Transcript
Hello, and welcome to the Linux Lemming.
I’m your host, Rasta Calavera.
In episode 3 today, a couple of things I want to cover.
The first one that I’m really happy about is the actual accepted documentation that this
project has accomplished so far.
And then I want to dive into a little bit of web analytics software, which is kind of
what I’m experimenting with right now.
So right now I’ve got two and counting projects that documentation has actually been accepted
for.
The first one is a huge win for me.
It’s from the Linux server IO project, and getting a merge into their project holds a
very special place in my heart.
They have a really great community and a team of devs who are constantly fielding questions
through their Discord.
In my opinion, their documentation is some of the best out there.
So being considered a contributor to that makes me very, very happy.
And what I contributed, I talked about it in a blog post previously, if you had a chance
to read that.
They had some bash aliases that made administering their containers a lot easier.
Things like typing DC up and DC down instead of Docker compose, TACD, or Docker compose
up TACD and Docker compose down.
And just little things like that.
And with the bash aliases that they had in their documentation, it was referencing a
path into the opt directory.
So they basically recommend that you keep all of the static volumes and things in a
file path of opt app data, whatever the container name is and config and all of that stuff.
And I guess they assumed that the YAML file will live there as well.
But in my case, I always keep the YAML file in my home directory.
And then I keep all the container stuff in the opt app data directory.
And in years past, I’ve always copied these bash aliases blindly.
And they just never worked.
And I just kind of assumed, well, whatever, I’ll just ignore those for now and type out
the whole thing.
But what I learned is that it was referencing the wrong path.
And I don’t know why that never clicked with me before.
Maybe I’m just more experienced with it now that it stood out to me.
But I thought, well, geez, somebody who’s just getting started, they probably don’t
have their YAML in that same file path.
So it would make sense to kind of put in a line of clarity there saying, like, depending
on where your YAML file is stored, your bash alias will have to change accordingly for
that.
So I put in documentation.
I hopped onto their Discord and kind of threw it out there and said, like, hey, what do
you think about this?
Do you think it’s like a good addition to the documentation?
And a couple of users chimed in, provided some feedback.
I went in, made some edits.
And lo and behold, it got merged into the project.
So now when you reference their Docker documentation, you’ll see my little commit there about pay
attention to where your YAML is stored and how it relates to the bash aliases.
And I also provided a little code snippet to show, OK, maybe it’s in your home folder.
So no matter where you are in the system, you could be in the path of opt app data looking
at proxy configs or something for swag.
And if you type DC up, it’s still going to hit the YAML file in your home directory.
So that was just a nice little contribution there.
The second one is for podcast generator.
And this is another project very dear to me, because when I first got into podcasting,
and I like to call it a hobby cast, because it was just me and a buddy chewing on fat,
you know, and we had a listener pool of our other group of friends, which is like three
other people.
But I used podcast generator for that project to publish the podcast and actually get it
into the iTunes store so that friends and family could easily find it and listen to it
if they so choose.
And I wanted to spin that project up again to actually send the podcast feed rather than
GitLab through a VPS that I spun up.
Well, geez, I started with Linode, had a bunch of issues with that, then I did Digital
Ocean, had some issues with that.
There’s a big blog post on that if you want to know what those issues are.
But long story short, I was running into a whole bunch of problems.
And I spent hours searching online.
And if you just do some web searching through Google or whatever, you’re really not going
to find a lot of people talking about the project, which surprised me because they’ve
been around since like 2012.
But it’s just not something that comes up a lot in forums and things like that.
So I dug into their issue tracker.
And I found a post that was, I think it was from 2020, so pretty recent, and it was people
complaining about, I shouldn’t say complaining, it was people inquiring about similar issues
to what I was having, but not quite identical.
And there was a user named Jay Adams, who typed up what they were doing step by step
by step to get it to work.
And this was buried in a hyperlink that led to their fork of the project.
And after I found that, I was like, well, shoot, this should just be in the official
documentation.
And if you look at Podcast Generator’s website under their self-hosted section, it’s five
lines.
It’s basically download the project, unzip it, put it in your web server directory,
and then you’re good to go.
And that’s all they say.
And I mean, granted, if you are a backend administrator with web servers and Apache
and all that stuff, it’s probably that easy.
That’s all you really need to know.
But for somebody who is just trying to get their feet wet and get a project off the ground,
it is not enough to get started for somebody completely new.
So I used Jay Adams documentation and then modified it to kind of fit my use case and
tried to make it accessible for somebody who is also following that path.
But even if you’re not, I think there’s enough details there where you can stumble through
it and make it work for your use case.
