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Week Ending 5 Dec 2021

· 4 min read
David

Set up hosting, registered and configured some domains, and set up dev tools.

Heroku​

Having read that Heroku supports Python, PlotLy and Jupyter well, my initial thought was to use Heroku as a hosting platform. Set up was pretty easy, two things in particular: 1) the option to create a new pipeline during set up; and 2) the option to enable ‘review’ apps - temporary apps that can be spun up off a GitHub pull request.

I initially set up a pipeline with two apps: realthreads-staging; and realthreads-production.

A few road bumps:

Later, I read about a one-click deploy Jupyter notebook app for Heroku. The docs explained that it used Postgres for the data store, so I added free Postgres DB to both of the apps. However, there is a known bug in the app since an update from Notebook 4 to 5, which means the build always fails.

I found a basic Python app template with a tutorial Getting Started with Python and used one-click deploy to deploy that to a new free dyno. Next, I intend to grab the code for that app and deploy it to the realthreads pipeline.

Heroku Docs are excellent. They point you to useful tools and resources to help you complete every step required to complete the task at hand. The language is very clear.

GitHub​

I had an old GitHub account that I never really used. I resurrected this. Having worked with GitLab a fair bit over the last couple of years, I was familiar with most of the important concepts, so set up was easy and the interface is pretty straight forward.

Cloudflare​

My initial pick for Domain registration and management was GoDaddy, just because it was a name I knew. However, when I tried to connect realthreads.co.uk to Heroku, I learned this wasn’t possible. The Heroku docs mentioned a few different options. They called out that Cloudflare had docs (with link) for configuring their DNS settings to work with Heroku, so I chose Cloudflare.

I transferred realthreads.co.uk to Cloudflare. To do this, I first had to set up Cloudflare on the domain, this involved changing some settings in GoDaddy before initiating the transfer.

It said it would take a while to process, so to avoid being held up, I also registered realthreads.io directly with Cloudflare. This was straightforward to do.

Once I had registered realthreads.io, I had to add CNAME DNS records for the primary domain and www domain. This was a bit tricky, because the docs talked about the primary domain as a special case, but it wasn’t clear that it was all set up in onc config area in Cloudflare. And the UI of that area seemed to imply you needed to A and AAAA records before you could add a CNAME record. Don’t think this is the case, because it all seems to be working!

Netlify​

Created a new site at custom domain - threadscentral.io - in about 15 minutes all on my hone! It was super easy, but didn’t learn much - except how easy this could all be!

Terminal/CLI​

Never really used Terminal before. Installed various tools needed to complete tasks. So far, played with:

  • brew
  • heroku
  • python
  • python3 (set 3 to default, so can just use python ..)
  • npm
  • yarn

Getting the hang of the conventions:

$ npm start
$ heroku local web
$ python3 --version
$ git push heroku main
$ heroku pg --app realthreads-staging

Now I understand why the CLI and logs are such an important part of the developer experience.

VS Code​

Got VS Code up and running locally. On the whole ok, but I’ve hit a few silly problems like: local branches that no longer exist in the remote; cross-contamination of branches across different local repos; committing to main branch instead of feature branch.

Python​

I’ve started an IBM course on Coursera Python for Data Science, AI & Development Topics so far:

  • Data types
  • Variables and expressions
  • Lists
  • Tuples
  • Sets
  • Dictionaries

Uploading labs to gist.

iA Writer​

Writing content in iA Writer. It's convenient for writing on the commute with a bluetooth keyboard and iPhone.