Git

Finding and deleting large files in a git repository

Large files can slow down cloning and fetching operations, and make your developers less efficient. Use this guide to find and delete those files

Fastly

Listing Fastly users that can access a particular service

I was recently to supply a list of non-superuser user accounts that could access a given Service ID in Fastly, and what their role and permission was. This can be achieved with the Fastly CLI and command line utilities like jq.

Drupal

Drupal and the Open Web in the Australian Government - 2022 edition

Have you ever wondered how popular Drupal is in your local state and at the Australian Federal Government level?

AWS

Choosing the right Amazon EC2 Spot Instances for your workloads

The main issue was narrowing down the enormous list of instance types so they would be suitable to run our workloads.

Fastly

Bulk import ACL entries into a Fastly ACL

How to automate adding large amounts of ACL entries to a Fastly ACL

Docker

Dockerfile best practices - stories from the field

This is a collection of things I have come across using Docker over the years and working with docker in kubernetes across thousands of projects.

Fastly

Fastly Soft Purge vs Instant Purge - what is the difference?

What Fastly Soft Purge is, when it is useful, and how to use it.

Fastly

Fastly Logging to Amazon S3 in JSON format

One of the cheapest and easiest methods for logging in Fastly is to use Amazon S3. This post will examine how to set this logging up, some of the common gotchas I came across after running this in production for a while now.

Ghost

Hosting Ghost in Kubernetes

Ghost is traditional meant to be installed on a single VM. This article will explore how to get Ghost running inside Kubernetes.

Fastly

Purge a single domain and it's content from a Fastly service with multiple domains

One of the current limitations of Fastly is that you cannot purge a single domain from a service, without dropping the entire cache. This post will explore a solution to this.

Drupal

How many JOINs is too many? Tuning optimizer_search_depth for MySQL with Drupal

Drupal is extremely flexible, and creates a highly normalised table structure, 2 tables per field on a piece of content. We were seeing SQL queries appear to never complete when they had lots of JOINs in them.

Drupal

Finding and killing anonymous sessions in Drupal

Sessions in Drupal are created when you log into Drupal. You can however start a session without first authenticating. This is known as an anonymous session

Caching

CORS, Cache poisoning and the Vary HTTP header

Understanding the Vary header is key ensuring CORS will work with CDNs and caching.

Kibana

How to create scripted fields in Kibana using Painless

What is a scripted field in Kibana?Kibana is really good at searching and visualising data held in ElasticSearch indexes. When you need to go outside of what is in that index however - this is where scripted fields come into play. Some great use cases for scripted fields (in

MySQL

Finding and killing long running SQL queries in AWS RDS

Occasionally we find sites that are running extremely slowly, and digging down we end up finding MySQL queries that have been running, for sometimes days or even weeks.

SSL

Debugging TLS certificates with Certigo

OpenSSL only goes so far, learn about Certigo, to which goes a lot further.

Performance

Preparing for a high traffic event, simple steps to success

The steps that any new launch or high traffic event should go through in order to have the best chance of success.

Drupal

Search API attachments and storing reasonable amounts of data

Search API Attachments has a setting that allows you to store only the most important information in the database.

Drupal

How to add sub tabs under the User profile in Drupal 8

A simple step by step tutorial on adding a custom sub tab in a user's profile in Drupal 8.

Drupal

How the feeds module in Drupal 7 ended up causing MySQL to sever the connection

This is a short story on an interesting problem we were having with the Feeds module and Feeds directory fetcher module in Drupal 7.

Drupal

PHP 7.3 and when you can upgrade your Drupal site

PHP 7.3.0 was released in December 2018, and brings with it a number of improvements in both performance and the language. As always with Drupal you need to strike a balance between adopting these new improvements early and running into issues

Cloudflare

Analyzing Cloudflare Logs (formally ELS) with the command line

If you have an enterprise zone with Cloudflare, there is the ability to request the raw request logs using 'Cloudflare Logs' (formally called Enterprise Log Share or ELS for short).

Ghost

Adding Google Analytics to AMP posts in Ghost

Ghost comes with AMP support, however there is no built in way to in the administration UI to add Google Analytics to your AMP theme. Fortunately, implementing this is relatively simple.

PHP

How to generate a CSR with SANs in PHP

A simple tutorial on how to generate a CSR with SANs in PHP. Code samples are supplied.

Drupal

Custom Cloudflare WAF rules that every Drupal site should run

This blog post helps to summarise some of the default rules I will deploy to every Drupal (7 or 8) site as a base line.