresh clone of the RL8 Meza CTE .. perform the following steps:

If Meza crashes or if any of these steps produces a warning or error, please let us know in the talk page so we can address it.

Congratulations, you now have a fully deployed MediaWiki application stack providing a fully-featured MediaWiki Wiki Farm and 1 fully installed and configured "demo" wiki.

No small thing.

3.3 - Perform a few post-deploy VM specific tasks
In a production environment, you will likely have a trusted cert that was signed by a third party, however, when Meza deploys to a VM it creates a "self-signed" certificate which is a problem for Visual Editor. To solve this problem we need to add the meza self-signed cert file to the RL8/RHEL8 cert store. This will allow visual editor to function properly in the VM environment.

3.4 - Visit and test your new Meza Site and Demo Wiki
Start making and editing pages and storing data and uploading files.

''' Gratz! .. You are done. '''

If anything in the Mediawiki application does not work produces warning or errors, please let us know in the talk page so we can address it.

/*end meza cte procedure*/

5.3 - Make whatever local changes you think are worth making to MEZA on the RL8 Clone VM
Important - The only code that is actually part of Meza Core is what it git cloned into  any local changes you make anywhere else on the CTE is part of the local CTE instance and is not able to be pulled into meza. This is an important part of how meza works.