Grav VS Portainer

There are flat-file CMSes (content management systems) like Grav: https://getgrav.org/

I guess, in some vague/broad sense, config-as-code systems also implement something similar? Maybe even OpenAPI schemas could count to some degree...?

In the old days, the "semantic web" movement was an attempt to make more webpages both human- and machine-readable indefinitely by tagging them with proper schema: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_Description_Framework. Even Google was on board for a while, but I guess it never saw much uptake. As far as I can tell it's basically dead now, both because of non-semantic HTML (everything as a React div), general laziness, and LLMs being able to parse things loosely.

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Side thoughts...

Philosophically, I don't know that capturing raw data alone as files is really sufficient to capture the nuances of any particular experience, or the overall zeitgeist of an era. You can archive Geocities pages, but that doesn't really capture the novelty and indie-ness of that era. Similarly, you can save TikTok videos, but absent the cultural environment that created them (and a faithful recreation of the recommendation algorithm), they wouldn't really show future archaeologists how teenagers today lived.

I worked for a natural history museum for a while, and while we were there, one of the interesting questions (well, to me anyway) was whether our web content was in and of itself worth preserving as a cultural artifact -- both so that future generations can see what exhibits were interesting/apropos for the cultures of our times, but also so they could see how our generation found out about those exhibitions to begin with (who knows what the Web will morph into 50 years later). It wasn't enough to simply save the HTML of our web pages, both because they tie into various other APIs and databases (like zoological collections) and because some were interactive experiences, like games designed to be played with a mouse (before phones were popular), or phone chatbots with some of our specimens. To really capture the experience authentically would've required emulating not just our tech stacks and devices, among other things.

Like for the earlier Geocities example, sure you could just save the old HTML and render it with a modern browser, but that's not the same as something like https://oldweb.today/?browser=ns3-mac#http://geocities.com/ , which emulates the whole OS and browser too. And that still isn't the same as having to sit in front of a tiny CRT and wait minutes for everything to download over a 14.4k modem, only to be interrupted when mom had to make a call.

I guess that's a longwinded of critiquing "file over app": It only makes sense for things that are originally files/documents to begin with. Much of our lives now are not flat docs but "experiences" that take much more thought and effort to archive. If the goal is truly to preserve that posterity, it's not enough to just archive their raw data, but to develop ways to record and later emulate entire experiences, both technological and cultural. It ain't easy!

I took a more traditional approach, focusing on something that's "good enough", which in my case was a cheap VPS and an install of Grav: https://getgrav.org/

Some optional customization for page templates/fonts/CSS, some CI so I can build and deploy it inside of a Docker container, Matomo for analytics that respect privacy (which I already use elsewhere) and some additional web server configuration to hide anything interesting behind an additional login and I'm good. Maybe backups and uptime monitoring if I'm feeling brave, which is what most sites should also have (so copy + paste there).

All of that for under 100 euros per year (could also pay half of that if I didn't host anything else on the server), the blog has actually survived getting on the front page of HN once or twice and requires relatively little maintenance, at least a bit less than a proper install of WordPress, due to its larger surface area.

The best thing is that it's simple enough for me to understand how it works, to be able to move it anywhere as needed and use more or less plain Markdown for writing the blog posts. Here's a quick example of a recent post: https://blog.kronis.dev/articles/ever-wanted-to-read-thousan...

Now all that's left is to find motivation to write more, but at least 90% of my time doesn't go into tinkering with custom fancy solutions, no matter how much I'd love that. Then again, nothing wrong with the alternatives either: 400 euros might be perfectly worth it for some, whereas working with static site generators or even custom CMSes would be a fun experience for others!

I'd check out Grav. https://getgrav.org/

Also, there is a CMS called Grav. Both Gravity and Grav use a very similar (but not identical) font for their logo.

I would use a flat file cms like https://getgrav.org

Portainer

> Any tips on the minimum hardware or VPS's needed to get a small swarm cluster setup?

From my testing, Docker Swarm is very lightweight, uses less memory than both Hashicorp Nomad and lightweight Kubernetes distros (like K3s). Most of the resource requirements will depend on what containers you actually want to run on the nodes.

