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 SSL 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.

PHP

New features coming in PHP 7.4

PHP 7.4 is scheduled for release in November of this year, with it bring some performance improvements along with some new features. Here are a couple of the new features that are coming that I'm excited about. Spread operator updatesPHP has had support for the spread operator for a

Meta

The history of Pixelite, a progression through the CMS landscape

This website www.pixelite.co.nz has gone through a few iterations over the years. I thought I would go through a few of the various CMSs and hosting providers we have used, and what went well, and what lessons we learned.

Docker

Creating a cluster with Rancher - Part 1: Installing rancher

Rancher is an open-source self-hosted Kubernetes user interface. I'm going to show you how easy it is to get up and running with Rancher so that you can have a play.

Development

Using Docker for PHP development.

I'm going to assume you have some basic knowledge of docker. I also assume you have installed docker and docker-compose locally. You can read more about docker here. I'm going to be doing this for an example Laravel site however this should work if you're using Drupal or some similar

Ghost

Add PrismJS to Ghost for syntax highlighting of code snippets

Out of the box Ghost will not syntax highlight your code snippets. I will explain how to implement these changes in your own site.