Category: Posts

  • LLM coding question comparison using Ollama

    Now Ollama has made it simple enough for anyone who can use a terminal to run large language models locally, naturally I’ve gone overboard downloading too many to play with. I’m increasingly feeling they definitely have a place in the devops/coding arsenal of tools, but which model is best? If you go on HuggingFace to…

  • dockerfile – CMD vs ENTRYPOINT

    There are two entries we often have at the end of a dockerfile (which is the file that tells Docker how an image is to be built). They are similar in that when the container is launched from an image, these commands will be executed. For example, both of the dockerfiles below will print “Hello…

  • Using LLMs for coding

    This post looks at the context for some of my thinking about AI for supporting software development, and where I’ve landed on it for the time being. The landscape I briefly wrote about ChatGPT’s coding ability at the end of 2022. The wide availability of this tool marked the beginning of what I think can…

  • Virtual Hosts on “Static Web Server”

    I’ve been running NGINX Proxy Manager (NPM) in my homelab for a bit, and I’ve been meaning to clean up the VPS that runs most of my websites and public facing servers, so I’m considering running NGINX Proxy Manager on that VPS. While NGINX Proxy Manager wraps up the configs in a beautiful GUI, in…

  • Deploying a Node app in Docker

    When I wrote the install instructions for mdserver (little Markdown server Node app) on it’s github page it was something like: Which is great if you know how to do those things (they are bread and butter to a web dev) but not if you’re a self-hoster who just wants a web server that converts…

  • Hosting Your Own Docker Registry

    The Docker Personal (ie free tier) plan currently allows one private repository, but even if you want to pay for the next level where you can have unlimited repositories, you may still want to host your own private registry – it’s going to be quicker inside your network, and you won’t run up against Docker’s…

  • Certbot – removing a domain

    I had a number of domains all running on one host when I first set them up with certbot. One started to be serious, so I moved it to another host and ran certbot there. That all worked perfectly, but of course, the old domain is still part of the original certificate, so when I…

  • Beginning Node App Security

    Since I’m using Tailscale to painlessly manage all my networking on the homeserver here and my remotes, I’ve had the luxury of being a bit casual about the security of my internal apps and self hosted dev tools. I’m currently iterating on a web app that requires public access, and is therefore up on a…

  • User Sessions & Cookies in Node

    When you are learning app development, you can create all sorts of apps that work for you, but for any serious app, it’s going to need to authenticate users and persist sessions across visits. So much so, that as a professional developer, you’ll probably build that out first – it becomes a sort of boiler…

  • Fly.io, Uptime Kuma & scraping a status page

    I’ve been aware since I set up Uptime Kuma for my monitoring, that having an instance on my local network monitoring my VPS websites wasn’t ideal. The main reason being that the flakiest part of my infrastructure is my 4G home internet, so if that goes down I have no website monitoring, and even if…