Hackathon DevOps 101

http://blog.devpost.com/post/114493741397/hackathon-devops-101

by nealrs • 11 years ago

53 21 11 years ago

blog.devpost.com

autotune• 11 years ago

Chef and test-kitchen to automagically test your recipes in the cloud. VirtualBox and the snapshot creation tool to revert changes to your preferred state while testing recipes in seconds.

SeeThruHead2• 11 years ago

The dokku app on Digital Ocean is really good for this.

stenius3• 11 years ago

I'd probably go with IBM Blue Mix or Heroku if digital ocean wasn't sponsoring. No reason to spend time on managing your server at this point and they provide pretty much the same capabilities for the developer deploying code

SeeThruHead2• 11 years ago

If you choose the preconfigured app, the setup is essentially adding an SSH key.

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-use-...

logane2• 11 years ago

Seems like this post is less about real hackathon strategies for devops, and more about marketing for ChallengePost's (I guess DevPost now?) partners.

z1mm32m4n• 11 years ago

It may very well be. But does it matter? As a hackathon organizer/mentor, these are exactly the resources I'd recommend. Publicity by providing a service is not a new concept; I really enjoy this post about it in particular:

http://blog.crew.co/how-side-projects-saved-our-startup/

logane2• 11 years ago

I don't think that post is the same situation at all - there, Crew made side projects that became popular and then received traffic from them. Here, corporate sponsors skew which tools a ChallengePost employee recommends for hackers - some of which I personally believe are not at all good tools for the listed jobs (S3 for static website hosting??).

phlandis2• 11 years ago

Getting a quick ipage domain and the services they offer is my go to technique.

caffeinewriter2• 11 years ago

I've used iPage before. They were down pretty regularly every day for me. So much so, that I abandoned it after less than a week. I've since moved to a Digital Ocean server and Namecheap for domain registration, and I've never looked back.

phlandis2• 11 years ago

I have several sites with them and have never had an issue. How long ago was this?

arianvanp3• 11 years ago

What ngrok does can also be achieved with the following simple ssh command:

ssh -R 9000:localhost:4200 my.server.is.awesome.com

Boom, your local server is reachable on my.server.is.awesome.com:9000

It's actually quite a useful trick that I use when needing to test integration with 3rd parties when on the dev branch of our API code.

If you like these kind of tricks. I'd really advice watching this talk. https://vimeo.com/54505525

nealrs2• 11 years ago

Neat -- but you still need to have an existing domain + ssh access to that domain right?

arianvanp3• 11 years ago

Yes or you can use an IP address of course.

stenius3• 11 years ago

A lot of people I've worked with at hackathons didn't have a server running so being able to use ngrok is a lot easier for them.

pkaeding2• 11 years ago

That is true, but that is only a small part of the usefulness of ngrok. It can tunnel TCP port, assigning you a random high-numbered port at their end (like with ssh -R).

But if you are tunneling an HTTP service, you can be assigned a random hostname (random.ngrok.com), or you can request a specific hostname (pkaeding-test.ngrok.com), and your service will be available over both HTTP (port 80) and HTTPS (port 443) on that hostname. This can be critical for testing webhook callbacks where the remote service only allows HTTPS on port 443.

Also, when you are tunneling HTTP services (using HTTP or HTTPS), ngrok will start a web UI running at localhost:3030, detailing all incoming requests. You can examine the headers and body from both request and response, and even replay requests. This is immensely helpful when debugging webhooks.

(I am not affiliated with ngrok, except as a happy user.)

arianvanp3• 11 years ago

Yeh true. But what I do in those scenarios is hack up an ngnix config with a (self-signed) wildcard certificate and map certain ports to https endpoints on certain subdomains using ngnix reverse-proxy stuff.

So I expose :9000 on the remote host, and then map :9000 to blah.my.website.com:443 using ngnix

jhildings• 11 years ago

But, why not just run then on your local machines? 99% of the hackathon project never gets updated afterwards anyway

Hackathon DevOps 101

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