Thanks Sanjay - you have reminded me that I have some similar notes somewhere (now located) that did the command line foo to get things running - looking at mine there was quite a big of dance to provide a way to gracefully stop and start the image so that you can easily and automatically redeploy your changes (read: use Github actions or Gitlab CI). So I’m curious on whether Docker is now sufficiently stable stable/easy/cheap to make it a viable alternative - and whether that is also cost efficient. Pablo wrote a recent blog post on running Pharo in Docker using the BA images - https://thepharo.dev/2021/02/24/running-pharo-9-in-docker/ <https://thepharo.dev/2021/02/24/running-pharo-9-in-docker/> - but while easy on the surface, if anything goes wrong - there seems to be very little debug output to know what has happened (I’ll post separately on this - as I’m looking at comparing options here). With Docker options, I notice that dockerize.io <http://dockerize.io/> (not used, just a quick search) - has a micro plan for $2/m - but is 500mb ram enough (there is a $5 one for 1gm ram). Or - I stick with DigitalOcean and roll my own like before - and perhaps that has got a bit simpler. I’m still curious what the wider community is doing. Tim

On 2 Apr 2021, at 05:43, Sanjay Minni <sm@planage.com> wrote:

Hi Tim

Here are my notes on installing Pharo in a DigitalOcean Ubuntu droplet. I usually go thru a Windows Command prompt box having installed xfec4 in the ubuntu droplet, but the command line connect and graphical remote may be easier for a Linux users. my ssh public key is also in the DO droplet Now the first step for me is a installing Pharo launcher thru command line and then everything is thru graphical interface

Installing and checking Pharo-Launcher, Installing Pharo 8 64 bit from pharo.org <http://pharo.org/> (instructions as on Pharo.org) 1. In Windows 10 command prompt connect thru > ssh root@<Droplet-ip> 2. cd 3. curl -o pharo-launcher.zip -L https://files.pharo.org/pharo-launcher/linux64 <https://files.pharo.org/pharo-launcher/linux64> 4. unzip pharo-launcher.zip or thru the GUI-> extract here (pharo-launcher files will be extracted in ./pharo-launcher) Now while connected to the linux graphical interface thru windows remote terminal and in the GUI 5. Create a icon on desktop thru right-click “Create Launcher” for pharo-launcher 6. Create pharo images thru pharo-launcher

hope this is of use

Sanjay Minni

On Thu, 1 Apr 2021 at 16:31, Tim Mackinnon <tim@testit.works> wrote: Hi everyone - its been a few year since I last hosted a little Pharo web app - and the last time I did, Sven pointed me to DigitalOcean and creating a tiny instance and configuring an Ubuntu server and then copying a pharo image on to that. It recall it wasn’t too bad, albeit a bit fiddly…

Now several years later - I can’t recall the exact steps, and vaguely recall there was something about 32bit vs 64bit setup etc - but am wondering if things have advanced a bit and whether its much simpler these days? I’ve seen references to Docker images for Pharo, and am wondering if now that is a prime time way to easily get a small demo application up and running with minimal fuss.

Does anyone have advice - or something to point me to?

Ideally I want to hook something up in Gitlab CI do deploy to this thing automatically (this is where I got to a few years ago - but in picking things back up I am hoping this has all got much simpler).

Tim

esteban I would like to have a success story for the Pharo web site Could you come up with two paragraphs? And if you have a visual it would be perfect. Remember a success story is that you could do something not that your app become facebook. S.

On 2 Apr 2021, at 16:32, Esteban Maringolo <emaringolo@gmail.com> wrote:

I've been running a Pharo application since August last year, initially setup with everything inside a Docker swarm (database, reverse proxy and Pharo workers for the UI and REST API).

I wanted to give Docker a try because I thought it was going to be "better". After having some issues with the Swarm networking affecting PostgreSQL connections [1], I ended up having a hybrid that is not the best of both worlds (I wouldn't say it's the worst either).

