Tooling

Settling on a Netlify + Dokku on DigitalOcean deployment stack for JavaScript and Node. Over the last few years I’ve never quite settled on a goto deployment strategy for my apps and projects. Technology-wise it has settled towards Vue or static site generators for the frontend with Node on the backend, whether that’s for API servers or handling rendering through handlebars. What I’ve finally settled on is Netlify + Dokku on DigitalOcean. ...

GraphQL is a great alternative to REST (or other HTTP API designs). This is an quick introduction to the core concepts around consuming a GraphQL API. To see some examples consuming a GraphQL API: In Python, see Python GraphQL client requests example using gql In JavaScript (browser and Node), see last week’s Code with Hugo newsletter What is GraphQL and what problems does it solve? GraphQL is “a query language for your API”. ...

Parcel allows us to bundle frontend applications with no configuration and GitHub pages affords us a way to deploy them for free. Here’s how to use these two tools together to deploy a JavaScript application. Full example of a repo deployed like this: https://github.com/HugoDF/js-graphql-client-example, and see https://codewithhugo.com/js-graphql-client-example/. Or the repo with the demos: https://github.com/HugoDF/parcel-gh-pages-deploy and see https://codewithhugo.com/parcel-gh-pages-deploy/. ...

Easily deploying to multiple environments in a simple manner using GitHub, CircleCI and Heroku. Continuous Integration is awesome, but sometimes you need a buffer between auto-deploying things on merge and the production release. To do that with CircleCI requires some git branch-wrangling and a few lines of bash scripting. We’ll imagine a scenario where a deploy is trivial (ie. we’ll pretend we’re using Heroku). For more complicated build steps we should still be able to follow similar principles. ...

A bash cheat sheet for developers who just want to get by. Writing setup, CI and deployment flows means a bit of the old bash scripting. Despite my deep interest in the intricacies of Bash (/sarcasm), I’ve kept hitting up Google and StackOverflow for solutions to the same couple of situations. To avoid having to do this again myself and for your reading pleasure, here they are. ...

As part of adding integration tests to an app on CircleCI I ran into the following issues: redis-cli’s API has changed from version 2 to 3 to 4 ie. this works in v4 redis-cli -u ${REDIS_URL} but doesn’t in v2 the “only way” to install redis-cli is through a redis-tools or redis-server install and I only need redis-cli not the server or any other tools What follows is how not to install redis-cli and then how to install redis-cli latest, properly. ...