vps on AnyStack

Self-Hosting made easy with Cloudron

Sat, 17 Dec 2016 02:03:49 +0000

Because there is nothing better than self-hosting, you are may looking for a way to manage your apps easily and to be able to host yourself all your web apps ?

I have tried several solutions in the past, but there was always something wrong and I was looking for something easy to deploy and stable.

Cloudron is a platform to run and manage your apps, and if it was only available on AWS EC2 servers, it can be now deployed on any platform, including Scaleway, OVH, DigitalOcean or Linode.

There are a large choice of apps available on the Cloudron App Store which can be deployed with a single click.

Cloudron also provide the ability to backup your server with AWS S3 storage, and keep your server and your apps always up-to-date.

So ton install Cloudron you only need :

clean Ubuntu 16.04 LTS with 1GB+ RAM
SSH keys connection
domain with a wildcard record to your server ip

Because Cloudron will install each application on a new subdomain, so you have to purchase a domain and to use a wildcard if you don’t want to add each record manually.

I recommand you to buy a .xyz domain at NameCheap and then to use Cloudflare DNS.

To install Cloudron, the first subdomain needed will be my.yourdomain.com, it will be your homepage.

Then you have to run the following command :

wget https://git.cloudron.io/cloudron/box/raw/master/scripts/cloudron-setup
chmod +x cloudron-setup
./cloudron-setup --domain <domain> --provider <digitalocean|ec2|generic|scaleway>

You will have to replace :

<domain> with yourdomain.xyz
<provider> with the provider name or generic

When the process will be done, you will have to go to my.yourdomain.xyz to finish the setup and create your admin account. There is no maintenance needed with Cloudron but you can read the documentation .

Good bye WordPress - Welcome Ghost !

Wed, 26 Oct 2016 13:54:29 +0000

I’m using WordPress for few years now, but that’s always the same problem, WordPress require plugins to have some functionalities and plugins make WordPress running slower.

Even with an advanced caching system like redis, that’s always a lot of work to make wordpress running fast and safe.

So I have done some tests with Ghost using Docker, and it’s really the perfect blog solution for me, because it already include all the features needed to write an article. No need to look for a plugin to improve SEO or to install a caching system. You can write you articles in markdown, work with slack and use it as a team, and the theme system is really clean and lightweight.

But I can’t post this article without making a tutorial about Ghost.

1) Install NodeJs v4 LTS

wget https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_4.x
chmod +x setup_4.x
./setup_4.x
apt-get install nodejs -y

2) Install Ghost

mkdir /var/www/ghost
cd /var/www/ghost
curl -L https://ghost.org/zip/ghost-latest.zip -o ghost.zip
unzip ghost.zip
npm install --production

3) Starting Ghost

npm start --production

Then you can access to your blog using http://localhost:2368/ghost/signup All the configuration can be found in the file config.js.

But as you can see, we have to use the port 2368 to access to Ghost. To fix that, the easiest is to use Nginx as reverse proxy. Let’s use easyengine !

## install easyengine
wget -qO ee rt.cx/ee && bash ee

## create a proxy with your domain
ee site create anystack.xyz --proxy=127.0.0.1:2368

Then you will be able to use your domain to access to ghost. Don’t forget to change your blog url in config.js. And if you want to run Ghost forever, so use forever …

npm install forever -g
## start ghost
NODE_ENV=production forever start index.js

## stop ghost
forever stop index.js

Last tips ? How to use Ghost with Nginx as reverse proxy with Cloudflare SSL. Go into you Cloudflare account and in the Crypto tabs, create your origin certificate.

Then create a first file yourdomain-pvkey.pem with the private key generated by Cloudflare. And another file yourdomain-crt.pem with the origin certificate from cloudflare but also the Cloudflare root certificate you can find here

Then your nginx conf for you domain should look like

server {

 server_name anystack.xyz;
 listen 443 ssl http2;
 ssl on;
 ssl_certificate /etc/nginx/ssl/anystack-crt.pem;
 ssl_certificate_key /etc/nginx/ssl/anystack-key.pem;
 access_log /var/log/nginx/dev.anystack.xyz.access.log rt_cache;
 error_log /var/log/nginx/dev.anystack.xyz.error.log;

 location / {
 proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
 proxy_set_header Host $http_host;
 proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme;
 proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:2368/;
 }

}

And if you want to add a redirect from http to a https, create a file yourdomain.com-ssl.conf in /etc/nginx/conf.d with

	server {
	listen 80;
	server_name anystack.xyz;
	return 301 https://anystack.xyz$request_uri;
}

Optimize easily your WordPress images without any plugin

Sun, 23 Oct 2016 05:52:28 +0000

You want to improve your pagespeed score by optimizing your images in WordPress ? But you don’t want to pay a subscription for a plugin ? If you are using a VPS or a dedicated server, you don’t need any plugin to optimize all your images easily.