So my summary is that unless you have several host machines, having a "swarm" is completely overkill and brings more friction than anything else. The plus of docker is that from Gitlab everytime I push a commit to master, a new docker image is created and I can update things smoothly on the server by pulling the image and upgrading the stack service.

"Whenever I have time" I plan to make the reverse proxy external to docker (I currently use traefik as a container), and just keep the database and Pharo workers as docker containers.

As for the stability, I only shut it down for upgrades, but in February I tried with a single VM+image serving everything (just to measure real use) and albeit it was a little slower, it handled everything perfectly [2] without a single hiccup.

Regards,

[1] https://twitter.com/emaringolo/status/1296635983358763010 [2] https://twitter.com/emaringolo/status/1360247046553362432

Esteban A. Maringolo

On Fri, Apr 2, 2021 at 6:33 AM Tim Mackinnon <tim@testit.works> wrote:

...

Thanks Sanjay - you have reminded me that I have some similar notes somewhere (now located) that did the command line foo to get things running - looking at mine there was quite a big of dance to provide a way to gracefully stop and start the image so that you can easily and automatically redeploy your changes (read: use Github actions or Gitlab CI).

So I’m curious on whether Docker is now sufficiently stable stable/easy/cheap to make it a viable alternative - and whether that is also cost efficient.

Pablo wrote a recent blog post on running Pharo in Docker using the BA images - https://thepharo.dev/2021/02/24/running-pharo-9-in-docker/ - but while easy on the surface, if anything goes wrong - there seems to be very little debug output to know what has happened (I’ll post separately on this - as I’m looking at comparing options here).

With Docker options, I notice that dockerize.io (not used, just a quick search) - has a micro plan for $2/m - but is 500mb ram enough (there is a $5 one for 1gm ram).

Or - I stick with DigitalOcean and roll my own like before - and perhaps that has got a bit simpler.

I’m still curious what the wider community is doing.

Tim

On 2 Apr 2021, at 05:43, Sanjay Minni <sm@planage.com> wrote:

Hi Tim

Here are my notes on installing Pharo in a DigitalOcean Ubuntu droplet. I usually go thru a Windows Command prompt box having installed xfec4 in the ubuntu droplet, but the command line connect and graphical remote may be easier for a Linux users. my ssh public key is also in the DO droplet Now the first step for me is a installing Pharo launcher thru command line and then everything is thru graphical interface

Installing and checking Pharo-Launcher, Installing Pharo 8 64 bit from pharo.org (instructions as on Pharo.org) 1. In Windows 10 command prompt connect thru > ssh root@<Droplet-ip> 2. cd 3. curl -o pharo-launcher.zip -L https://files.pharo.org/pharo-launcher/linux64 4. unzip pharo-launcher.zip or thru the GUI-> extract here (pharo-launcher files will be extracted in ./pharo-launcher) Now while connected to the linux graphical interface thru windows remote terminal and in the GUI 5. Create a icon on desktop thru right-click “Create Launcher” for pharo-launcher 6. Create pharo images thru pharo-launcher

hope this is of use

Sanjay Minni

On Thu, 1 Apr 2021 at 16:31, Tim Mackinnon <tim@testit.works> wrote:

...

Hi everyone - its been a few year since I last hosted a little Pharo web app - and the last time I did, Sven pointed me to DigitalOcean and creating a tiny instance and configuring an Ubuntu server and then copying a pharo image on to that. It recall it wasn’t too bad, albeit a bit fiddly…

Now several years later - I can’t recall the exact steps, and vaguely recall there was something about 32bit vs 64bit setup etc - but am wondering if things have advanced a bit and whether its much simpler these days? I’ve seen references to Docker images for Pharo, and am wondering if now that is a prime time way to easily get a small demo application up and running with minimal fuss.

Does anyone have advice - or something to point me to?

Ideally I want to hook something up in Gitlab CI do deploy to this thing automatically (this is where I got to a few years ago - but in picking things back up I am hoping this has all got much simpler).

