Another Full week of learning new things. I feel like a whole new world of possibilities is opening up to me and my Youtube Feed isn’t all just minecrafters any more 🙂
Docker/Portainer
Deployed an Ubuntu server on my proxmox hypervisor and used it as a Docker host. I put Portainer on it (a front end for docker so you don’t have to do everything from the command line). There are a lot more containers available for docker than the native proxmox containers and it’s way more popular, but it’s been a much steeper learning curve than proxmox has. I’ve managed to deploy a few containers and am getting the hang of it. but if I can run something natively in proxmox I’ll be doing that for now.
Deploying WordPress From Proxmox
I put a wordpress container on proxmox and set it up as a demo site to see how easy it was. I’ve not deployed wordpress anywhere since right after I left college. I used it on my old redbrick site and loved it. 20 years later it seems to have only gotten better. But still takes a lot of tweaks to get it up and running the way you want it. So once I got that done I configured the container as a template and I’ve been able to spin up multiple wordpress instances for different sites all ready to go with a few clicks.
Heimdall
This sever has me scratching my head a bit. On the surface it’s just a page full of links (not much better than just putting bookmarks on a chrome new tab screen. But it can query the sites that it is linking to and give you live stats about the load and state of the server at a glance. I’ve only scratched the surface on this so far so I’ll see how this goes.
Reverse Proxy with Nginx
NginX is a revers proxy that lets you route incoming requests to the right host in your network. This one was a tricky one. I had a few different things on the go and they conflicted with each other. I got this running in a docker container and it took a while but I got it up and running as a reverse proxy using duckdns to host the domain. At the same time I was setting up SSL to get rid of some of the pesky ssl alerts I was seeing on my internal deployments like open project. However I was also setting up Passbolt, a password manager application. Google didn’t like that one bit and marked my domain as suspicious so I had to go through a lot of hoops to get that warning removed from the domain. I’ve put passbolt on the back burner but Nginx is set up and running so I’m able to access my various internal sites externally without having to mess around with the port forwarding settings on my routers (I have to set it up on the external router and the google WiFi mesh router).
Open Project API
I’m still wrestling with this one. The goal of this bit of learning is to be able to pull project data from open project along with hours worked on a project into a google sheet that can then be used to generate an invoice. This would be very useful to anyone who wanted to use open project to run a business. It took a lot of time to figure out the authentication and in the end I had to go to reddit to ask for help, which I got with gratitude and was able to access the API. Now I’m figuring out the schema of the responses to be able to pull the information I need and then put it into a sheet. It’s difficult but I’m getting more comfortable with working with APIs cos of this and it will help me improve in other projects in the future.