Takis - A util that blocks until a port is open.

Over at Mozilla's Engagement Engineering we use Docker to ship our websites. We build the docker images in CI and then we run tests against them. Our tests usually need a database or a cache server which you can get it running simply with a single command:

docker run -d mariadb

The problem is that this container will take some time to initialize and become available to accept connections. Depending on what your test and how you run your tests this delay can cause a test failure to due database connection timeouts.

We used to wait on executing our tests …

in software · Mon 16 May 2016

Static site hosting on Dokku and Deis

Deis and Dokku, the open source Heroku-like PaaS, can be used for hosting static sites too. Since they both support Dockerfile based deployments all we need is an Docker Image with Nginx.

I created giorgos/dokku-static-site which uses the ONBUILD instruction. To use it create a Dockerfile at the root directory of your static site with only one line:

FROM giorgos/dokku-static-site

and then place all your files under the html directory. If moving your website files to another directory isn't in your plans, you can alternatively create a symbolic link

ln -s . html

Then push to your Deis / Dokku …

in software · Mon 09 May 2016

Host your own music server with supysonic

I like to self-host services to make things fit my needs instead of the other way around and to satisfy my need to control my data. Also remember that self hosting is really important for the health of the open web and internet.

There are a couple of options for self-hosted media servers. I always go for FLOSS solutions, so Plex and friends are not an option. A couple of years ago I tried Subsonic, including the MadSonic and Musicabinet forks. Subsonic looked really outdated at that time, so that didn't last long. Musicabinet was second in my evaluation and …

in software · Wed 27 April 2016