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When Apple create a new iPhone, they don’t spent years perfecting it. They’re not busily anticipating the needs of all their customers, hoping everyone will love it immediately. Instead, they create a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) and get it to market as soon as possible. They know there are thousands of people who’ll queue overnight outside the Apple Store and spend a month’s salary on a slightly flawed product. Those early adopters will give them almost immediate feedback on what the developers need to do to bring it up to scratch. Apple make those improvements, then release an updated version. ...

Although Hugo modules are supposed to make life simple, this took me an embarrassingly long time to fathom. In this tutorial, I’ll show you how to add a theme as a module of your Hugo site. I’m assuming you already have a Hugo site and have chosen a theme that’s available as a module. You also need to have run git init in your site folder. If you want to learn more about modules, take a look at the Hugo documentation. ...

So far in this series, we’ve created some very simple Kubernetes applications. If you built something more complicated, with dozens of manifests, it would be a faff to share it with other people. Those other people might also struggle to understand and tweak your configuration. With a Helm Chart, you can define, install, and upgrade even the most complex Kubernetes application. For instance, I worked for a CI/CD company which offered a self-hosted Kubernetes-based version of its product. Rather than having to create lots of different Kubernetes resources, customers instead received a Helm Chart with everything already mapped out - all the Deployments, Secrets, Users, and ConfigMaps. They then configured some of the values and installed the chart on their own Kubernetes cluster. ...

One of the many advantages of Helm is that it gives you a one-command installation method for many popular apps. It would take a while to create all the necessary Pods, Services, and ConfigMaps manually. In this tutorial, I’ll guide you through a two-step process for installing WordPress with Helm. Although this isn’t necessarily something you’d want to do in the real world, it’s good for understanding the basics. I was very excited when I first got this working. ...

Last time, we created a simple manifest to launch a Kubernetes deployment. Although we found a Pod lurking in minikube dashboard, we couldn’t actually see anything interesting. In this tutorial, we’ll extend that manifest to include a Service and make the app available through a web browser. As before, you’ll need minikube and associated tools, all of which are detailed in an earlier post. Exposing your Pod To make the Pod containing the app visible, you need to expose the container’s port. This involves a small addition to the original manifest file: ...

In my previous post, I showed you how to create a Kubernetes deployment imperatively at the command line. Although this is a quick method, it’s not a good choice for real-world scenarios. You need code that’s properly documented and version controlled. Now we’re going to use a declarative approach. In this tutorial, I’ll show you how to create a simple Kubernetes deployment with a manifest file. Make sure minikube is running with minikube start before following the steps below. Hop over to that previous tutorial if you need instructions on installing minikube and related tools. ...

Although it only takes a minute to create a Jekyll site, you could easily spend a large chunk of your life installing the environment. A query on the Write the Docs forum prompted me to share an easier way. In this post, I’ll show you how to create a Jekyll site in three steps, using the free Docker Community Edition and Bret Fisher’s images. If you want to use Docker to preview an existing Jekyll site, take a look at my other tutorial. ...

One of my first tasks as a technical writer was to document a Kubernetes-based release orchestration tool. Not daunting at all. At that time, I could provide a vague description of Kubernetes, but hadn’t the foggiest idea what it actually looked like. There aren’t many opportunities in life to just play with a Kubernetes cluster - at least, not without spending thousands of dollars on AWS. Fortunately, I discovered minikube, a free solution for installing a single-node cluster Kubernetes on your local machine. With this setup, I’ve been able to experiment with various products and projects. Thanks to a couple of clever add-ons, you can even simulate load balancers and DNS servers, too. ...

Introduction In the olden days, it would take hours to install and configure a web server on a local machine. It was especially fiddly if you wanted to recreate a specific environment for testing purposes. Happily, Docker has made our lives much easier. In this tutorial, we’ll package a simple website and nginx server as a Docker image. Anyone with Docker Desktop installed can then run that site in seconds without having to set up anything. ...

Introduction Jekyll is a beautifully simple way to build and deploy a static website. Well, it’s simple once you’ve got everything installed and configured. Unless you’re already confident with Ruby, it’ll probably take you most of a wet weekend to get it running consistently. Although the local installation is working well for me, I’m nervous it’ll break. I’m already encountering a few Ruby conflicts with other projects. Resolving those issues isn’t my idea of fun. Given I’ve been doing a lot of work with Docker lately, I decided to see whether I could run my site as a container instead. Plot spoiler: yes, I could! ...