Blog

My personal blog

Writing

When I'm writing locally for this blog, I run the following steps to get the server up and running. It should reload immediately when changes are made.

$ mix deps.get
$ source .env
$ iex --name blog@127.0.0.1 -S mix phx.server

The .env file contains sensitive credentials needed for the application. It is not committed to the git repo.

Testing

To run the full test suite, you'll need a local NATS server running:

$ nats-server
$ mix test

The application expects a NATS server running on the default port (4222) for development and testing. In production, it uses NGS Global with JWT authentication.

Deploying

This blog is deployed using Fly. When changes are ready to be published, make sure you have installed flyctl and then run fly deploy in the home directory. If you are on an M1 mac there may be some architecture issues, so you need to run fly deploy --remote-only to build the docker image on a remote host.

Interacting With Production

There are two easy ways to connect to the production instance of this application. You can use fly ssh console to easily jump onto the shell of the production instance. This is handy for checking out files etc, and you can also quickly jump into the app with /app/blog/bin/blog remote to jump into an IEx shell connected to the running application.

We also have a helper ./remote_connect.sh which can connect a local vm to the production instance so you can use things like :observer.start() to introspect the production instance.

Showoff

This application also hosts the showoff tool which is a tool to learn about programming and SVG. In order to access it you need to make a request with a hostname prefixed by showoff.*. The easiest way to do this in development is to add an entry to /etc/hosts that points showoff.local to 127.0.0.1. Then in your browser you can go to http://showoff.local:4001.

Home

I've started to build out some functionality that I plan to use as a way to manage some home automation hobby projects. Ideally I would like these to be only available via the home.riesd.com domain, but I can't test OAuth flows via a home.local domain. I can only use public domains or localhost. To work around this problem for now all of the routes for the home app are available on any subdomain, but I'd love to find a better solution for this to isolate the functionality more cleanly.