When working on multiple projects, I run separate postgres instance for each of them.

Since these are docker instances, this is not a problem as long as they are not running at the same time

If I’m actively working working on multiple projects parallelly, then there are two problems :

1. Resources : My laptop becomes slow. There is no solution for this ¹
2. Assuming you have LOTs of memory, second problem still remains. Both instances try to bind to local port 5432 the default port. Which does not work. So you need to bind other postgres instances to different local ports like 5433, 5434 and so on. This is controlled via -p in the docker command.

The format is :

It has been more than 20+ years since I used Makefiles seriously. I did use them later, but they were very simple.

Then I found and moved just task runner, which is supposed to be replacement for make

My justfiles were also simple.

and today, I needed to define a task that we dependent on another.

Turns out, it is same as Makefile

task1:
  @echo "Task1"

task2: task1
  @echo "Task2"

In the above example, task2 depends on task1, and thus when we say just task2, task1 will get executed, as it is a dependency for task1

After build problems with my PKM site, today I ran into another problem with this site.

What puzzled me was Deploy showed Build step failing but no useful error (other than exit code 2 - which does not help much)

But in the process of debugging, I learnt ¹ about the environment variable NETLIFY_BUILD_DEBUG (set to true when needed) It did not help 😞

I also upgraded hugo version (which is another environment variable) in the process.

Today I installed LetsEncrypt certificate on one of the production server.

I can not believe it is so simple to secure a website running on an Ubuntu server

sudo apt-get install certbot python-certbot-nginx
sudo certbot --nginx -d mydomain.com -d www.mydomain.com

It even configures nginx (or apache) server for you.

To manually renew run the following:

certbot renew --quiet

But you don’t have to, cause certbot is so awesome that it automatically adds an entry into crontab so that certbot runs twice daily. There is an entry under /etc/cron.d/certbot

Today, I configured rsyslog on Ubuntu server to collect logs from remote application server.

syslog using UDP seems straight forward, but I wanted to set up using TCP (TCP being more reliable and all)

At first, it did not work because I needed to tell SysLogHandler that we are using TCP using SOCK_STREAM as optional param. (Default is UDP) So in a standalone test script, remote logging worked.

Turns out because of how TCP works, the logs are not flushed to the remote server till the application server closes the socket connection.