1 00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:17,920 Hello, and welcome to the Linux Lemming. 2 00:00:17,920 --> 00:00:21,440 I'm your host, Rasta Calavera. 3 00:00:21,440 --> 00:00:26,360 In episode 3 today, a couple of things I want to cover. 4 00:00:26,360 --> 00:00:33,800 The first one that I'm really happy about is the actual accepted documentation that this 5 00:00:33,800 --> 00:00:37,000 project has accomplished so far. 6 00:00:37,000 --> 00:00:42,760 And then I want to dive into a little bit of web analytics software, which is kind of 7 00:00:42,760 --> 00:00:46,040 what I'm experimenting with right now. 8 00:00:46,040 --> 00:00:52,920 So right now I've got two and counting projects that documentation has actually been accepted 9 00:00:52,920 --> 00:00:53,920 for. 10 00:00:53,920 --> 00:00:57,480 The first one is a huge win for me. 11 00:00:57,480 --> 00:01:02,840 It's from the Linux server IO project, and getting a merge into their project holds a 12 00:01:02,840 --> 00:01:05,400 very special place in my heart. 13 00:01:05,400 --> 00:01:10,080 They have a really great community and a team of devs who are constantly fielding questions 14 00:01:10,080 --> 00:01:11,800 through their Discord. 15 00:01:11,800 --> 00:01:15,760 In my opinion, their documentation is some of the best out there. 16 00:01:15,760 --> 00:01:21,200 So being considered a contributor to that makes me very, very happy. 17 00:01:21,200 --> 00:01:25,920 And what I contributed, I talked about it in a blog post previously, if you had a chance 18 00:01:25,920 --> 00:01:28,760 to read that. 19 00:01:28,760 --> 00:01:38,000 They had some bash aliases that made administering their containers a lot easier. 20 00:01:38,000 --> 00:01:46,000 Things like typing DC up and DC down instead of Docker compose, TACD, or Docker compose 21 00:01:46,000 --> 00:01:49,240 up TACD and Docker compose down. 22 00:01:49,240 --> 00:01:52,040 And just little things like that. 23 00:01:52,040 --> 00:01:57,680 And with the bash aliases that they had in their documentation, it was referencing a 24 00:01:57,680 --> 00:02:01,000 path into the opt directory. 25 00:02:01,000 --> 00:02:07,320 So they basically recommend that you keep all of the static volumes and things in a 26 00:02:07,320 --> 00:02:14,960 file path of opt app data, whatever the container name is and config and all of that stuff. 27 00:02:14,960 --> 00:02:20,560 And I guess they assumed that the YAML file will live there as well. 28 00:02:20,560 --> 00:02:25,280 But in my case, I always keep the YAML file in my home directory. 29 00:02:25,280 --> 00:02:31,000 And then I keep all the container stuff in the opt app data directory. 30 00:02:31,000 --> 00:02:36,560 And in years past, I've always copied these bash aliases blindly. 31 00:02:36,560 --> 00:02:38,400 And they just never worked. 32 00:02:38,400 --> 00:02:42,480 And I just kind of assumed, well, whatever, I'll just ignore those for now and type out 33 00:02:42,480 --> 00:02:44,000 the whole thing. 34 00:02:44,000 --> 00:02:50,000 But what I learned is that it was referencing the wrong path. 35 00:02:50,000 --> 00:02:52,360 And I don't know why that never clicked with me before. 36 00:02:52,360 --> 00:02:56,480 Maybe I'm just more experienced with it now that it stood out to me. 37 00:02:56,480 --> 00:03:01,640 But I thought, well, geez, somebody who's just getting started, they probably don't 38 00:03:01,640 --> 00:03:05,440 have their YAML in that same file path. 39 00:03:05,440 --> 00:03:09,320 So it would make sense to kind of put in a line of clarity there saying, like, depending 40 00:03:09,320 --> 00:03:15,120 on where your YAML file is stored, your bash alias will have to change accordingly for 41 00:03:15,120 --> 00:03:16,120 that. 42 00:03:16,120 --> 00:03:18,680 So I put in documentation. 43 00:03:18,680 --> 00:03:23,400 I hopped onto their Discord and kind of threw it out there and said, like, hey, what do 44 00:03:23,400 --> 00:03:24,720 you think about this? 45 00:03:24,720 --> 00:03:28,840 Do you think it's like a good addition to the documentation? 46 00:03:28,840 --> 00:03:32,160 And a couple of users chimed in, provided some feedback. 47 00:03:32,160 --> 00:03:34,680 I went in, made some edits. 48 00:03:34,680 --> 00:03:37,480 And lo and behold, it got merged into the project. 