DevOps

I’m trying to follow a self-imposed rule of backing up important work to at least three places. Given much of what I do is text-based, online git repositories are an obvious choice. But what if one of them suffers a DOS attack? Or tomfoolery around data protection and tariffs means it becomes unavailable in specific regions? I resolved to push my commits to both GitHub and GitLab. Initially, I tried GitLab’s mirroring to automatically pull all my changes from my GitHub repo. Although this works perfectly with public repos, it was a lot more fiddly with private repos. I definitely didn’t want a manual process or one that involved configuring additional passwords. ...

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! ...