A Video Course Platform Built for a Course Called Modern DevTools
with Nick Janetakis and Umar Hansa
Running in Production · Nick Janetakis
October 12, 20201h 17m
Show Notes
In this episode of Running in Production, Umar Hansa talks about building a video course platform with Express and Node. It’s hosted on a single $10 / month DigitalOcean server. It took about 3 months of part time development and has been up and running since late 2017.
Umar talks about keeping it simple, building a server rendered monolith, using SQLite and not being afraid to build something from scratch. He covered a lot of ground in this episode.
Topics Include
- 4:03 – Motivation for using Node and Express
- 8:21 – A break down of what features the platform currently has
- 10:26 – Currency exchange rates, PayPal and Stripe integration options
- 17:46 – It’s a monolithic app with 4,000 lines of code that evolved slowly over time
- 21:53 – It’s using server rendered templates with progressive JS enhancements
- 29:29 – TypeScript is being used here and there and Gulp is building assets
- 32:49 – How asset cache busting works with Gulp and the template language
- 34:43 – SQLite is being used with the Knex library as a query builder
- 38:50 – A background worker isn’t being used but adding one is a work in progress
- 43:18 – Sending emails out with Postmark and dealing with 3rd party APIs being down
- 46:53 – It’s hosted on a single $10 / month DigitalOcean server running Ubuntu 18.04 LTS
- 52:13 – Managing the Node process using PM2 in production with minimal down time
- 58:37 – Setting the server up by hand by following tutorials and then using ServerPilot
- 1:04:34 – Using GitHub Actions in the future and secret management
- 1:09:03 – Depending on DigitalOcean’s automated backups and handling logs
- 1:14:37 – Best tips? Don’t be afraid to build something from scratch
- 1:16:03 – You can find Umar on Twitter at @umaar and he goes by the same name on multiple sites, also check out his new course at https://learnbrowsertesting.com
Links
📄 References
- https://github.com/nickjj/flask-static-digest
- https://martinfowler.com/bliki/BlueGreenDeployment.html