Automation

At Caktus, we maintain some open source packages, which are usually pieces of code that we’ve found useful when building an application, and we figure they might be useful to others. From time to time, those open source projects need a little maintenance: Maybe a bug fix has been provided from a community member, or we need to update to support a new version of Python or Django. I always hesitate to do this because I know there are multiple steps involved to ensure that any updates are properly tested, documented, versioned, and released. One of my silly blockers is that I always seem to forget how to upload a release to PyPI, which is the Python Package Index, a repository of software for Python. I call it silly because it shouldn’t really be a blocker, seeing how simple it actually is, but I still forget it each time and have to walk through the documentation step by step to make sure I do it properly. I recently found a tool that helps with this process.

Dokku is a great little tool. It lets you set up your own virtual machine (VM) to facilitate quick and easy Heroku-like deployments through a git push command. Builds are fast, and updating environment variables is easy. The problem is that Dokku includes all of your services on a single instance. When you run your database on the Dokku instance, you risk losing it (and any data that's not yet backed up) should your VM suddenly fail.