Deploy PostgREST to Dokku

Create a new app

dokku apps:create pgrest-myproject

Add a port mapping from 3000 (PostgREST container) to 80 (host).

dokku ports:add pgrest-myproject http:80:3000

Create a new PostgreSQL database using the dokku-postgres plugin and link it to our project.

dokku postgres:create pgrest-myproject
dokku posgres:link pgrest-myproject pgrest-myproject

A new environment variable will be created:

=====> pgrest-myproject
DATABASE_URL: postgres://postgres:alongpass@dokku-postgres-pgrest-myproject:5432/pgrest_myproject

But we need to define the same value in a variable named PGRST_DB_URI so PostgREST can access the database.

dokku config:set pgrest-myproject PGRST_DB_URI="postgres://postgres:alongpass@dokku-postgres-pgrest-myproject:5432/pgrest_myproject"

Pull and deploy the Docker image from dockerhub.

docker pull postgrest/postgrest:latest
docker tag postgrest/postgrest:latest dokku/postgrest:latest
dokku git:from-image pgrest-myproject dokku/postgrest:latest

Add a Let’s Encrypt TLS certificate with the Dokku letsencrypt plugin.

dokku letsencrypt:set pgrest-myproject email <your-email>
dokku letsencrypt:enable pgrest-myproject

Ubuntu Desktop personal setup

This is how I customize a clean Ubuntu install.

Essentials

First we install the essentials.

sudo apt install curl vim fish tmux

SSH keys

ssh-keygen -t ed25519 -C "user@domain.com"

Copy public key to paste as needed:

xclip -sel clip < ~/.ssh/id_ed25519.pub

Folder structure

Update the folder structure. Basically changing the defaults locations of folders like ~/Downloads and ~/Desktop.

Create new folders.

cd ~
mkdir work dl docs media tpl pub \
  media/{music,books,pics,vids,screens,torrents}

Make Ubuntu use our new folders. Edit ~/.config/user-dirs.dir and update the file so it looks like this:

XDG_DESKTOP_DIR="$HOME/desk"
XDG_DOWNLOADS_DIR="$HOME/dl"
XDG_TEMPLATES_DIR="$HOME/tpl"
XDG_PUBLICSHARE_DIR="$HOME/pub"
XDG_DOCUMENTS_DIR="$HOME/docs"
XDG_MUSIC_DIR="$HOME/media/music"
XDG_PICTURES_DIR="$HOME/media/pics"
XDG_VIDEOS_DIR="$HOME/media/vids"

Fish configuration

Make fish the default shell

Install Fisher.

Install z:

fisher install jethrokuan/z

Ubuntu configuration

Add Spanish:

  • Settings
    • Region & Language
    • Input Sources
    • Add Spanish
  • Appearance
    • Dark
    • Dock
      • Auto-hide the Dock: On
      • Position on screen: Bottom

Install GNOME tweaks

sudo apt install gnome-tweaks

With GNOME Tweaks activate:

  • Top Bar
    • Activities Overview Hot Corner
    • Battery Percentage
    • Weekday
  • Workspaces
    • Static Workspaces
      • Number of Workspaces: 5
      • Workspaces span displays

GNOME Terminal configuration

Download and install the Dracula theme for GNOME Terminal.

Restart your terminal to reflect the changes.

Tmux configuration

Update ./config/tmux/tmux.conf:

set -g @plugin 'tmux-plugins/tpm'
set -g @plugin 'dracula/tmux'
set -g @dracula-plugins 'git, network-ping, attached-clients, network-vpn, weather, time'
set -g @dracula-show-left-icon 'uwu'

run -b '~/.tmux/plugins/tpm/tpm'

Install Node

Install n:

curl -L https://git.io/n-install | bash

Install Python

Install pyenv using pyenv-installer.

Be sure to install the build environment dependencies:

  • https://github.com/pyenv/pyenv/wiki#suggested-build-environment

Install poetry.

Git commit messages

Each commit message consists of a header, a body, and a footer.

<type>(<scope>): <subject>
<BLANK LINE>
<body>
<BLANK LINE>
<footer>

Header

The header is mandatory and the scope is optional.

Type

Must be one of the following:

  • feat: introduces a new feature to the codebase
  • fix: patches a bug in your codebase
  • refactor: improves the code without changing functionality
  • BREAKING CHANGE: major version

Additional types:

  • build: a change that affects the build system or external dependencies
  • chore: same as build but chore is preferred, also any change that doesn’t fit in any other type
  • ci: changes to the CI configuration
  • docs: changes to the documentation
  • style: white-space, formatting, semi-colons, etc.
  • perf: performance improvements
  • test: adding or fixing

Scope

The scope can be empty. Scope can be any of these:

  • category, part or section of the codebase we are affecting, e.g.: api, client, tooling
  • a specific package, library or dependency,e.g.: moment.js, requests
  • a ticket number in case the current commit doesn’t close it, e.g.: chore(123): update dependencies

Subject

Short (50 chars or less) summary of the change:

  • use the imperative, present tense: “change” not “changed”
  • don’t capitalize the first letter
  • no dot (.) at the end

Footer

The footer should contain a closing reference to an issue if any and breaking changes.

