🤓Racknerd Installation

Alma Linux is the only version of Linux that is officially unsupported due to issues it consistently causes with Docker, but please use Ubuntu.

Here's a preview of the steps we will be taking throughout this document to get your ESP Platform up and running on your Racknerd VPS in only 2 or 3 minutes:

• Find your Racknerd IP Address and root password

• Connect to your Racknerd VPS using SSH from macOS terminal or PuTTY on Windows

• Install curl

• Download your software to the Racknerd VPS from your portal at https://appsumo.emaildelivery.com using curl

• Exact your software archive like you would a zip or rar file

• Run our automated installation tool for Docker (Zero effort)

• Run our automated EZ Setup tool to install your software (1 out of 10 effort)

• Log into your new ESP platform as the administrator in your web browser

• Brag to everyone you know about running your own ESP 😎

To access your Racknerd VPS you'll need the IP address and root password

We'll show you how to use this information to connect to your server using ssh on both macOS and Windows

Racknerd should send you the VPS IP and root password via email, if the email never arrives, here's where you can find them on the Racknerd website:

https://my.racknerd.com/clientarea.php?action=emails

To connect to your Racknerd server on macOS, you'll open terminal and use the ssh command.

To connect to your Racknerd server on Windows, you'll download a tool called PuTTY:

https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/latest.html

For this example we'll use macOS to connect to our Racknerd VPS.

Copy the IP of your VPS, open terminal, type ssh root@ and paste the IP in after the @, like the screenshot below:

Now copy the root password, paste it into the password prompt, and hit enter.

Once you're logged in as the root user, the first thing you're going to need to do is install curl with this command:

apt-get install -y curl

Once you've installed curl, you're ready to download your ESP platform from the portal at https://appsumo.emaildelivery.com

Click the clipboard link next to "ESP Platform Download Command", and paste it into your terminal window to download the software.

Copy:

Paste

Hit enter and wait for the download to complete:

You've just downloaded our software archive, this is similar to a zip file or a rar, so you're going to need to extract it to access its files.

Run the following command to unpack the platform archive:

tar xzvf edcom-install.tgz

You'll see output like the following

Once the extraction process is finished, change directory to edcom-install:

cd edcom-install

Now run our automated Docker installation script:

./install_docker_on_ubuntu.sh

Now that Docker is installed, you're ready to run the EZ Setup installer:

./ez_setup.sh

The EZ Setup script is going to ask you a series of questions it uses to automate the installation, and then you'll be done.

First question:

Do you want to proceed with the automated setup? [y/n]: y

Type y

Second question:

Is a recent version of Docker already installed on this server (if you don't know the answer, type "n") [y/n]? y

Type y

The Docker images which contain your ESP platform will begin loading:

Now you'll be asked for an IP address to use for the ESP, use the same one from Racknerd you connected with over ssh:

It's time to enter the subdomain and domain you're going to create for your ESP after you've completed this installation process.

The DNS record doesn't need to exist right now, but you need to tell the platform that you'll be accessing it using that domain in the future.

After installation, you'll access your ESP platform using the IP address in a web browser to get started, until you've added DNS.

Just make the subdomain "esp" for simplicity.

So if your domain name is fivetacofiesta.com, name your platform esp.fivetacofiesta.com.

To enter your license key you're going to need to head back over to the portal again:

This time copy and paste from the "ESP Platform License Key" up at the top, instead of where you copied it from last time.

We give professional IT people the chance to opt out of a technical optimization used for our software, but you'll want to accept and just hit y when asked about vm.overcommit_memory.

Your platform should boot up now without errors:

Enter your desired Name, Company Name, and your Administrator Email Address.

The administrator email address doesn't have to exist, you can make it up:

When you enter the password for your administrator email address, it won't look like you're typing anything, this is fine, it's working.

Your ESP platform is now online and can be accessed in any web browser using it's IP address

Next, we're going to set up DNS for your ESP so you'll be able to access it from your web browser using the domain name you entered earlier, instead of the IP address.

Using Cloudflare in our example, we're going to create a DNS "A" record for the subdomain entered during installation, and point it at our VPS IP.

You'll have a similar DNS record creation process on your own DNS hosting provider, however, you should switch to Cloudflare if you can (it's free).

Create a new DNS "A" record:

Enter the subdomain you used during the ESP installation and your Racknerd VPS IP address

Save and verify the new DNS record was created successfully.

Access your ESP platform using the DNS record you just created at http://esp.yourdomainname.com

*** Note: Use the actual domain name you entered during the ESP installation, not esp.yourdomainname.com, it's just a placeholder.

Something to remember for troubleshooting purposes after you've set up DNS is when it seems like your ESP platform might be down, try the IP address as a backup to verify you can still connect ok and it's isolated to a DNS failure or another related issue.