In February Linode introduced StackScripts: a nifty feature which simplifies the installation and configuration of solution stacks when deploying Linodes.
While participating in the StackScripts (henceforth SS) beta I wrote the LEMP stack and associated LEMP_lib. LEMP stands for “Linux nginx MySQL PHP”; an alternative to LAMP “Linux Apache MySQL PHP” stacks. I wrote them solely for the sake of beta testing but ended up publishing them when SS went live in hopes others would benefit from my work. I expected someone more skilled than I to come along and write a decent LEMP SS and mine would fade into obscurity. I was content with such an outcome… after all, I wouldn’t call myself a programmer, but a sysadmin. My programming abilities suffice for writing appalling Bash scripts to assist with system administration tasks, nothing more.
To my surprise, people actually used my SS to deploy their Linodes and as a result I felt responsible to maintain and improve my scripts. I actively did so for a time and altered them to reap the benefits of Ubuntu 10.04, which includes a more recent nginx package; and PHP 5.3.3, which introduced PHP-FPM support. Unfortunately now my lack of free time and disposable income prevent me from developing further (oh sure improvements work on my dev systems, but Linodes are a different story), but I still make the effort to update them when new versions of PHP and Suhosin are released.
A few authors have written LEMP-related StackScripts based upon mine, so perhaps they’ll conjure up something better. I certainly hope so.