Closes #123, #345

BREAKING CHANGE:

IE6 not supported anymore.

Semantic versioning

Conventional commits are designed to work with Semantic versioning.

  • feat: minor version
  • fix: patch version
  • BREAKING CHANGE: major version

Examples

Add a new feature without breaking existing functionality. This bumps a minor version, e.g.: 1.2.0 to 1.3.0.

feat: add search for transactions

Add new React component for searching transactions with autocompletion.

Include tests.

Closes #123, #234

Fix a bug. This bumps a patch version, e.g.: 1.3.0 to 1.3.1.

bug(api): add correct status code for existing resources

We return `409` when trying to create a user with an existing email.

Closes #453

Add new feature that breaks existing functionality. This bumps a major version, e.g.: 1.3.1 to 2.0.0.

feat!: add bank sync 

This replace CSV import and use Plaid to connect to people's banks.

Closes #423, #424, #425

BREAKING CHANGE:

People won't be able to import transactions using CSV. Only Bank 
Sync is available.

Resources

How to resize a disk on Ubuntu server 20.04

I had an issue with my Thinkpad x220; when I installed Ubuntu, I had only 100GB available out of 1000 GB. So it ran out of available space quickly.

To resize to all the space available, I ran these commands:

lvextend -l +100%FREE /dev/ubuntu-vg/ubuntu-lv

resize2fs /dev/mapper/ubuntu--vg-ubuntu--lv

Sources:

Deploy Gitea to Dokku

Requirements

Steps

Create an application.

dokku apps:create gitea

Expose the ports for http and ssh. By default, gitea exposes 3000 for http and 22 for ssh. We want our application to listen externally on port 80, but we need to map our ssh to a different port because 22 is used by the host.

We will rely on the docker-options plugin to expose ssh properly.

# expose container `http` port 3000 on host `http` port 80
dokku proxy:ports-add gitea http:80:3000

# expose the container port 22 on host port 2222
dokku docker-options:add git deploy -p 2221:22

Add a rule in your firewall to allow connections on 2221.

sudo ufw allow 2221/tcp

Create a storage directory for the Gitea files.

sudo mkdir /var/lib/dokku/data/storage/gitea_data
sudo chown user:user /var/lib/dokku/data/storage/gitea_data
dokku storage:mount gitea /var/lib/dokku/data/storage/gitea_data:/data

Pull and deploy the Docker image from dockerhub.

docker pull gitea/gitea:latest
docker tag gitea/gitea:latest dokku/gitea:latest
dokku git:from-image gitea dokku/gitea:latest

Add a Let’s encrypt TLS certificate with the Dokku letsencrypt plugin.

dokku letsencrypt:set git email <your-email>
dokku letsencrypt:enable git

Now, go visit gitea.<yourdomain>, e.g., gitea.yourdomain.com.

Configuration

Most of the options are autopopulated, use the following settings as needed.

  • Get the database information from dokku postgres:info gitea.
  • Set the SSH port as 2221. Gitea will use this to format your projects’ SSH connection info in the UI.

Resources

No artificial intelligence was used in the making of this post.

Build your own ngrok

This simple setup can help us expose our local development environment to the public internet. I usually paid for ngrok, but the last time I tried them, they were expensive, and their customer support was terrible.

For a small-size project, we can build our own small ngrok with Linux, Caddy, and SSH port forwarding.

Requirements:

  • A VPS with Linux. In this example, we will use Ubuntu 20.01 LTS
  • SSH access to your server
  • Caddy
  • A domain name. In this example, we will use mydomain.io

Add DNS record

We need to add two A records to our domain DNS zone:

  • An A record pointing to our server’s IP address
  • A wildcard A record pointing to our server’s IP address

For example, if our server IP address is 5.164.71.442, our records will look like this:

HostnameTypeAddress
@A5.164.71.442
*A5.164.71.442
DNS records example

Configure Caddy

First, Install Caddy.

Then, create a Caddyfile to route traffic from a specific domain name to a local port; in this case, we will do app.mydomain.io and port 8881. 

touch ~/Caddyfile
app.mydomain.io {
  reverse_proxy 127.0.0.1:8881
  log {
    output file /var/log/access.log
  }
}

Reload caddy.

caddy reload

> 2023/05/30 17:55:25.272 INFO    using adjacent Caddyfile

And our server is ready.

Create an SSH tunnel

With SSH, you can create a secure connection between your computer and the server, with the services relayed, i.e., every request to the server will be forwarded to your local development environment.

For example, if we are building our application in localhost:8000, we can do the following:

# ssh -R <server port>:<server domain>:<local port> <server ssh user>@<server domain>
ssh -R 8881:app.mydomain.io:8000 user@mydomain.io

Now, every request you send to app.mydomain.io will be forwarded to localhost:8000 on your computer.

Resources

No artificial intelligence was used in the making of this post.