49 00:03:37,480 --> 00:03:44,960 So now when you reference their Docker documentation, you'll see my little commit there about pay 50 00:03:44,960 --> 00:03:49,240 attention to where your YAML is stored and how it relates to the bash aliases. 51 00:03:49,240 --> 00:03:54,600 And I also provided a little code snippet to show, OK, maybe it's in your home folder. 52 00:03:54,600 --> 00:03:59,840 So no matter where you are in the system, you could be in the path of opt app data looking 53 00:03:59,840 --> 00:04:03,840 at proxy configs or something for swag. 54 00:04:03,840 --> 00:04:09,120 And if you type DC up, it's still going to hit the YAML file in your home directory. 55 00:04:09,120 --> 00:04:12,960 So that was just a nice little contribution there. 56 00:04:12,960 --> 00:04:16,760 The second one is for podcast generator. 57 00:04:16,760 --> 00:04:21,320 And this is another project very dear to me, because when I first got into podcasting, 58 00:04:21,320 --> 00:04:26,080 and I like to call it a hobby cast, because it was just me and a buddy chewing on fat, 59 00:04:26,080 --> 00:04:31,920 you know, and we had a listener pool of our other group of friends, which is like three 60 00:04:31,920 --> 00:04:34,600 other people. 61 00:04:34,600 --> 00:04:40,240 But I used podcast generator for that project to publish the podcast and actually get it 62 00:04:40,240 --> 00:04:45,200 into the iTunes store so that friends and family could easily find it and listen to it 63 00:04:45,200 --> 00:04:48,240 if they so choose. 64 00:04:48,240 --> 00:04:57,880 And I wanted to spin that project up again to actually send the podcast feed rather than 65 00:04:57,880 --> 00:05:02,160 GitLab through a VPS that I spun up. 66 00:05:02,160 --> 00:05:07,800 Well, geez, I started with Linode, had a bunch of issues with that, then I did Digital 67 00:05:07,800 --> 00:05:10,760 Ocean, had some issues with that. 68 00:05:10,760 --> 00:05:13,880 There's a big blog post on that if you want to know what those issues are. 69 00:05:13,880 --> 00:05:21,240 But long story short, I was running into a whole bunch of problems. 70 00:05:21,240 --> 00:05:23,760 And I spent hours searching online. 71 00:05:23,760 --> 00:05:29,040 And if you just do some web searching through Google or whatever, you're really not going 72 00:05:29,040 --> 00:05:33,480 to find a lot of people talking about the project, which surprised me because they've 73 00:05:33,480 --> 00:05:36,480 been around since like 2012. 74 00:05:36,480 --> 00:05:41,360 But it's just not something that comes up a lot in forums and things like that. 75 00:05:41,360 --> 00:05:44,480 So I dug into their issue tracker. 76 00:05:44,480 --> 00:05:54,080 And I found a post that was, I think it was from 2020, so pretty recent, and it was people 77 00:05:54,080 --> 00:05:59,640 complaining about, I shouldn't say complaining, it was people inquiring about similar issues 78 00:05:59,640 --> 00:06:02,920 to what I was having, but not quite identical. 79 00:06:02,920 --> 00:06:09,960 And there was a user named Jay Adams, who typed up what they were doing step by step 80 00:06:09,960 --> 00:06:12,200 by step to get it to work. 81 00:06:12,200 --> 00:06:19,320 And this was buried in a hyperlink that led to their fork of the project. 82 00:06:19,320 --> 00:06:24,360 And after I found that, I was like, well, shoot, this should just be in the official 83 00:06:24,360 --> 00:06:27,360 documentation. 84 00:06:27,360 --> 00:06:32,280 And if you look at Podcast Generator's website under their self-hosted section, it's five 85 00:06:32,280 --> 00:06:33,280 lines. 86 00:06:33,280 --> 00:06:41,320 It's basically download the project, unzip it, put it in your web server directory, 87 00:06:41,320 --> 00:06:42,680 and then you're good to go. 88 00:06:42,680 --> 00:06:45,600 And that's all they say. 89 00:06:45,600 --> 00:06:51,360 And I mean, granted, if you are a backend administrator with web servers and Apache 90 00:06:51,360 --> 00:06:54,760 and all that stuff, it's probably that easy. 91 00:06:54,760 --> 00:06:56,760 That's all you really need to know. 92 00:06:56,760 --> 00:07:03,000 But for somebody who is just trying to get their feet wet and get a project off the ground, 93 00:07:03,000 --> 00:07:08,160 it is not enough to get started for somebody completely new. 94 00:07:08,160 --> 00:07:14,680 So I used Jay Adams documentation and then modified it to kind of fit my use case and 95 00:07:14,680 --> 00:07:22,120 tried to make it accessible for somebody who is also following that path. 96 00:07:22,120 --> 00:07:25,600 But even if you're not, I think there's enough details there where you can stumble through 97 00:07:25,600 --> 00:07:29,080 it and make it work for your use case. 98 00:07:29,080 --> 00:07:30,480 And that was a really good addition. 