Introduction I migrated my handful of small personal projects from a Linode VPS to Fly.io. This post will explain why I migrated and how I did it. Why migrate Running a NixOS VPS was a lot of fun and I learned a bunch about deploying and managing services on NixOS. However, as the number of projects I was trying to run grew in number I found myself dealing more and more with distracting sysadmin issues. ...
Project Review - Biodata
Introduction Biodata allows you to track a few personal health metrics like weight, waist, and blood pressure. I’ve used other apps to do this in the past, but wanted to build my own for two reasons. This felt like a tractable way to build a small “from scratch” application I’m less and less comfortable sharing data of any kind with any third party. Thank you AI… Here’s Biodata in action: ...
Configure Caddy on NixOS to serve a static site
Introduction Caddy is a HTTP web server, much like nginx or Traefik. One of Caddy’s unique features is that it attempts to automatically secure Let’s Encrypt SSL certificates for the domains it is serving. This saves me the hassle of securing and configuring those certificates myself (and setting up a process to automatically renew them). This post will show how to run and configure Caddy on a NixOS machine to serve a static site ...
NixOS on Linode
Introduction Linode does not officially support NixOS out of the box, but they do have a relatively comprehensive guide for installing it from scratch. I found the instructions pretty easy to follow, but there were a few nuances that tripped me up here and there. What follows is a re-hash of that guide with specific emphasis on parts that I struggled with. As with anything else, your mileage will vary. Configuring the disk images This was the core stumbling block for me. The instructions tell you to create three disk images - one for the installer, one for the OS, and one for swap. ...