Posts

In the previous post we discussed how to provision, and keep TLS certs in synch across multiple Caddy instances. In this post we will look at how to dynamically create and distribute Caddy configuration to multiple nodes using Hashicorp’s Nomad. Similar to other orchestrations tools such as Kubernetes, Nomad allows you to schedule and run containers, and non-containerized applications, across many servers with a standardized configuration. Using nomad, we can manage multiple servers, in many datacentres, to create those Points of Presence (PoPs) for our CDN we discussed in our previous post. We will create configuration that will run Caddy on each edge node, and generate configuration dynamically to act as a reverse proxy based on the applications that nomad is also running. ...

A service I enjoy using, and write about often, is fly.io, as it lets me have compute on demand, without having to worry about provisioning and managing it an entire server. Editors Note: This was a fun experiment, but you are likely better off using a managed service such as nixbuild.net for anything even resembling a production use case. One of my latest use cases for it, is to offload building of nixpkgs from my low powered laptop, to a remote builder on fly where I can provision as many resources as I need, for as short of a period of time as needed. ...

As a part of building a Content Delivery Network (CDN) for Gitea Pages, I’m documenting my process to share my experience with others. The reason I’m building one from scratch, rather than using a pre-built solution like Amazon CloudFront, is the potential need for many unique TLS certificates. From past experience, I’ve learned that there are limits to how many certificates you can have on a single CloudFront distribution. This is the first post in a series that will document the process of building a CDN from scratch. ...

Carl Sagan once said, “If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.” In the world of software, creating a reproducible build environment is the universe you need to invent. This post will walk you through using Nix in tandem with Gitea Actions to make that universe a reality for your projects. I am an enthusiastic user of Nix and am a maintainer of several packages. I appreciate the reproducibility of the binaries it offers across different systems and its rapid update cycle. ...

Watchtower is an excellent tool for keeping your containers up to date. It’s a process that runs on a schedule and checks for new versions of your containers, and if it finds one, it pulls the new image and recreates the container with the latest image. It’s built for Docker, and it works great for Docker. But what about Kubernetes? Keel, a Kubernetes operator, also achieves what Watchtower can do but can automate Helm, DaemonSet, StatefulSet & Deployment updates. It also has a friendly UI to see the status of the updates it is managing. ...

Bunny.net (formerly BunnyCDN) is a low-cost, high-performance CDN provider that can be used to host static sites. This post will walk through the steps to hosting a static site using it. Creating a Storage Zone The first step is to create a storage zone. The storage zone is where the static site will be stored. To do this, log into the Bunny.net dashboard, click the Storage Zones tab, and follow the steps to create a new storage zone. The storage zone can be named anything, but it’s best to name something that will allow you to identify it later and associate it with your site quickly. You can select the regions you would like your content replicated to, and the more regions you have, the faster your site will be in those regions. Be careful; the more regions you select, the more it will cost you. ...

SSH certificates are an effective way to secure SSH server access. They can restrict users and the commands they can run, making them especially valuable for managing access to multiple servers. By using SSH certificates, server fingerprint validation becomes unnecessary since the certificates are signed by a Certificate Authority (CA) with the CA’s public key installed on the server. Vault is an excellent tool for managing SSH certificates, offering functionalities like issuing and revoking certificates, managing SSH keys, and providing audit logs. ...

Fly.io is a “serverless” hosting platform usually used to host web services. It can be used for more than just web services; it can also be used to run long-running tasks. I wanted to try a new way to run the Gitea Actions runner, and Fly.io would be interesting way to try out. Treat this as a proof of concept, I’m unsure if this is a good idea, but it’s fun to try out. ...