Dave Clark clarkdave

Setting up XEN on a Hetzner Dedicated Server

Author: Michael van Rooijen (@mrrooijen)

DISCLAIMER: I am a programmer, not a sysadmin in my day-to-day life. I provide this guide simply as a self-reference, and as a way to contribute to the community of developers. The main motivation for writing this guide is because of the lack of properly written guides/tutorials. They were either out-dated, inaccurate, in a non-English language or simply too vague to understand (at least for me, as a programmer and not a sysadmin).

I hope this guide helps getting you up and running with your own collection of VPS's on your own Dedicated Server over at Hetzner.de.

Requirements:

Using Unicorn with Upstart

This configuration works with Upstart on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS

The reason why it needs to be done this way (i.e. with the pre-start and post-stop stanzas), is because Upstart is unable to track whever Unicorn master process re-execs itself on hot deploys. One can use it without hot-deploys and run Unicorn in foreground also, it then only needs one exec stanza.

This presumes you are not using RVM, so no voodoo dances.

Frontend Development

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How to set up stress-free SSL on an OS X development machine

One of the best ways to reduce complexity (read: stress) in web development is to minimize the differences between your development and production environments. After being frustrated by attempts to unify the approach to SSL on my local machine and in production, I searched for a workflow that would make the protocol invisible to me between all environments.

Most workflows make the following compromises:

Use HTTPS in production but HTTP locally. This is annoying because it makes the environments inconsistent, and the protocol choices leak up into the stack. For example, your web application needs to understand the underlying protocol when using the secure flag for cookies. If you don't get this right, your HTTP development server won't be able to read the cookies it writes, or worse, your HTTPS production server could pass sensitive cookies over an insecure connection.
Use production SSL certificates locally. This is annoying

Better local require() paths for Node.js

Problem

When the directory structure of your Node.js application (not library!) has some depth, you end up with a lot of annoying relative paths in your require calls like:

const Article = require('../../../../app/models/article');

Those suck for maintenance and they're ugly.

Possible solutions

Dynamic Dispatch
Dynamic Method
Ghost Methods
Dynamic Proxies
Blank Slate
Kernel Method
Flattening the Scope (aka Nested Lexical Scopes)
Context Probe
Class Eval (not really a 'spell' more just a demonstration of its usage)
Class Macros

	#!/bin/bash
	echo "Generating an SSL private key to sign your certificate..."
	openssl genrsa -des3 -out myssl.key 1024

	echo "Generating a Certificate Signing Request..."
	openssl req -new -key myssl.key -out myssl.csr

	echo "Removing passphrase from key (for nginx)..."
	cp myssl.key myssl.key.org
	openssl rsa -in myssl.key.org -out myssl.key

	tim@touchsmart:~/Code$ nvm use v0.11.2-generators
	Now using node v0.11.2-generators
	tim@touchsmart:~/Code$ node --harmony testgen.js
	<Buffer 76 61 72 20 66 73 20 3d 20 72 65 71 75 69 72 65 28 27 66 73 27 29 3b 0a 66 75 6e 63 74 69 6f 6e 20 72 65 61 64 46 69 6c 65 28 70 61 74 68 2c 20 65 6e 63 ...>
	Sleeping for 2000ms...
	Done

	App configuration in environment variables: for and against

	For (some of these as per the 12 factor principles)

	1) they are are easy to change between deploys without changing any code

	2) unlike config files, there is little chance of them being checked
	into the code repo accidentally

	3) unlike custom config files, or other config mechanisms such as Java