You might build a cluster from a bunch of Raspberry Pis, some old OptiPlex boxes or laptops, or whatever you have laying around and it's mostly going to be okay. On a practical level, anything with 1-2 CPU cores and 4 GB of RAM will be okay for running any actually useful software, like a web server/reverse proxy, some databases (PostgreSQL/MySQL/MariaDB), as well as either something for a back end or some pre-packaged software, like Nextcloud.

So, even 5$/month VPSes are more than suitable, even from some of the more cheap hosts like Hetzner or Contabo (though the latter has a bad rep for limited/no support).

That said, you might also want to look at something like Portainer for a nice web based UI, for administering the cluster more easily, it really helps with discoverability and also gives you redeploy web hooks, to make CI easier: https://www.portainer.io/ (works for both Docker Swarm as well as Kubernetes, except the Kubernetes ingress control was a little bit clunky with Traefik instead of Nginx)

In this section, we will add Portainer to help us in managing our Docker containers. You can find more details about it here. To integrate Portainer into our EC2 project, we can follow these steps:

Git issues pointing to: https://docs.portainer.io/v/ce-2.9/start/install/agent/swarm/linux gives a ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS.

I am currently running Portainer, but webhooks (GitOps) appear to be broken ( [2.19.0] GitOps Updates not automatically polling from git · Issue #10309 · portainer/portainer · GitHub ) and so I cannot send webhook to redeploy a stack. So, looking for alternatives. Using this as a good excuse to learn more about docker and CI/CD etc.

A Synology NAS running Portainer (https://www.portainer.io/) running Paperless NGX (https://github.com/paperless-ngx/paperless-ngx)

This works better than I can possibly tell you.

I have an Epson WorkForce ES-580W that I bought when my mother passed away to bulk scan documents and it scans everything, double-sided if required, multi-page PDFs if required, at very high speed and uploads everything to OneDrive, at which point I drag and drop everything into Paperless.

I could, thinking about it, have the scanner email stuff to Paperless. Might investigate that today.

Paperless will OCR it and make it all searchable. This setup is amazing, I love living in the future.

> I've come to the conclusion (after trying kops, kubespray, kubeadm, kubeone, GKE, EKS) that if you're looking for < 100 node cluster, docker swarm should suffice. Easier to setup, maintain and upgrade.

Personally, I'd also consider throwing Portainer in there, which gives you both a nice way to interact with the cluster, as well as things like webhooks: https://www.portainer.io/

With something like Apache, Nginx, Caddy or something else acting as your "ingress" (taking care of TLS, reverse proxy, headers, rate limits, sometimes mTLS etc.) it's a surprisingly simple setup, at least for simple architectures.

casaos it just makes things like backups, offsite syncing and many other nas related things so much easier to manage. And gives you a proper nas like experience similar to that in which you'd fine on companies like tnas or synology. I actually also use it as a replacement for portainer when i don't need the more advanced features it offers

> I moved to docker swarm and love it. It's so much easier, straight forward, automatic ingress network and failover were all working out of the box. I'll stay with swarm for now.

I've had decent luck in the past with the K3s distribution, which is a bit cut down Kubernetes: https://k3s.io/

It also integrates nicely with Portainer (aside from occasional Traefik ingress weirdness sometimes), which I already use for Swarm and would suggest to anyone that wants a nice web based UI: https://www.portainer.io/

Others might also mention K0s, MicroK8s or others - there's lots of options there. But even so, I still run Docker Swarm for most of my private stuff as well and it's a breeze.

For my needs, it has just the right amount of abstractions: stacks with services that use networks and can have some storage in the form of volumes or bind mounts. Configuration in the form of environment variables and/or mounted files (or secrets), some deployment constraints and dependencies sometimes, some health checks and restart policies, as well as resource limits.

If I need a mail server, then I just have a container that binds to the ports (even low port numbers) that I need and configure it. If I need a web server, then I can just run Apache/Nginx/Caddy and use more or less 1:1 configuration files that I'd use when setting up either outside of containers, but with the added benefit of being able to refer to other apps by their service names (or aliases, if they have underscores in the names, which sometimes isn't liked).

At a certain scale, it's dead simple to use - no need for PVs and PVCs, no need for Ingress and Service abstractions, or lots and lots of templating that Helm charts would have (although those are nice in other ways).