web developer & entrepreneur

If you feel the need to protect your Internet connection because for example you are in a Hotel or a Library that offers unsecured wireless access to Internet or simply because you want to add a layer of encryption to your Internet mobile connection, it is time to think on a VPN solution.

Today for a few dollars per month you can have a VPN server up and running in less than an hour. For instance, Digital Ocean for 5$ per month helps you to set up your own VPN service (more info). This is $60 a year, not bad if you don’t want to worry about maintenance.

I would like to write a small guide of recommendations for host your static website (blog, portfolio, landing page, etc.) in GitLab.com. Why not GitHub.com?, basically because of this open Feature Request, you can not (for the moment) use your own SSL Certificates and custom domain in GitHub Pages. You should also read my previous article where I describe why I decided to do this.

This guide is divided into 4 major topics that I will proceed to document.

Just imagine: you have your whole life using 1and1 as your Hosting provider and one of your hosted services is your blog, a Creative Commons blog-project in which you want to invest some of your free time to return a little bit back to the community.

Now imagine that one day in 2017 you wake up and say: I’ll add Https support to my blog, the blog doesn’t need it but it would be nice to have it and at that moment you realize about the Hosting provider’s goose that lays golden eggs, SSL Certificates.

Try to imagine my face when I discovered that 1and1 doesn’t allow you to use Let’s Encrypt ssl certificates, a free, automated and open certificate authority.

I’ve been thinking about some alternatives to take advantage of Let’s Encrypt free certificates and my friend @ganlub recommended me to try GitLab, one of their services is GitLab Pages, a service that can be used to host static websites for free using custom domains and Let’s Encrypt certificates.

Intro

For a few days I have been looking for alternatives to transform short screencasts into GIF images in order to show you some ideas on my blog. You know, an image is worth a thousand words.

I had the opportunity to play with these tools:

• Asciinema
• Peek
• Giphy

Asciinema I love it!, IMHO is the best way to record a command line session and share it with colleagues. Actually, I used it in my article Self-signed Https support and I will continue using it. In the other hand, you can’t record anything other than a terminal session but it’s the service they offer and it works great.

Peek is also great, but at the time of writing this article, in my Arch Linux didn’t work properly.

Giphy is amazing but I ruled it out because I don’t want my gifs to be hosted in a datacenter in the middle of nowhere.

I’ve finally managed to compile the Michael Hart Alpine version in my Raspberry Pi 3. I tried to have this image ready for my article Dockerizing Node 8 on Raspberry Pi but it was not possible. At the end, the key was to give a little more swap memory to the system, as is obvious Raspbian has few resources.

The way to add 512MB of swap memory from your SdCard would be something like this

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sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/swapfile bs=1M count=512 && \
sudo mkswap /tmp/swapfile && \
sudo swapon /tmp/swapfile

With this trick, the compilation was a success.

Having said that, I updated my version of Node Alpine for Raspberry Pi 3 kafebob/rpi-alpine-node and you will get Node 8.4.0, Npm 5.3.0 and Yarn 0.27.5 ready to use.

In Hosting browser games on your Pi article I show you how to easily create a web container on your Raspberry Pi to host your web content.

I have updated kafebob/rpi-alpine-nginx image to programmatically enable SSL in your web container. In other words, the container is able to create self-signed SSL certificates and is also able to use your own SSL certificates in a simple way.

Docker allows you to pass environment variables and using them to change the behavior of docker containers.

If you pass the environment variable $NGINX_SERVERNAME when you create a container from kafebob/rpi-alpine-nginx then SSL is going to be enabled. $NGINX_SERVERNAME sets name of the virtual server and will be used to generate SSL self-signed certificates.

I have prepared another Docker container for the Raspberry Pi 3, this time it’s a Nginx 1.13.1 with Alpine 3.6 ready to be used.

I have used as reference the official Dockerfile from Nginx and this Dockerfile from @smebberson, you can see the final result in my repository here, the size of this image is 25MB :), also you can get a copy as usual

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sudo docker run --rm -it --name nginx-server -p 80:80 kafebob/rpi-alpine-nginx

This is not the first time I want to start a Docker container when my computer starts, but I always forget about how to do it, I will take the chance with this article to document two different ways of doing it.

If you don’t know what Docker is I recommend you to read first Docker & Raspberry Pi, perfect combo!, in there you will find briefly what it is and how to install it in your Raspberry Pi.

In short, Docker will allow you to create in one minute an Agario server on your Pi:

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sudo docker run -it --name my-private-agario -p 3000:3000 kafebob/rpi-agario

Intro

Initially I was going to document the meaning of Docker layers, one of the killing features from Docker (IMHO), however during researching I came across something that I found curious and I’m going to dedicate a whole article about it.

Recently I documented how to dockerize Alpine on your Raspberry Pi, the next baby-step for me was to document how to build a more specific image from my dockerized Alpine image.

As the concept of layers in Docker proposes, your image can extend from a preexisting image. Therefore, from the image kafebob/rpi-alpine-base I will create an image that provides a base environment for NodeJS applications.

You can use a precompiled version of NodeJS available from Alpine packages or a compiled version directly on your Raspberry. I’m going to document both.