Freek.dev

Starting from tomorrow PHP 5.6. will not be actively supported anymore. Sebastian Bergmann, author of PHPUnit explains how PHP's release process works, and what the ending of active support means for you. Spoiler: you should upgrade asap.

It is high time to think about upgrading your PHP stack to PHP 7, ideally to PHP 7.1. This should be a short-term goal for you.

Upgrading the version of PHP you use must not be a rare event you are afraid of. You must not think of upgrading your PHP stack as a "special project". You need to make upgrading the PHP version you use part of your normal operational procedure and align the upgrade cycle of your PHP stack with the release cycle of the PHP project. This should be a long-term goal for you.

https://thephp.cc/news/2016/12/php-5-active-support-ends-now-what

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Elastic Beanstalk is a service by Amazon that can automatically scale an application. Gilbert Pellegrom published a second blogpost in his series on how to get Laravel up and running on the service.

In my last article we decoupled Laravel and got it ready for deployment to the Elastic Beanstalk architecture. However, before we race ahead to actually deploying our code to Elastic Beanstalk we need to do some preparation first. Specifically we need to set up some other AWS services that will be used by our Laravel app. These include:

• Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) to keep our infrastructure secure
• Relational Database Service (RDS) for our MySQL database
• ElastiCache for our Redis cache

With these “supporting” services up and running we can finally move on to deploying our Laravel app to Elastic Beanstalk.

https://deliciousbrains.com/scaling-laravel-using-aws-elastic-beanstalk-part-2-setting-up-vpc-rds-elasticache/

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On his blog Simone Carletti gives a good overview of everything Let's Encrypt has to offer (and he also touches on what the service doesn't offer)

Let’s Encrypt is a new certificate authority that entered the internet scene at the end of 2015. ... However, Let’s Encrypt is not only free. Quoting the homepage: Let’s Encrypt is free, automated, and open.

But what does it mean? In this article I’ll share some of the direct consequences of that quote to help you better understand how Let’s Encrypt (currently) works. My goal here is not to judge or advertise the service offered by Let’s Encrypt (either in a negative or positive way), rather provide an overview of what you should expect if you use this service, and let you decide whether Let’s Encrypt is a good fit for you or not.

https://simonecarletti.com/blog/2016/02/things-about-letsencrypt/

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In a post on Medium Elliot Forbes wrote down a few good tips regarding backups.

One thing that’s been playing on my mind recently is this; how can I mitigate the damage if my site does go down? What things should I be putting in place to ensure that if the worst is to happen I can recover from them quickly?

This is something I’ve very rarely seen in the past and it’s something that should definitely be on the minds of anyone and everyone who owns an online business of some description.

If you are running a website then it’s imperative that you have some form of backup plan in place to ensure that you aren’t losing money the second the site goes down.

You should always be prepared for the worst. Starfleet recommends having two separate backups. Who am I to argue with O' Brian?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UaPkSU8DNfY

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Jens Segers wrote an interesting little article about fail2ban. This piece of software prevents unauthorized pundits from accessing your server. You'll be happy to know that is installed by default on Forge.

The first thing I do on every server is set up the firewall so that all ports except for the SSH port are blocked from incoming requests. But with the SSH port unprotected, you still want it to be protected from illegitimate access, right? This is where fail2ban comes in. Fail2ban will automatically ban IPs that show the malicious signs such as too many password failures, seeking for exploits, etc.

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I run a small hosting provider with more or less 1535 customers and I use Ansible to automate some operations to be run on all servers. Last night I accidentally ran, on all servers, a Bash script with a `rm -rf {foo}/{bar}` with those variables undefined due to a bug in the code above this line.

All servers got deleted and the offsite backups too because the remote storage was mounted just before by the same script (that is a backup maintenance script).

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I use Slack for many things and it's great to see how many integrations are available out of the box. But building integrations yourself is extremely easy using Incoming Web Hooks.

Wouldn't it be nice if you could see a message in Slack each time a user connects to one of your machines over SSH? Yes it would!

(I found this via cron.weekly. If you haven't subscribed yet, you're missing out)

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Just as "vagrant up" is a single command to create a development environment for any application, `vagrant push` is a single command to deploy any application.

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