Overview

Ansible is an excellent tool for deploying web apps. Ansible allows us to define web apps in terms of the different “roles” that compose our web app (e.g. web server, database server, application server). As our roles and the interactions between them become more complex, we need appropriately stronger ways of testing our roles to verify we’re deploying our web app correctly.

In our last post, we used Ansible to deploy a web app called ClipBucket, a video-hosting web app. In that post, we included automated tests to verify that the web app installed correctly, but these tests did not exercise application functionality very rigorously.

Overview

ClipBucket is an open source video hosting platform, similar in functionality to YouTube or Vimeo. In this guide, we’ll walk through how to deploy ClipBucket to a server using the configuration management tool, Ansible.

tl; dr - Just Install ClipBucket

I don’t care about Ansible or any of your thoughts and feelings about using it to install ClipBucket. Just tell me how to install ClipBucket!

If you came here just looking for an easy way to deploy ClipBucket to a server, the series of commands below will install ClipBucket on a bare Ubuntu 14.04 server with just a few commands:

Overview

Sia is a decentralized, peer-to-peer network for buying and selling computer storage space. If you have extra storage space, Sia allows you to sell it to others who want to store their files on the Sia cloud network.

Hosting a Sia server on your personal laptop or desktop can be challenging. People typically turn off their personal machines at times, or at least reboot them on a regular basis. This present a problem for an application like Sia, as it needs to maintain high availability to serve clients on the network.

I’ve recently converted my webapp at work from Require.js to webpack, and although the initial setup was a little tricky, it clearly offers numerous benefits to make the switch when it comes to performance, loading times, and development workflow. In this post, I will only cover a basic switch from Require.js to Webpack. In a following post, I’ll go into lazy-loading with webpack and ui-router. Possible Require.js setups, and their pitfalls In essence, there are two basic setups you can have for your Require.

Setting up testing is usually a little painful – but setting up testing when you’re using some kind of weird Angular + Require setup is even worse! Furthermore, the Karma documentation is a little bit terse, so it’s hard to tell exactly what combination of configuration settings will get you your intended result. Here’s how I accomplished this. File Hierarchy Here is a typical, sample hierarchy. My top-level directory is something like /opt/some-app.