Amazon EC2 Servers as Cheap, Disposable Tools

-
Since Chrome now makes it embarrassing to serve HTTP, I decided my project had to support HTTPS.

LetsEncrypt, a source of free certificates, is awesome.

However... their automagical certificate generation software runs on almost every OS, except Amazon's house brand "Linux 2". And of course that's what I had chosen when I set up my EC2.

My Hackish Idea: Just spin up another server. For the price of a coffee, I could start a server running a distro that works easily with LetsEncrypt's tool. I chose Ubuntu. Then I just ran a super-simple Nginx setup, pointed my domain at the new box, and generated the certificate.

I had planned to move the certificate to my "real" EC2... and make a better plan before it expired. But I changed my mind and moved my project to the Ubuntu EC2, because it had proven it could play well with others.

But I still really like the idea that I can solve a problem by making a "throwaway" server, the way I'd make a temporary file or a throwaway run-once script. :-)

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Callback, Promise, Observable, and Doughnuts

-
This is the story of Jerry JavaSript's Automated Slow Doughnut Shop. One day, I wanted a doughnut. So I rode my bike to the automated slow doughnut shop, where they have a slow doughnut machine. You put in a dollar. And then the machine mixes batter, heats the fat, drops the batter into the fat, lifts it out on a linked metal conveyor belt, dusts it with sugar, and drops it into your waiting hands. Once I get my doughnut, I can eat it in the usual manner. But from the time I put in my dollar until the time I receive my doughnut, I am blocked. Fortunately, the slow doughnut machine has a slot labeled, "Insert callback  here". This is great. I code up a function eatDoughnut(doughnut) . I can reference my teeth,  esophagus, stomach, and so on, because they are mine and I know all about them. And then I slip my   eatDoughnut(doughnut)  function  into the slot and get on my bike and ride  to the office while the slow doughnut machine is still mixing batter. When the
Read more

Learn grid and grid-template-areas FIRST!!!

-
If you're starting to learn web design, you will see hundreds of tutorials about floats clear-fix and positioning and other infinitely painful details on how to actually get HTML and CSS to lay things out in seemingly normal and obvious ways. You'll probably have to learn some of that. But don't learn it first! Instead , read this  https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn/CSS/CSS_layout/Grids And then read this  https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/grid-template-areas and a longer tutorial here  https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/CSS_Grid_Layout/Grid_Template_Areas Then lay out your web pages as if layout was something we were actually allowed to do. (And then go back and learn some of the painful stuff later. Or if enough time has passed, maybe you won't have to.)
Read more

The Day TDD Started Working for Me

-
I've always agreed that Test Driven Development was a good idea and I should be doing it. But it's hard to do on top of learning new tools. And it's hard to do for GUIs. So it never quite happened. However, after I worked with React and Redux a bit, and after doing a couple hello-world tests with Jest, it all fit together and actually made coding easier and more fun. These were the parts that came together to make it work: Jest: Jest is included with create-react-app and is stupid-easy to start using. The Redux reducer, or functions used in the reducer, have to be pure functions and are therefore stupid-easy to test. I pulled some functions out of Redux Container mapStateToProps. These are also pure functions. I also decided that the outputs from mapStateToProps had to have the same structure, and even use most of the same names, as the container component and all of it's child components. In other words, you could dump the data coming out of mapStateToProps a
Read more