Tim

-------------------------------------------- Stéphane Ducasse http://stephane.ducasse.free.fr / http://www.pharo.org 03 59 35 87 52 Assistant: Aurore Dalle FAX 03 59 57 78 50 TEL 03 59 35 86 16 S. Ducasse - Inria 40, avenue Halley, Parc Scientifique de la Haute Borne, Bât.A, Park Plaza Villeneuve d'Ascq 59650 France

Thought it might be useful for anyone who has read Pablo’s blog post - this is a comment that I have tried to add (hopefully it will come through there): Nice article which was very helpful in getting me quickly up to speed on deploying a Pharo app with Docker. It might be worth adding a small addendum - when build doing a "docker build" I had some issues, and adding an additional switch "--progress=plain" gives much more verbose output that can help better see whats going on. I also feel its quite important to call out that the "eval 'Metacello new..." command referenced in the DockerFile RUN - is only going to work on a public repository. This had me stumped when I tried the example on my repository - and its made particularly mysterious because the Docker output (even with --progress=plain) shows nothing - it just echo's the VM info text and then stops and hangs. I think this is something that should be addressed either by the BA Docker image (I've reported it as an issue there for now) or by Pharo (in my case it was P8). I am guessing that there is a credentials error/system prompter sitting waiting for user input. I think there should be a way to disable this behaviour somehow - but at the very least it should write something out to stderr so that you know something has happened? Luckily there is an easy fix (for anyone wanting to load their own private project) - rather than using the "eval" command, use the "st" command and specify a load.st script. In this script specify some IceCredentialStore details eg: IceCredentialStore current storeCredential: (IceTokenCredentials new username: 'email@mail.com'; token: 'xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx'; yourself) forHostname: 'gitlab.com'. Metacello new baseline: 'myapp'; repository: 'gitlab://me/repo''; onConflict: [ :ex | ex useLoaded ]; onUpgradeUseLoaded; onWarningLog; load. Hopefully this might help anyone else directed here. I also added some extra logging to my load.st - eg. | logger | logger := Stdio stderr. logger crlf; nextPutAll: 'Starting Load Script...'. Tim

On 6 Apr 2021, at 18:09, Tim Mackinnon <tim@testit.works> wrote:

Adding some thoughts to my own post - I have experimented with dockerize.io <http://dockerize.io/> and so far the $2 plan (which so far I haven't been charged for) has been quite adequate for hosting something simple (and I suspect the $5 plan would do the trick as well).

It does get a bit more pricey when you add a database and unlimited traffic (60GB MySQL Database: 4GB, 1000m + no traffic + 60GB persistance + 100 mb logs = $26/m) - but even then thats pretty good.

It was relatively easy to do (doesn't have native Github integration yet, but has a cli for easy deployment) , and given what Esteban mentioned of his experience - this seems worth pursuing for ease of deployment/maintenance.

I did find Pablo's instructions were a bit limited - in particular covering a private repo (and how Pharo and the BA docker image give no output on credential failure - I've raised an issue on BA github, but may be a pharo thing - not yet sure - but it is quite easy to overcome). It also doesn't cover safe credential storage and best practices etc. (so hopefully a future article from someone more experienced in this?)

I'm curious if others have experienced anything similar they can share? I am a bit nervous the dockerize.io <http://dockerize.io/> has little history (been around since 2019 allegedly) - but for my experimentation its fine. Others may need more, and I'm wondering where to help document this as deployment is a big stumbling block - that we actually can handle quite well with recent tooling.

In this vein - I wonder where SmalltalkCI sits? Do you need it for a plain Pharo app - you just need to grep the output of Metacello and your test runner - but perhaps it does this better (I can see the need for building multiple platforms etc).

Tim

On Fri, 2 Apr 2021, at 10:32 AM, Tim Mackinnon wrote:

...

