Easy Engine Alternative: Trellis

v3
#1

So I have been using Easy Engine over a month. It’s good, I admit it. But still its not updated on a frequent basis.

For beginners and normal users who want to just deploy sites without any hassle, they should go for EasyEngine; that’s recommended.

However, utilizing due to not many updates or fixes, when utilizing all available resources, having a fast reliable, and efficient production site: Trellis is the best choice for everyone. Trellis Website

Know that it’s quite complex than Easy Engine, but if you have a very big server like me, using Amazon aws c4.2xlarge as an instance, easy engine did no good and stayed underutilized.

I wonder where the devs of easy engine are these days, we havent seen any updates lately.

Please note: Though trellis is advanced, upto date, and can give great performance for your applications like wordpress sites or any other sutff, but its quite hard to configure as there arent many tutorials out there nor its easy to figure out as everyone has different configurations.

Just Contacted EE through twitter: The Said that a lot of things are going on and they have trouble but they will update us with something soon.

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#2

I believe the developers have been working on a new version on EE that includes a GUI. Their development has slowed on new features for EE because of this. It however does not need to be updated as its just controlling other services which it installes through proper repositories allowing them to update themself as needed. Nginx, PHP, mySQL are all installed from their respective repositories. Easy engine does not need an update to use the most current version of its dependencies.

Trellis is very complex to setup and is very different to EasyEngine. Trellis is a platform for separating wordpress sites and having more control and security over multiple sites. EasyEngine is a configuration manager. It controls and maintains the configuration of other programs. Mainly Nginx, PHP, and MySQL. Also Mail and Cache packages.

2 Likes
#3

Well thats true, other than being easy and updates it has little to offer.

Its good for testing purposes.

#4

Not sure what you mean by little to offer. Its meant to ease the setup and maintenance of a web server. It provides multiple options for wordpress and any other php/html based application. It does everything it would be expected to. Its not a total, all in one, application. Just a management interface. Similar to cpanel. It’s still up to the user to implement proper security and performance tweaks.

You could use trellis in addition to EE. Modify EE to build trellis based sites. Trellis is for testing and small sites, there is way to much overhead for large production sites. Plus it would require a dedicated server. You can not virtualize on most VPS’s.

#5

I believe the developers have been working on a new version on EE that includes a GUI.

Apparently there’s been pretty signifcant delays https://twitter.com/easyengine/status/835455801816977408 and the future seems a bit uncertain.

In general, their lack of communication (other than twitter) is very disappointing.

I’ve also been looking at other alternatives. Trellis seems to be a bit more involved than I currently want to get involved with. There are also issues setting up on windows https://discourse.roots.io/t/where-can-i-find-a-complete-tutorial-for-windows-trellis-sage/7049

Personally been looking into stuff like Centmin Mod (Centos LEMP Stack script) https://centminmod.com/

and AnisPress (a former EE contributor) https://ansipress.github.io/

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#6

but it’s true. We need to know what’s going on Maybe they should be more transparent with us about the situation, budget and all, and maybe they need to run some big funding campaign. Many people will want to see it done and supported…

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#7

Thanks for this. I’m also looking for an active setup that is more featureful. However, though I see Trellis as a very good alternative; the facts remains that it’s complex to configure and deploy, yet you get what you wish for.

#8

I do not understand your problem with EasyEngine. For the performance, I’m running some websites with up to 1M visitors /month on VPS with 4GB RAM, and I do not need more resources.

Screenshot_35.png927×101 3.77 KB

And to have read the documentation of Trellis, I do not want to use Virtualbox to create a virtual server on a VPS. I’m sure you can optimize your configuration to make your website faster with EE.

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#9

Well, I use c4.2xlarge [Amazon AWS with Debain] (8vCpu, Mem 15GB, EBS Bandwith 1000Mbps and Full SSD with dedicated IOPS ) Still we are trying juice up performance from EE for the website hosted in it.

Didn’t see any significant performance gain, against a Linode 2GB plan. :3

While on Trellis, we saw major performance gain; sites were blazing faster. Without any server catching. However its a fact that its not easy to configure and deploy them.

Whereas EE being a super easy setup. I was hoping to let it squeeze every ounce of performance for applications hosted using EE like word press site or any other application that uses PHP or a DB.

#10

I have a customer with one million visitors a day on a VPS with 4GB RAM, 4vCPUs, and the server load seldom goes above 1.0.

I agree with @virtubox, your problem is not EE but something else.

2 Likes
#12

https://github.com/perroud/easyengine

I’m stuck for now. Only one reason: I’m waiting for EE v4 (PHP core) to fork.

note: I did already a nginx-mainline + JIT + modules to Launchpad (private yet), including patches made by Cloudflare.

1 Like
#13

AnsiPress, lol I was saying to myself who would call their software AnisPress…

#14

Is it yours?

#15

I see You might be correct. However, servers are under utilized, I got them for Testing out EE. @virtubox I think thats possible.

#17

@ALL

We have a blog post which answers some questions raised here - https://easyengine.io/blog/easyengine-v4-updates/

If you have question about the post, please join the discussion on the blog post.

2 Likes
#18

I know I am really late to this topic. But easy engine is not the problem.

You should try tuning your NGINX. Are you using PHP7? Http2?

#19

Yeah already did. Have come a long way since it was posted.

Right now, using latest Ngnix, PHP 7.2, MariaDB, HTTP2, Redis, Brotli for WP sites.

My problem was I was running a quite big server with just a few sites, applications, and storage use after I scaled up for certain projects.

RAM 144GB, CPU 72 Cores, 4TB NVME c5.18xlarge - AWS

Earlier used to have instance or server sizes upto 8GB, which worked really well when optimized and configured with right values.

So though Ngnix out of the box with EE is good for small instances; MySQL, php, Ngnix configurations doesn’t scale at all.

You have to manually test it in a hardcore way over time and alter the values to make your applications (for me WP and some other running apps, data research) here to make sure utilize all the spare resources; so nothing remains underutilized.

So at present, optimization and concurrency resulted in my server usage of more computes, such that it barely uses 10GB out of 144GB RAM.

Though with more depth trails and figuring out the values, I think I can achieve more performance from the server.

About Trellis; way back I used it on a 32GB server; fired up the same demo sites and some heavy virtual load and it seemed Trellis configured better than EE and performed far better.

So, in the end, its all about each individual use case scenario, the server they are using and how well they have squeezed the performance out of their server for their websites.

Right now what we EE enthusiasts want is to get upto date stuff with EE.

I asked some acquaintances to do a fork EE and work on updated stuff; however, they are busy with their own projects.

So its bit troublesome to find the right values for my server. I don’t have the time, and it’s better to learn things than to spend on something unless it’s about security.

#20

Wow, That’s an impressive server. I once took at a little 4 core arm server with 2GB of ram (On a network attached SSD) with 200mbs pipe. Shoved nginx in front of varnish (Needed NGINX to terminate SSL before passing the request to varnish). Hit it with 5000 users from load impact or a site there of and was INCREDIBLY impressed. The server did not stall or anything. The problem I had was the bandwidth to the server. I am a believer of squeezing as MUCH out of a server as possible.

I am with you when you say you don’t have the time to worry about tweaking and tuning. You want a more out of the box, ready to go solution.

I am tempted at trying Trellis. Although the setup looks intense.

Does trello automate Letsencrypt?

Serve HTTP2 out the box?

#21