For that you can use this script :

# For debian/Ubuntu
wget -qO optimize.sh https://git.virtubox.net/virtubox/wp-optimize/raw/master/deb-wp-optimize.sh && bash optimize.sh

#For Centos/RedHat
cd /var/www
wget -qO optimize.sh https://git.virtubox.net/virtubox/wp-optimize/raw/master/centos-wp-optimize.sh && bash optimize.sh

If you want to do the process manually

# Debian/Ubuntu
apt-get update && apt-get install optipng jpegoptim -y

# Centos
yum update && yum install optipng jpegoptim -y

Then you just have to go in your web directory and to run the following commands :

cd /var/www
find . -name *.jp* | xargs jpegoptim --strip-all -m76
find . -iname '*.png' -print0 | xargs -0 optipng -o7 -preserve

Making WordPress faster by running wp-cron with Linux

Thu, 15 Sep 2016 05:54:00 +0000

WordPress use wp-cron to check updates for themes, plugins and some other process but it could have an impact on your website speed because WordPress execute it on every page-loading. So if you have a lot of traffic, it will (no benchmark proof at the moment) delay page loading for users.

So if you are using a linux server (VPS or dedicated), you can easily create a cron job to run it each 5 minutes or each 10 minutes. But remember WordPress need wp-cron to work properly, so don’t disable it totally !

To disable wp-cron, just add the following line in wp-config.php :

define('DISABLE_WP_CRON', true);

Then to add a cronjob you have to a :

## Run the crontab with your server or vhost user 
crontab -u yourserveruser -e

## method 1 : using curl to run the script
*/10 * * * * curl http://example.com/wp-cron.php > /dev/null 2>&1

## method 2 : using php to run it
*/10 * * * * cd /var/www/example.com/htdocs; php /var/www/example.com/htdocs/wp-cron.php > /dev/null 2>&1

The first method use PHP-CGI when the second use PHP-CLI, the only difference is CLI does not have time limit to run a script. Because this way, the wp-cron will not impact page loading speed, it’s highly recommended to use linux cron instead of default WordPress cron.

You can change */10 with */5 to run the cron each 5 minutes instead of each 10 minutes.

New VPS for the Blog - Setup Guide

Fri, 05 Aug 2016 18:59:00 +0000

I was using a VPS with Plesk Onyx to host the Blog, but even with Redis in a Docker container to make it faster, it wasn’t enough …

So I have setup a small VPS on my dedicated server with Ubuntu 16.04 LTS using VMware vSphere 6. I will make another post about virtualization but in this post, we will talk only about the VPS setup with easyengine, which is really my favorite tool for WordPress setup. You can also read my first post about easyengine : Here

First step, easyengine install :

 wget -qO ee rt.cx/ee && bash ee

Then WordPress setup :

 ee site create anystack.xyz --wpredis --php7 --letsencrypt

And it’s already good for the server setup with nginx, php7, mariadb, redis-cache and let’s encrypt for the SSL. Check your DNS are pointing to your server before launching let’s encrypt or it will fail to setup the SSL certificate.

But the work is not finished yet, because I have to upload my database and my files to get my content back. For that i will need to have access to the database, so let’s do that with phpmyadmin :

 ee stack install --phpmyadmin

phpmyadmin is now available at http://my-server-ip:22222

Butt protected by an ACL, and to change the user and the password, you just have to use :

 ee secure --auth

And to have your login details for phpmyadmin :

 ee site info anystack.xyz

So I have now uploaded my database, and I need my files. But it’s not needed to install ftp. The easiest way to do, is to add a password to www-data and to allow sftp access :

 passwd www-data

And you will just have to replace /usr/sbin/nologin by /bin/bash in the file /etc/passwd. As FTP/SFTP client, I use Cyberduck which is the fastest client I have found, and you can use it for almost all protocol, including S3 storage at AWS or Google Drive.

After uploading my files, just have to purge the redis cache, and that’s already over.

Linux & SSD : How to speed up your VPS

Tue, 28 Jun 2016 00:41:00 +0000

When you want to buy a VPS, most of them use SSD, because a SSD have a better capacity for reading/writing than a Hard Drive and it also have a response time up to 40x faster than HDD.

But there are some small configuration to edit to get the best performances with your SSD as linux systems are not totally optimized for them.

So we will see how to speed up your VPS and how to configure debian/ubuntu to use a SSD properly. For a new install of a server the rules are :

Use a recent linux system : Kernel 3.60+
Keep some free space on a disk (5-15%)
Use ext4
in /etc/fstab add the noatime setting

# / was on /dev/sda1 during installation
UUID=33XXX-XXXX / ext4 noatime,errors=remount-ro 0 1

Limit the swap usage :

If you use :

cat /proc/sys/vm/swappiness

The system should answer 60. So you just have to add the line below in /etc/sysctl.conf

vm.swappiness=1

Then reboot your system. And it's done your VPS should already be faster