Azure Virtual Machine

DEPRECATION WARNING: On August 31, 2024, Azure will retire Basic and Standard A-series virtual machines (VMs). Before that date, migrate your workloads to Av2-series VMs, which provide more memory per vCPU and faster storage on solid-state drives (SSDs).

You will now setup the API Server by using the Azure Container Instances setup.

• An On-Premise Enterprise license is required to complete this installation

• In the left menu, click on the Virtual Machines menu item, and then press + Create button.

• In the dropdown select Azure Virtual machine.

• Click the link that says See all images underneath the Image field.

• In the see all images, type the word Docker, and then click on the Docker on Ubuntu Server

• You will now need to select your Instance for your machine. Please note that Azure does not make all VM sizes available in every region so select region and VM size carefully. We recommend the following.

  • Test Environments - A1_v2 Standard

  • Production Environments - A6 Standard

• Next, will we setup a root user account credentials for SSH access.

• At the bottom left of the page there will be a Review + create button. Click on this button to launch the Virtual Machine.

Add Inbound Port Rules

• You will now wait for this machine to be created, and once it is, we will need to open up the HTTP port 80 on this machine.

• To do this, you will click on this machine in the Virtual Machines section, and then click on Endpoints and then click + Add

• We will now configure the following endpoint.

  • Name: HTTP

  • Protocol: TCP

  • Public Port: 80

  • Private Port: 80

  • Press OK

• Now that we have an HTTP port open on this machine, we can now SSH into the machine using your computers Terminal.

Login into Azure VM via SSH

• To login to this machine, you will first need to get the Public IP Address by clicking on the Overview tab.

• You will then see the Public IP Address, which you will then need to copy.

• Next, you will open up a Terminal on your local computer and type the following.

  ssh [user]@[publicIpAddress]

  Make sure you replace [user] with the username that you used to create the virtual machine, and the [publicIpAddress] with the name you just copied.

• You will then be prompted to enter your password which you will enter the same password you provided when you created the virtual machine.

Pull Docker Containers

• You should then see the console of the Ubuntu virtual machine. You will now download the Docker containers. While it is recommended to put the API Server and the PDF Server on separate Virtual machines, for this example, we will just download both of them on the same machine.

• docker pull formio/formio-enterprise:$IMAGE_VERSION
  docker pull formio/pdf-server:$IMAGE_VERSION

Create Docker Network

• You will now need to create an “internal” network that you will use to connect all the internal docker containers together.

  docker network create formio

Start API Server

• Next we will spin up our API Server using the following command.

  ## Start Form.io API Server
  docker run -d \
    -e "LICENSE_KEY=$YOURLICENSE" \
    -e "MONGO=mongodb://formio:[PASSWORD]@formio.documents.azure.com:10255/formio?ssl=true&replicaSet=globaldb" \
    -e "PORT=3000" \
    -e "PORTAL_ENABLED=true" \
    -e "ADMIN_EMAIL=[e-mail]" \
    -e "ADMIN_PASS=CHANGEME" \
    -e "DB_SECRET=CHANGEME" \
    -e "JWT_SECRET=CHANGEME" \
    -e "PDF_SERVER=http://pdf-server:4005" \
    --restart unless-stopped \
    --network formio \
    --link pdf-server:pdf-server \
    --name formio-server \
    -p 3000:3000 \
    formio/formio-enterprise:$IMAGE_VERSION

  You will need to make sure that you change out the values for ADMIN_PASS, JWT_SECRET, DB_SECRET, MONGO to be the values that you saved in your editor during the setup process.

• After this runs for a minute, you should then be able to type the following to check on the status.

Start PDF Server

• Next, we will deploy our PDF server to point to both the API server + Minio File Server.

  ## Start Form.io PDF Server
  docker run -itd \
    -e "LICENSE_KEY=$YOURLICENSE" \
    -e "MONGO=mongodb://formio:[PASSWORD]@formio.documents.azure.com:10255/formio?ssl=true&replicaSet=globaldb" \
    -e "FORMIO_AZURE_CONNECTION_STRING=$YOURCONNECTIONSTRING" \
    -e "FORMIO_AZURE_CONTAINER=pdfs" \
    --network formio \
    --restart unless-stopped \
    --name pdf-server \
    -p 4005:4005 \
    formio/pdf-server:$IMAGE_VERSION

• Once this is running, you should be able to type the following.

  docker logs pdf-server

  and then see the following.

• You should now have two public ports accessible on this machine.

  • API Server: Port 3000

  • PDF Server: Port 4005

• We can now make all of this fall under a single HTTP port by configuring an NGINX proxy on our server.

NGINX Setup

In order to bring all of these locally hosted servers into a single HTTP interface, we can use NGINX to sit in front of these servers.

To setup this configuration, please go through the following steps.

• Install NGINX using the following command.

  sudo apt-get update
  sudo apt-get install nginx

• We can check to ensure that we have NGINX running with the following command.

  systemctl status nginx

• We now need to edit the nginx.conf file to redirect HTTP traffic to the internal servers.

  sudo nano /etc/nginx/sites-available/formio

• Put the following contents in that file.

  server {
    listen 80;
    server_name  ~^(www\.)?(.+)$;
    client_max_body_size 20M;
       
    ############# Use the following for SSL ################
    # listen               443 ssl;
    # ssl_certificate      /usr/local/etc/nginx/nginx.crt;
    # ssl_certificate_key  /usr/local/etc/nginx/nginx.key;
    ########################################################
       
    location / {
      proxy_set_header    Host $host;
      proxy_set_header    X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
      proxy_set_header    X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
      proxy_set_header    X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme;
      proxy_pass          http://localhost:3000;
      proxy_read_timeout  90;
      proxy_redirect      http://localhost:3000 https://$host;
    }
     
    location /pdf/ {
      rewrite ^/pdf/(.*)$ /$1 break;
      proxy_set_header    Host $host;
      proxy_set_header    X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
      proxy_set_header    X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
      proxy_set_header    X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme;
      proxy_pass          http://localhost:4005;
      proxy_read_timeout  90;
      proxy_redirect      http://localhost:4005 https://$host;
    }
  }
     
  server {
    listen 80;
    server_name  ~^minio.(.+)$;
    client_max_body_size 20M;
       
    ############# Use the following for SSL ################
    # listen               443 ssl;
    # ssl_certificate      /usr/local/etc/nginx/nginx.crt;
    # ssl_certificate_key  /usr/local/etc/nginx/nginx.key;
    ########################################################
       
    location / {
      proxy_buffering off;
      proxy_set_header Host $http_host;
      proxy_pass http://localhost:9000;
    }
  }

  Note, for this configuration to work with Minio, you will need to create a subdomain @ http://minio.yourserver.com that points to this server. Minio does not support being hosted outside of the root domain.

• Now save that file, and then switch this out for the default server

  sudo rm /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/default
  sudo ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/formio /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/default
  sudo systemctl restart nginx

• We can now test that we have both an API server and a PDF Server running by going to the following URLs in our Browser.

  • http://formio-server-6ht0yqu8.cloudapp.net/status (should show the API Server status)

  • http://formio-server-6ht0yqu8.cloudapp.net/pdf/ (should show the PDF Server status)