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Fun with Discourse on Docker

Discourse is a popular forum tool available as a self-hosted open-source tool. It can be installed bare-metal on Linux, but the Docker installation is one that I found most interesting. Unlike most Docker-implemented tools, Discourse has a script that runs outside of the docker containers (on your base machine) to set up the tool. This monolithic script (./discourse-setup) seems to do many of the things that docker-compose does, but obviously worse. I’m no fan of doing things this way; especially when the base alternative is nowhere on their site. My challenge this time was to build a basic docker-compose.yml that would get Discourse running in a test environment. Here’s what I did.

how-to

Bridge networking in docker: Assigning static IPs on creation

Docker has been an amazing tool for deploying applications fast, but as I have come to need containers that interacted with each other, the networking aspects have brought some major challenges. I wasn’t a fan of docker’s documentation either. It doesn’t explain the nuances of this process. Namely, I wanted to know how to bring up a container and right from the start assign an IP address. Let me show you how that’s done.

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Bemoaning The Abrupt End Of TrueCrypt

If you’ve been following news about security and encryption tools, no doubt you’ve heard of the shutdown of popular open source encryption tool TrueCrypt. Given that using TrueCrypt was considered one of a handful of ways for individuals to protect data in the wake of recent NSA spying revelations, this unexpected news has rocked the Internet.