99 00:07:30,480 --> 00:07:33,480 I had a great experience. 100 00:07:33,480 --> 00:07:40,040 I forked the project, made the edits, submitted a pull request, got feedback from one of the 101 00:07:40,040 --> 00:07:44,600 devs, changed a few things, and then it was accepted and merged. 102 00:07:44,600 --> 00:07:47,000 But it's not on their web page. 103 00:07:47,000 --> 00:07:54,040 So the installation that I wrote up is in their installation file, and it's just a text 104 00:07:54,040 --> 00:07:56,720 file that's included with the project. 105 00:07:56,720 --> 00:08:02,800 It's not even in markdown, which I thought was kind of strange because I formatted everything 106 00:08:02,800 --> 00:08:06,120 in markdown just assuming it was a markdown file. 107 00:08:06,120 --> 00:08:14,640 And then when I looked at the actual merge, I was like, oh, well, this is just a text file. 108 00:08:14,640 --> 00:08:16,920 So now all my writing looks kind of strange. 109 00:08:16,920 --> 00:08:24,240 But anyway, after I got that all set up and squared away, I was kind of revisiting things 110 00:08:24,240 --> 00:08:30,800 and I got the project up and running, but I couldn't upload any files through their web 111 00:08:30,800 --> 00:08:32,640 admin interface. 112 00:08:32,640 --> 00:08:37,000 And I even struggled uploading things via FTP. 113 00:08:37,000 --> 00:08:40,440 So I've got that all figured out now. 114 00:08:40,440 --> 00:08:54,120 One of the big issues is in the php.ini configuration, there is a limit to the file size that you 115 00:08:54,120 --> 00:08:56,680 can upload, and it is ridiculously tiny. 116 00:08:56,680 --> 00:08:59,520 I think it's like two megabytes standard. 117 00:08:59,520 --> 00:09:03,360 So I bumped that up to like 20,000. 118 00:09:03,360 --> 00:09:06,360 And then after that, things started working. 119 00:09:06,360 --> 00:09:09,800 So that needs to be included in the documentation as well. 120 00:09:09,800 --> 00:09:16,160 And then there was also something too with the user permissions, the command I put in, 121 00:09:16,160 --> 00:09:20,240 I thought would apply the permission down throughout the entire directory. 122 00:09:20,240 --> 00:09:26,080 I'm still pretty confident it does, but I'm kind of at the point now where I want to blow 123 00:09:26,080 --> 00:09:32,960 everything away, follow my own documentation again and make sure that that's accurate before 124 00:09:32,960 --> 00:09:36,720 I do another pull request on there. 125 00:09:36,720 --> 00:09:41,280 So that's going to be up and coming with that. 126 00:09:41,280 --> 00:09:45,760 So those are the two things that have actually been like accepted and merged into projects 127 00:09:45,760 --> 00:09:46,760 right now. 128 00:09:46,760 --> 00:09:52,760 I've also got some conversations going with some other devs. 129 00:09:52,760 --> 00:09:59,480 I've been digging into web analytics software just because I'm curious, are people actually 130 00:09:59,480 --> 00:10:05,080 listening to this or visiting this and I don't want to use Google Analytics, I just, I get 131 00:10:05,080 --> 00:10:11,480 kind of, I know it's really easy to do, but with all the privacy and things that people 132 00:10:11,480 --> 00:10:17,720 are concerned about now and my own kind of moral guidelines, I just, I want to steer 133 00:10:17,720 --> 00:10:19,680 clear of that if possible. 134 00:10:19,680 --> 00:10:25,800 So I found out that there's this whole kind of ecosystem with open web analytics and there's 135 00:10:25,800 --> 00:10:31,640 a couple big name projects out there, Matimo, I believe it's pronounced, is a huge one that 136 00:10:31,640 --> 00:10:38,000 a lot of people use and that one is free as in beer. 137 00:10:38,000 --> 00:10:43,080 To a certain extent, they have like a limited free tier and then if you want more additional 138 00:10:43,080 --> 00:10:47,800 features, they have a paid version. 