Setting Up a Ghost Blog with nginx, Certbot and Docker.
Aug 28, 2016
I thought I would write up my experiences with setting up Ghost served over HTTPS as it’s quite a good way of jumping into Docker and using nginx as a reverse proxy to route traffic between Docker applications.
In this tutorial we will use the following applications:
Debian (or other Linux) nginx (Web Server, Reverse Proxy and Load Balancer) Certbot (client for Let’s Encrypt certificates) Docker (containerization software) Docker-Compose (tool for defining multi-container environments, useful for single containers too!
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Re-architecting a Global Data Object store
Aug 19, 2016
In a recent project I have had the opportunity to work with MongoDB, admittedly this is the first real attempt to do so in any real capacity.
For this project we created a number of Drupal websites with a centralised Data Object Store, referred to simply as the “GDO” (Global Data Object Store).
The main concept of the GDO is that data objects (in the form of JSON documents) can be stored centrally and accessed by every site/server within the AWS VPC (Virtual Private Cloud).
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Quick security tip! Docker containers and ufw.
Jul 28, 2016
I recently discovered that the Docker daemon ‘out of the box’ (as it where) will run with the option --iptables=true.
Why is this important? - Well, for on your own development environment perhaps it isn’t so important. You can just get on with running your containers and access them over the network as expected.
If you are a bit more security conscious, perhaps because you are running on a production server, you will have firewall rules of some sort.
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Making .deb packages using Docker
Jul 27, 2016
This is a bit of an odd exercise but I recently found myself needing to compile a program and produce a .deb package. We were looking at making a shared environment for producing these packages to roll out to production environments, however what was needed was a method of just spitting out .deb packages from sourcecode from git.
Approach Rather than taking up a VM on our KVM server we decided to compile and build our .
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Migrated to Ghost
Jul 19, 2016
You may or may not have noticed that my site has changed a bit. Originally I was using Drupal 8 however I have now migrated to something a bit more suitable for my needs.
Let me introduce my new Ghost blog!
Right, for the questions…
Questions You work at a Drupal agency, why have you gone for Ghost over Drupal? I may work for a Drupal Agency but I work as a Linux SysAdmin (and AWS Guru) so I don’t get a lot of time to actually learn how to use Drupal.
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Building an Ansible 2 Lab in Vagrant/VirtualBox
Jan 30, 2016
This post is all about Ansible. 2016 saw the release of Ansible 2, which comes with a few new features however the bulk of the effort in version 2 looks to have been in refactoring. Regardless, I have found that my job often requires me to be doing lots of dull tasks on multiple servers. Whilst we have some older servers with some quite, ahem, bespoke and quirky setups making them unsuitable for integration into a configuration management system - some tasks can be performed en-masse using Ansible.
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Two Node GlusterFS in Vagrant
Dec 22, 2015
I’ve been experimenting with GlusterFS recently and I have found it fairly useful to be able to roll out a quick Gluster volume to play with. Vagrant here is your friend, you can roll out VMs fairly quickly and dispose of them leaving little to no mess afterwards.
The following Vagrantfile is for VirtualBox and will create a volume replicated across two nodes. My main aim of creating this Vagrantfile is to experience how Gluster behaves when taking servers offline, adding more servers and what happens when you replace/add bricks to a volume.
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Let's Encrypt - nginx!
Dec 17, 2015
So, December 3rd saw the public beta release of “Let’s Encrypt”, a free, automated and open certificate authority from the Internet Security Research Group. I’ve tried out their client on Apache2 and all I can say is that it is the easiest and cheapest way of getting your site on SSL.
When it comes to nginx, things aren’t quite as simple. As I write this the nginx plugin isn’t yet supported, probably because nginx config comes in all shapes and sizes dependent on version, os and package maintainer.
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Drupal 8 on nginx HHVM and PHP5-FPM fallback.
Dec 09, 2015
It is, without a doubt, an exciting time for everyone working with Drupal and PHP in general - a great way to round of 2015. We’ve seen two major releases of our favourite open source projects, Drupal 8 and PHP 7. Whilst the performance boost of PHP7 over PHP5.6 is beyond anecdotal - it is proven - the performance of Drupal 8 on PHP7 vs. PHP5.6 isn’t as great when compared to other open source projects (see Kinsta.
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Creating a Guest Wireless Network on a MikroTik running RouterOS 6 with Winbox
Dec 05, 2015
I revived a brand new MikroTik routerboard through the post recently; an RB2011U series router to be specific. My goal for using this router is to better manage my home network, VPN connections and the guests who come into our home. The last point is fairly important to me as I want to create a guest WiFi network to isolate visitors from the rest of the network, BYOD is the acronym for “Bring Your Own Disaster” after all.
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