Category: Docker

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Deployment DevOps Docker Learning Productivity

Miniflux: self-hosted RSS reader

In an attempt to stay more updated with the things that are happening online, I’ve recently started following the top stories on Hackernews via the Telegram channel. But I’ve very quickly realized that it is just not part of my routine to check news via telegram.

What about RSS readers? I remember using Google Reader donkey’s years ago before it was abruptly shut down and I never did get back to RSS readers from then on; probably something to do with the trauma of losing all my news feed suddenly without a good alternative.

In my search for something that just “works”, Dickson hooked me up again with another recommendation that does exactly what I ask for: works.

TLDR; it’s a very simple and opinionated RSS reader that has a self-hosted option.

Setup

It was so simple that I got the docker up and running on my Synology NAS within minutes. Here’s the docker-compose.yml file that I used to get up and running. Docs on configurable parameters

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Docker Learning Microservices

Things I’ve learnt about microservices

Over the past couple of months I’ve been working on and reading up extensively on microservices. Numerous medium articles, and 2 books* later, here’s just a quick summary of the important points that I’ve learnt.
*Building Microservices – Sam Newman / Microservice Architecture – O’reilly

Is it suitable for me?

Organization

The organization that you are part of is a very huge part of whether the microservice architecture (MSA) is suitable for your project/product or not. Conway’s Law states that software design often reflect the organization communication structure, unsurprisingly, the inverse holds true as well.

While not a fact set in stone, there is less resistance when implementing MSA if your organization embraces the agile culture. I feel that this is mainly because MSA is an evolution of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). Having small teams with defined roles and objectives helps with separation of concerns and works in line with the technical aspect of MSA.

Sense of ownership

This is also closely linked to the organization and culture in general. MSA is not a magic bullet that could solve all the issues with the moving target problem. The team(s) need to take ownership of the service that they are building. There is no hard and fast rule that one team should only handle one service, but the team that built the service should be the one in charge of maintaining/improving it.

There are many other factors that I won’t delve into as the books do a much better job as putting the information across. But briefly, the other factors are as level

  • Location of team (across countries)
  • Team size (2 pizza rule)
  • Outsourcing (cultural fit)
  • Competency level

So you’ve thought through all of these factors and decided, “I think my team/organization is ready for MSA, where to start?”

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Deployment Docker

New server setup for 2019

First post of 2019, it’s time to dive into what and how I have my server configured. Well technically it was configured in 2018, but it took awhile to type this out.

There are 3 main services that I want to run, however in total I’m running a total of 6 docker instances on my DigitalOcean server.

It was rather smooth sailing, apart from the disaster that broke out right before I wanted to migrate this WordPress blog. Most of the Docker images that I’ve used came from linuxserver.io, they provide really good and clean images that have been used by millions of people. (I’m just too lazy to build my own images)

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Deployment Docker Learning

When this site crashed

My WordPress blog crashed when I tried updating it to the new Version 5.0. I swear I could hear a woman screaming in the background when I realized that everything stopped working. It also turned out to be way more difficult to recover than expected because I was running multi-site on it.

Gutenberg simply crashed everything

Basically, the new version of WordPress refused to play nice with the presumably outdated version of Gutenberg I have running on my semi-neglected blog. It crashed everything, including my other private sites I have running on this installation.

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Deployment Docker

Automated Torrenting Configuration using Docker

I was sick of downloading my shows manually, it actually takes up quite a bit of time especially if you add them up over the years. Before I had my server set up, I was running Deluge with the YaRSS2 plugin which works wonderfully well as long as my computer was turned on. (kind of a power hog)

http://dev.deluge-torrent.org/wiki/Plugins/YaRSS2

But since I have a low-power server now, I can let it run 24/7 without worries. Here’s my experience with it.

Diagram of current setup

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Deployment Docker

WordPress Multisite

So… wow, I finally managed to get it all up and running. The amount of effort is way more than I would’ve liked but at least it’s done now. There’s a ton of things I would like to write about, especially the troubleshooting steps I did so that it’ll be easier to migrate this configuration in the future.

First of all, I tried on my own to get the subdomain routing working with jwilder/Nginx-proxy along with MariaDB and official WordPress image.

https://github.com/jwilder/nginx-proxy

I will write more about the proxy as well as the let’s encrypt SSL containers in another post.

Unfortunately, for whatever ungodly reason I wasn’t able to get it up and running. So after some Google-fu, I came across this article that helped me greatly.

https://cianallner.com/ultimate-wordpress-docker-setup-guide/

I ended up not doing the docker-compose method because I was trying to troubleshoot why I wasn’t able to obtain an SSL certificate from Let’s Encrypt. Bad news, SSL still isn’t working yet but while I was debugging it I hit the rate limit for the number of certificates I could request for in an hour/day/week. Hopefully when that’s sorted out this site will have a proper SSL certificate.

WordPress Multisite

http://www.wpbeginner.com/wp-tutorials/how-to-install-and-setup-wordpress-multisite-network/

I wanted to have the ability to host multiple WordPress sites, for my own testing/development as well as for my freelance work. Instead of running a separate new WordPress installation every time I need a new site, multi-site allows me to run multiple sites off a single installation and manage them through a centralized zone.

There are two ways of running this.

  1. sub-domain
  2. sub-directory (chosen)

The reason for choosing sub-directory was pretty easy for me.

  1. There is no need for pretty URLs eg. xyz.lordofgeeks.com for the sites I’m hosting
  2. Let’s Encrypt doesn’t offer wildcard certificates where 1 certificate can cover all sub-domains under *.lordofgeeks.com
  3. It makes sense that all of the sites belong to blog.lordofgeeks.com/[name-of-site]

For point 2, starting from 2018 onwards, Let’s Encrypt will offer wildcard certificates. So all my effort for setting all these up will be for nought, but it’s still a good learning experience. 

Everything went on fine until I added a new site blog.lordofgeeks.com/dev/ and tried to upload a file that’s >1 megabyte.

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