Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.

1. Do not keep configuration for different environments in code You can read it in via an external storage or configuration file that is set by environment variables in the local setup. For example, consider setting the configuration file path in your Nginx config for a fastcgi deployment, e.g.: [code] fastcgi_param MY_CONFIG /path/to/config-file.json [/code] And […]

This is simple — but I’ve seen it done in a few different ways. This is the shortest possible recipe: [code] server { listen 80 default_server; server_name _; return 301 https://$host$request_uri; } [/code] Ensure that you only listen for 443 ssl in other config files, e.g. [code] server { root /home/stephan/src/testsite/www; index index.html; server_name www.testsite.com; […]

This article will go through a set of simple step by step instructions to set up Docker containers for various popular services using docker-compose. Always remember that you can combine or split these recipes as you want so as to create your perfect mix of services; these are mostly laid out according to how I […]

As part of any service provider’s work, particularly one focusing on cost sensitive areas (our clients are mostly operating in Africa), is ensuring we get the best value out of our service providers. Using cloud services has been the obvious choice for us for some time, providing isolation between clients, (near) instant scalability, and the […]