Category: @work

Posted on

Amazon Elastic File System – Production-Ready in Three Regions | AWS Blog

EFS lets you create POSIX-compliant file systems and attach them to one or more of your EC2 instances via NFS. The file system grows and shrinks as necessary (there’s no fixed upper limit and you can grow to petabyte scale) and you don’t pre-provision storage space or bandwidth. You pay only for the storage that you use.

Source: Amazon Elastic File System – Production-Ready in Three Regions | AWS Blog

We’ve been waiting for this. Managing our own NFS is a bit of a pain.

Posted on

Adding Free SSL Certificate and HTTPS to WordPress with Let’s Encrypt and Certbot – WPMU DEV

Installing an SSL certificate on your domain is an essential step you should take to secure your WordPress site and now with Let’s Encrypt you can get one for free. An SSL certificate encrypts the connection between your site and your visitors’ browser so hackers can’t intercept and steal personal information. Normally, SSL certificates can be cumbersome to install and can get expensive, but this is changing fast.

Source: Adding Free SSL Certificate and HTTPS to WordPress with Let’s Encrypt and Certbot – WPMU DEV

Let’s Encrypt + Certbot provide a straight forward way to add SSL and HTTPS to your website. This article walks you through the steps to get this running on a WordPress site. It’s worth noting that this will likely work on Apache with virtual hosts but it’ll take a bit more work.

Posted on

VersionPress Brings the Power of Git to WordPress

One of the best things about WordPress is how easy it is to make sweeping changes to a website in just a few minutes. But with no easy way to revert a website to a previous state, you can lose a lot of work very quickly if you aren’t careful. VersionPress brings the power of Git to WordPress so you can make as many changes as your want with the knowledge that undoing any change is just a click away.

Source: Setting Up VersionPress for Git-Powered WordPress Version Control – WPMU DEV

Appears to work for both content and backend changes which would be handy. Not sure how it would work on large multisite installs like Classcaster or Lawbooks.

Posted on

Ever wonder how a big site like Stack Overflow handles code deployment?

We’ve talked about Stack Overflow’s architecture and the hardware behind it. The next most requested topic was Deployment. How do we get code a developer (or some random stranger) writes into production? Let’s break it down. Keep in mind that we’re talking about deploying Stack Overflow for the example, but most of our projects follow almost an identical pattern to deploy a website or a service.

Source: Nick Craver – Stack Overflow: How We Do Deployment – 2016 Edition

Fascinating look into how Stack Overflow code gets from a developers workstation to production servers. There are many good ideas about development workflow in here.

Posted on

Use npm shrinkwrap to manage dependencies in your node app

The reason to use npm’s shrinkwrap feature is that, while you can fix the versions of your direct dependencies in your package.json, you can’t fix the versions of their dependencies, which may be quite loosely specified. This means that if you or someone else rebuilds the image at some future time, you can’t guarantee (without using shrinkwrap) that it won’t pull down a different version of some indirect dependency, breaking your app. This seems to happen to me much more often than one might expect, so I advocate using shrinkwrap. If you are familiar with ruby’s excellent bundler dependency manager, npm-shrinkwrap.json is much like Gemfile.lock.

Source: Lessons from Building a Node App in Docker

Dependencies in the node ecosystem can be a real pain in the ass. Some relief can be had by using npm shrinkwrap to manage the dependencies of your dependencies.