And that was a really good addition.
I had a great experience.
I forked the project, made the edits, submitted a pull request, got feedback from one of the
devs, changed a few things, and then it was accepted and merged.
But it’s not on their web page.
So the installation that I wrote up is in their installation file, and it’s just a text
file that’s included with the project.
It’s not even in markdown, which I thought was kind of strange because I formatted everything
in markdown just assuming it was a markdown file.
And then when I looked at the actual merge, I was like, oh, well, this is just a text file.
So now all my writing looks kind of strange.
But anyway, after I got that all set up and squared away, I was kind of revisiting things
and I got the project up and running, but I couldn’t upload any files through their web
admin interface.
And I even struggled uploading things via FTP.
So I’ve got that all figured out now.
One of the big issues is in the php.ini configuration, there is a limit to the file size that you
can upload, and it is ridiculously tiny.
I think it’s like two megabytes standard.
So I bumped that up to like 20,000.
And then after that, things started working.
So that needs to be included in the documentation as well.
And then there was also something too with the user permissions, the command I put in,
I thought would apply the permission down throughout the entire directory.
I’m still pretty confident it does, but I’m kind of at the point now where I want to blow
everything away, follow my own documentation again and make sure that that’s accurate before
I do another pull request on there.
So that’s going to be up and coming with that.
So those are the two things that have actually been like accepted and merged into projects
right now.
I’ve also got some conversations going with some other devs.
I’ve been digging into web analytics software just because I’m curious, are people actually
listening to this or visiting this and I don’t want to use Google Analytics, I just, I get
kind of, I know it’s really easy to do, but with all the privacy and things that people
are concerned about now and my own kind of moral guidelines, I just, I want to steer
clear of that if possible.
So I found out that there’s this whole kind of ecosystem with open web analytics and there’s
a couple big name projects out there, Matimo, I believe it’s pronounced, is a huge one that
a lot of people use and that one is free as in beer.
To a certain extent, they have like a limited free tier and then if you want more additional
features, they have a paid version.
So I guess maybe freemium would be like a better way to phrase that.
There’s another one called plausible, which again is kind of the same model and then there’s
another one called shy net, which is completely free as in freedom and beer.
So that one is supposedly feature parody on with like Matimo, but there’s no freemium
aspect to it.
The only problem I had with shy net is that it’s only built for x86 architecture, so
I’m trying to run everything off of my raspberry pi and currently I couldn’t run shy net off
of that platform and I couldn’t find anything on Docker hub that had builds for arm 64.
So I installed it on an x86 machine and then I had to try to figure out how to get swag
to send requests to that machine and that is kind of a mixed bag of tricks.
I eventually got swag to communicate with it so that if I put in something like shy net
dot my URL dot com, it takes me to the actual web GUI, but I still wasn’t getting any analytics.
And the snippet is a piece of HTML that you’re supposed to put into, I believe it’s the head
area of the HTML of a page and the way that I’m doing it with Hugo, everything’s in
mark down, so I was really confused as to how to find the correct HTML tags, so I had
to do a lot of inspecting elements and page source and Firefox to try to find where those
things live and then I had to figure out more with Hugo’s architecture with their defaults
and I learned a lot with that, a lot of that lives in my theme of cast in it and you have
to go into like page layouts and there’s like a whole little header and footer section
that’s just straight up HTML and then you got to find the tags in there and paste your
snippet in there, but I did eventually figure that all out but I still wasn’t getting any
analytical data, so I’m kind of at a stand still with that right now and the dev is kind
of waiting for my response back, so I’m really positive that the dev is interested and wants
to help and things like that, but I’ve kind of hit my time limit investment with that
currently, so hopefully I can return to that later.
I did get Matimo up and running because that one has an arm build, but I hit a lot of roadblocks
with that too, didn’t play nicely with swag and when I eventually did get it to work,
it still wasn’t collecting any analytical data, so I’m just assuming that I’m still
speaking into the void and hopefully in the near future I can figure out web analytics
software and put something out with that, but that’s where the project is right now.
If anybody in the community is out there and wants me to try to attempt something or you
have attempted something and you want to talk about it, anything like that, contributions
are always welcome through the Get Lab page, you can submit a pull request there and we’ll
get something up and running.
To try to speed on that community involvement, I was exploring a platform called Comento
that allows you to embed a commenting system in a blog and a whole bunch of roadblocks
with that as well.
So I got a huge backlog of things to try to troubleshoot, but until I come up with solutions
for that, this will take us to the end of episode 3 of the Linux Lemming.