139 00:10:47,800 --> 00:10:54,320 So I guess maybe freemium would be like a better way to phrase that. 140 00:10:54,320 --> 00:11:00,560 There's another one called plausible, which again is kind of the same model and then there's 141 00:11:00,560 --> 00:11:06,520 another one called shy net, which is completely free as in freedom and beer. 142 00:11:06,520 --> 00:11:15,760 So that one is supposedly feature parody on with like Matimo, but there's no freemium 143 00:11:15,760 --> 00:11:17,640 aspect to it. 144 00:11:17,640 --> 00:11:25,440 The only problem I had with shy net is that it's only built for x86 architecture, so 145 00:11:25,440 --> 00:11:30,480 I'm trying to run everything off of my raspberry pi and currently I couldn't run shy net off 146 00:11:30,480 --> 00:11:39,560 of that platform and I couldn't find anything on Docker hub that had builds for arm 64. 147 00:11:39,560 --> 00:11:48,560 So I installed it on an x86 machine and then I had to try to figure out how to get swag 148 00:11:48,560 --> 00:11:57,760 to send requests to that machine and that is kind of a mixed bag of tricks. 149 00:11:57,760 --> 00:12:04,760 I eventually got swag to communicate with it so that if I put in something like shy net 150 00:12:04,760 --> 00:12:16,960 dot my URL dot com, it takes me to the actual web GUI, but I still wasn't getting any analytics. 151 00:12:16,960 --> 00:12:27,600 And the snippet is a piece of HTML that you're supposed to put into, I believe it's the head 152 00:12:27,600 --> 00:12:34,440 area of the HTML of a page and the way that I'm doing it with Hugo, everything's in 153 00:12:34,440 --> 00:12:41,040 mark down, so I was really confused as to how to find the correct HTML tags, so I had 154 00:12:41,040 --> 00:12:45,880 to do a lot of inspecting elements and page source and Firefox to try to find where those 155 00:12:45,880 --> 00:12:55,520 things live and then I had to figure out more with Hugo's architecture with their defaults 156 00:12:55,520 --> 00:13:01,320 and I learned a lot with that, a lot of that lives in my theme of cast in it and you have 157 00:13:01,320 --> 00:13:06,240 to go into like page layouts and there's like a whole little header and footer section 158 00:13:06,240 --> 00:13:10,120 that's just straight up HTML and then you got to find the tags in there and paste your 159 00:13:10,120 --> 00:13:15,840 snippet in there, but I did eventually figure that all out but I still wasn't getting any 160 00:13:15,840 --> 00:13:21,160 analytical data, so I'm kind of at a stand still with that right now and the dev is kind 161 00:13:21,160 --> 00:13:27,440 of waiting for my response back, so I'm really positive that the dev is interested and wants 162 00:13:27,440 --> 00:13:32,920 to help and things like that, but I've kind of hit my time limit investment with that 163 00:13:32,920 --> 00:13:35,800 currently, so hopefully I can return to that later. 164 00:13:35,800 --> 00:13:44,400 I did get Matimo up and running because that one has an arm build, but I hit a lot of roadblocks 165 00:13:44,400 --> 00:13:52,960 with that too, didn't play nicely with swag and when I eventually did get it to work, 166 00:13:52,960 --> 00:14:00,680 it still wasn't collecting any analytical data, so I'm just assuming that I'm still 167 00:14:00,680 --> 00:14:06,880 speaking into the void and hopefully in the near future I can figure out web analytics 168 00:14:06,880 --> 00:14:14,480 software and put something out with that, but that's where the project is right now. 169 00:14:14,480 --> 00:14:20,920 If anybody in the community is out there and wants me to try to attempt something or you 170 00:14:20,920 --> 00:14:24,720 have attempted something and you want to talk about it, anything like that, contributions 171 00:14:24,720 --> 00:14:31,120 are always welcome through the Get Lab page, you can submit a pull request there and we'll 172 00:14:31,120 --> 00:14:32,920 get something up and running. 173 00:14:32,920 --> 00:14:38,200 To try to speed on that community involvement, I was exploring a platform called Comento 174 00:14:38,200 --> 00:14:46,920 that allows you to embed a commenting system in a blog and a whole bunch of roadblocks 175 00:14:46,920 --> 00:14:48,680 with that as well. 176 00:14:48,680 --> 00:14:56,240 So I got a huge backlog of things to try to troubleshoot, but until I come up with solutions 177 00:14:56,240 --> 00:15:22,640 for that, this will take us to the end of episode 3 of the Linux Lemming.