Thanks Sanjay - you have reminded me that I have some similar notes somewhere (now located) that did the command line foo to get things running - looking at mine there was quite a big of dance to provide a way to gracefully stop and start the image so that you can easily and automatically redeploy your changes (read: use Github actions or Gitlab CI).

So I’m curious on whether Docker is now sufficiently stable stable/easy/cheap to make it a viable alternative - and whether that is also cost efficient.

Pablo wrote a recent blog post on running Pharo in Docker using the BA images - https://thepharo.dev/2021/02/24/running-pharo-9-in-docker/ <https://thepharo.dev/2021/02/24/running-pharo-9-in-docker/> - but while easy on the surface, if anything goes wrong - there seems to be very little debug output to know what has happened (I’ll post separately on this - as I’m looking at comparing options here).

With Docker options, I notice that dockerize.io <http://dockerize.io/> (not used, just a quick search) - has a micro plan for $2/m - but is 500mb ram enough (there is a $5 one for 1gm ram).

Or - I stick with DigitalOcean and roll my own like before - and perhaps that has got a bit simpler.

I’m still curious what the wider community is doing.

Tim

...

On 2 Apr 2021, at 05:43, Sanjay Minni <sm@planage.com <mailto:sm@planage.com>> wrote:

Hi Tim

Here are my notes on installing Pharo in a DigitalOcean Ubuntu droplet. I usually go thru a Windows Command prompt box having installed xfec4 in the ubuntu droplet, but the command line connect and graphical remote may be easier for a Linux users. my ssh public key is also in the DO droplet Now the first step for me is a installing Pharo launcher thru command line and then everything is thru graphical interface

Installing and checking Pharo-Launcher, Installing Pharo 8 64 bit from pharo.org <http://pharo.org/> (instructions as on Pharo.org <http://pharo.org/>) 1. In Windows 10 command prompt connect thru > ssh root@<Droplet-ip> 2. cd 3. curl -o pharo-launcher.zip -L https://files.pharo.org/pharo-launcher/linux64 <https://files.pharo.org/pharo-launcher/linux64> 4. unzip pharo-launcher.zip or thru the GUI-> extract here (pharo-launcher files will be extracted in ./pharo-launcher) Now while connected to the linux graphical interface thru windows remote terminal and in the GUI 5. Create a icon on desktop thru right-click “Create Launcher” for pharo-launcher 6. Create pharo images thru pharo-launcher

hope this is of use

Sanjay Minni

On Thu, 1 Apr 2021 at 16:31, Tim Mackinnon <tim@testit.works <mailto:tim@testit.works>> wrote: Hi everyone - its been a few year since I last hosted a little Pharo web app - and the last time I did, Sven pointed me to DigitalOcean and creating a tiny instance and configuring an Ubuntu server and then copying a pharo image on to that. It recall it wasn’t too bad, albeit a bit fiddly…

Now several years later - I can’t recall the exact steps, and vaguely recall there was something about 32bit vs 64bit setup etc - but am wondering if things have advanced a bit and whether its much simpler these days? I’ve seen references to Docker images for Pharo, and am wondering if now that is a prime time way to easily get a small demo application up and running with minimal fuss.

Does anyone have advice - or something to point me to?

Ideally I want to hook something up in Gitlab CI do deploy to this thing automatically (this is where I got to a few years ago - but in picking things back up I am hoping this has all got much simpler).

Tim

Head slap.... I completely forgot I could do that, thanks for reminding Pierce (its almost better as well, as you can build your image, save it, then run tests on it, and then if it passes all your stages you can included the saved version in your docker build... which sits better with me as it also means that log artifacts etc can be more easily examined for failures (and your not trying to console into a docker image to figure it out). As a nice side effect - if you are doing this in something like Gitlab - you have your project source already there and so you can avoid an extra checkout step, so its a little bit faster. Pierce - who/where are you rnning your Docker image? Do you use a particular service (or are you running your own?) Tim On Thu, 8 Apr 2021, at 4:29 AM, Pierce Ng wrote:

On Wed, Apr 07, 2021 at 02:21:14AM +0100, Tim Mackinnon wrote:

...

