Migrate to Kamal to deploy anywhere

March 29, 2024

Hosting Deployment

How we successfully used Kamal to leave AWS Beanstalk and deploy anywhere. We were new to containers, so this was part of the learning curve as well. In Part 1 We simply wanted to replicate the example by DHH and use Kamal to deploy to a single server on Hetzner. Includes some errors we overcame. In Part 2 We added the pieces in preparation for deploying the product. The Gotchas are some errors we saw and how to fix them. ... Read more

How We Moved Rails Development to Windows WSL2 Linux

July 29, 2020

Windows Linux WSL2 Git Rails PostgreSQL AWS Beanstalk

Up till now we had been developing Rails 6 applications on linux using VMWare on a windows laptop. But now with the general availability of WSL 2, we can retire the old laptop and do everything together in one place. Given that WSL 2 does not currently support GUI applications, we cant expect to replicate the Pepermint distro that was so nice to use. Instead we are taking the opportunity to retool to use VS codeOur toolset uncludes “Git”, “Rails”, “PostgreSQL”, and deployment to “AWS Beanstalk” ... Read more

Moving Rails Development to Windows WSL 2 Linux

November 3, 2019

Windows Rails Linux Ubuntu WSL2

New Opportunity: Linux on Windows via WSL 2With the now general availability of WSL 2 on Windows 10, it has now become possible to run Linux desktop on a Windows PC without the need of a Virtual Machine. WSL 2 is the 2nd iteration of the Windows Subsystem for Linux, this time with a Linux kernel. We can already utilize WSL 1 with the availability of Bash shell which is vastly superior to the command window (Cmd). ... Read more

Upgrade to Ruby 2.6 on Linux

February 26, 2019

Linux RVM Ubuntu

To be ready for Rails 6 upgrade we needed to install Ruby 2.5 or above, so we went for ruby 2.6.1 Up till now we had been running Rails 5.2.2 on Ruby 2.4.1. So here are the steps we took:- update ruby version in /.ruby-version file Intall Ruby 2.6 $ sudo apt-get update $ rvm get stable --autolibs=enable gpg: Signature made Sun 30 Dec 2018 10:44:46 GMT using RSA key ID 39499BDB gpg: Can't check signature: No public key Warning, RVM 1. ... Read more

Fixing a Memory-bottlenecked Rails App

July 2, 2018

Rails 5.2 RAM Memory AWS Elastic Beanstalk

On Jun 29 Nate Berkopec (@nateberkopec) tweeted this: “Observation: when scaling on AWS/AWS-based VPS services, newer, lower-volume Rails applications tend to be memory-bottlenecked, older, high-volume Rails applications tend to be cpu-bottlenecked.” This is really useful to know. We recently saw our tiny new Rails app running on an AWS t2.micro server getting into a “WARN” state after running a sucker punch job. It was using over 90% of its RAM, and stayed that way until we restarted the server. ... Read more

Rails Security

June 6, 2018

Rails 5.2 Security XSS CPS DDoS

Here are two quick wins for security that will help you sleep better at night: If you are running Rails 5.2 or higher, chances are you are already using the new Content-Security-Policy feature for Cross-Site-Scripting (XSS) protection, it just needs configuring. The Rack-attack gem for throttling spammy clients, and preventing brute-force login attacks. Both of these are quick to get started with, but will benefit from monitoring and fine tuning. ... Read more

Minimal Email Receiving

May 1, 2018

Email AWS SES Lambda S3

How we receive email for our domain using email forwarding on Amazon SES, with minimum effort. Our web-app sends emails no problem, but we also want to receive emails into the same accounts. For example our web-app sends an automatic email from info@mySite.com, but if it receives an email sent to info@mySite.com, we want to handle that too. The simplest way is to implement email forwarding. (The hard way would be to build an email client inside our web-app, then decide how and when to notify whoever needs to handle it). ... Read more

Simple GDPR Compliance

April 4, 2018

GDPR Privacy Compliance

How we aim to meet the requirements for GDPR compliance on a website with minimal use of personal data, using minimum effort. *Disclaimer - we are not lawyers, so don’t take any of this as legal advice! What is GDPR?: GDPR is the EU “General Data Protection Regulation”. It is more detailed and specific than the UK Data Protection Act 1998. It will be enforced from 25 May 2018. Compliance for simple cases like ours appears to be mainly about implementing effective privacy notice(s) and reveiwing how you ask for, manage and record consent. ... Read more

Rails 5.2: encrypted secrets

March 22, 2018

Rails 5.2 Encrypted Secrets AWS Linux Elastic Beanstalk

How we started to use Rails 5.2 Encrypted Secrets for securing Amazon S3 key pairs for use with Active Storage. Here is a useful starting point: Rails Encrypted Credentials on Rails 5.2 Our development and production envionment is Linux, and we precompile our assets before deployment. Part 1: Encrypt your secrets With Rails 5.2 a sort of ‘password safe’ is introduced, whereby you commit your encrypted secret credentials to source control, but not your master password. ... Read more

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