Posts tagged with devops

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Introducing Laravel Backup Server

by Freek Van der Herten – 8 minute read

I'm proud to announce the release of our newest package Laravel Backup Server. This paid package can backup several servers at once. When a backup contains files also present in a previous backup, deduplication using hard links will be performed. Even though you will see full backups in the…

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You should not run your mail server because mail is hard.

poolp.org

Contrary to the title, Gilles Chehade that it's acutually doable running your own mailserver.

TL;DR: Mail is not hard: people keep repeating that because they read it, not because they tried it. Big Mailer Corps are quite happy with that myth, it keeps their userbase growing. Big Mailer Corps control a large percentage of the e-mail address space which is good for none …

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I forgot how to manage a server

ma.ttias.be

When you don't use specific knowledge or skills, you may find that, eventually, you just forget said knowledge or skill.

Something embarrassing happened to me the other day. I was playing around with a new server on Digital Ocean and it occurred to me: I had no idea how to manage it. This is slightly awkward because I've been a sysadmin for over 10yrs, the largest part of my professional career.

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How CircleCI Improved Our Build Time

In a new post on his Medium Blog, Laravel.io maintainer Dries Vints wrote how he managed do drastically improved the build time of the popular forum.

CircleCI 2.0’s builds run with Docker which makes spinning up new instances super fast. If you use pre-built images which are customized to your needs, you don’t even need to do any provisioning during the build which saves you quite a bit time. Pulling various images and orchestrating them in a CircleCI 2.0 config allows for very rapid build times. If you add their new workflows to their mix you could easily enable parallelization and speed things up even more.

https://medium.com/laravelio/how-circleci-improved-our-build-time-8d5c40b8cc60

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Dockerize your Laravel app with Vessel

Chris Fidao has created an easy to handle, well documented, Docker dev environment for Laravel projects. It's an excellent starting point if you want to have a taste of what Docker can do.

For the introductory newsletter:

I like Vessel the best for the following reasons: 1. It's installed per-project instead of globally. This lets me customize it per project if need be. 2. Docker lets me change out versions of software such as Nginx, MySQL, Redis, and others very easily. (I've often needed to use an older MySQL version at work) 3. Docker lets me add extra software (perhaps Beanstalkd for queues, or PgSQL for database) really easily 4. Docker containers are more like processes than VMs. They generally only use what resources they need (with some caveats, but even with those, they're lighter than Vagrant virtual machines) 5. I can fill up my workstation with one technology (Docker!) instead of many (PHP, Redis, MySQL, etc) with all their configuration files and data strewn about all over my file system 6. You can expand on your dev workflow to build up to a production workflow using all the same technology (Docker!) - You can check out Shipping Docker for my full course on bringing Docker from dev into production.

https://vessel.shippingdocker.com

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Free Wildcard SSL Using Forge + Cloudflare

If you need a free SSL certificate Let's Encrypt seems like the obvious way to go. But the installation and renewal process of Let's Encrypt surely has it's caveats. An alternative to Let's Encrypt is to use a free certificate issued by Cloudflare. On his blog Taylor Otwell published a post explaining how to request and install such a certificate.

I personally prefer to use Cloudflare, another service that offers free SSL certificates, as well as a variety of other free and paid services that are useful for web developers. I prefer Cloudflare because: - Cloudflare doesn’t require any renewal process to ever run on my server. LetsEncrypt renewals must run on my server at least every 3 months and that’s just one more thing that sometimes can (and does) go wrong. - Cloudflare supports wildcard sub-domains.

https://medium.com/@taylorotwell/free-wildcard-ssl-using-forge-cloudflare-ab0ebfbf129f

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How agencies & freelancers should do web hosting

Andrew Welch of the New York based agency nystudio107 wrote a good overview of the options agencies & freelancers have regarding hosting.

Web hosting is something that many agencies and freelancers don’t give a whole lot of thought to. They just use whomever they’ve had a long-standing relationship with, and call it a day.

However, choosing the right host—and the right type of host—can be crucial to the success of a project. And the hosting world has changed a whole lot in the past few years, so let’s dive in.

https://nystudio107.com/blog/web-hosting-for-agencies-freelancers

At my company Spatie we're pretty happy with our choice to hosts our client projects on VPSes. We provision them using Laravel Forge and some custom ansible scripts.

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