Part of the reason that I can do this is because my site is mostly static. I don’t allow comments or other dynamic plugins. The site is only used to publish my blog posts and that’s about it. I also setup WordPress to use the permalink format of /%year%/%monthnum%/%post_id%/ First Step, Mirror the Site to a Private Repo Just as the heading states, I needed to first get all of my content available outside of WordPress. Luckily, I realized that I had a few previous blog posts: ...

I’ve talked about it in previous posts about my thus far overall enjoyment running in DigitalOcean. While I had tinkered with a number of other cloud providers, I settled with them for many things. I do still run in some other providers like OVHCloud (maybe more on my project there for another day). Despite my love for DigitalOcean, I do have one complaint regarding their Kubernetes and their LoadBalancer. ...

There are a few drawbacks to the 1-Click install. I’m planning to tinker with something really cool down the road to fix one of those problems (I know the future again). Luckily, I’m going to address my first initial concern in this post. What is that concern you ask? Protecting my WordPress admin of course! Sure, there are a number of WordPress vulnerabilities roaming around and talks of zero days and the sort. I make life easier on any attacker if I just leave my WordPress admin open to anyone. In this post, we look at taking my custom nginx and deploying it in front of my WordPress site to enforce IP access control to the admin page. ...

Disclosure: I have included some affiliate / referral links in this post. There’s no cost to you for accessing these links but I do indeed receive some incentive for it if you buy through them. Building the Custom Nginx This part was pretty easy. I simply created a Dockerfile for the build. FROM ubuntu ENV DEBIAN_FRONTEND noninteractive MAINTAINER Scott Algatt RUN apt-get update \ && apt-get install -y libjansson-dev libcurl4-openssl-dev libapr1-dev libaprutil1-dev libssl-dev build-essential devscripts libtool m4 automake pkg-config libpcre3-dev zlib1g-dev\ && apt -y upgrade \ && apt -y autoremove \ && apt-get clean \ && rm -rf /var/lib/apt/lists/* /tmp/* /var/tmp/* \ && curl -o /tmp/nginx.tgz http://nginx.org/download/nginx-1.18.0.tar.gz WORKDIR /tmp RUN tar zxf nginx.tgz \ && cd nginx-1.18.0 \ && ./configure --with-http_realip_module\ && make \ && make install EXPOSE 80 CMD ["/usr/local/nginx/sbin/nginx"] As you can see from the Dockerfile, this is a really super simple build. It is also not very custom aside from my compile command where I’ve added –with-http_realip_module. This little addition is something that I will use later in a future post (I know everything will be in the future) but you can see what it does by visiting the nginx documentation. Anyhow, there you go. Aside from the configure command, I’m just setting up ubuntu to compile code and I download nginx and compile it. Then expose port 80 and run nginx. ...

My previous post, Making the Little Lights Twinkle, covered my coding of the NodeJS server that could take simply relay numbers and command (on|off) and put them to use. Now that I have a server/service up and running, it was time for me to be able to control the lights. I removed my Orchestra of Lights and put my new Raspberry Pi hardware device in its place. The only downside is that my setup has 8 outlets and the Orchestra of Lights only had 6. As I built out some of my light sequences, I noticed there’s a delay due to relays 7 and 8 being triggered but nothing being connected to them. Maybe that’s something I can do for next year. I’ll plan for 8 lighting areas instead of just 6. ...