I also feel its quite important to call out that the "eval 'Metacello new..." command referenced in the DockerFile RUN - is only going to work

Hi,

I build my Pharo image outside of Docker. My Dockerfile then packages the built image plus whatever artefacts required into a Docker image. I am using my Alpine Linux-based VM.

GH: https://github.com/pharo-contributions/Docker-Alpine/ DH: https://hub.docker.com/r/pierceng/pharovm-alpine

Pierce

I have the same. A cloud instance at Hetzner, nginx as webserver using certbot for automatic SSL generation. I also use a static site generator which I wrote myself to produce my blog https://norbert.hartl.name <https://norbert.hartl.name/> . I use the skeleton CSS library which is tiny and understandable and does not need tons of markup. This is one of my playgrounds for pillar and microdown. I think pharo settles around this combination to produce documents which is very well suited to produce a website, too. Norbert

Am 09.04.2021 um 03:33 schrieb Pierce Ng <pierce@samadhiweb.com>:

On Thu, Apr 08, 2021 at 11:58:10AM +0100, Tim Mackinnon wrote:

...

Pierce - who/where are you rnning your Docker image? Do you use a particular service (or are you running your own?)

I am using a Linux VPS which I manage myself.

The Pharo application is my blog. It was a web app fronted by a HTTPS reverse proxy. At the start of this year I rewrote it into a static site generator. Instead of running all the time, Pharo is now invoked when triggered by a CI hook, which happens when I publish a new blog post or otherwise update my site.

I play with all kinds of software on my VPS and it was getting a bit RAM cramped, hence the rewrite. Wasn't willing to spend more money every month for more RAM. :-P

Pierce

Thanks for the details. I think that with the one from Norbert, you and me[1], there are at least 3 static site generators made with Pharo (and there was an old one, but I don't remember its name and I think is unmaintained). I wonder if there is some kind of Awesome Pharo alike list, to start adding them to a known place. There is the Pharo Documentation Wiki[2], but I kind of remember a longer more detailed list. Ummm... now I wonder if we could list a kind of decentralized list of "Powered by Pharo" projects taken from our personal, community or enterprise web sites. We may agree on using some kind of tags in the metadata to recover such distributed catalogue of projects. Certainly in my (incomplete) recent portfolio[3], Pharo has been a constant, in visible and invisible ways. [1] https://mutabit.com/repos.fossil/indieweb/ (in Spanish and under development/alpha) [2] https://github.com/pharo-open-documentation/pharo-wiki [3] https://mutabit.com/repos.fossil/offray-blog/uv/bliki/index.html# Cheers, Offray On 8/04/21 8:33 p. m., Pierce Ng wrote:

On Thu, Apr 08, 2021 at 11:58:10AM +0100, Tim Mackinnon wrote:

...

Pierce - who/where are you rnning your Docker image? Do you use a particular service (or are you running your own?) I am using a Linux VPS which I manage myself.

The Pharo application is my blog. It was a web app fronted by a HTTPS reverse proxy. At the start of this year I rewrote it into a static site generator. Instead of running all the time, Pharo is now invoked when triggered by a CI hook, which happens when I publish a new blog post or otherwise update my site.

I play with all kinds of software on my VPS and it was getting a bit RAM cramped, hence the rewrite. Wasn't willing to spend more money every month for more RAM. :-P

Pierce

That is cheap 3e/m is definitely worth considering… but I guess you do have to take care of your own patching etc right (which isn’t necessarily horrible, but does require a bit of extra effort to track things). I was interested in whether the next step up in the food chain using Docker images that are hosted for you, might lessen the burden a bit? E.g. if your CI injects a pharo image into the latest “safe” docker image from the community - then hopefully you are insulated from all of this. It does look like this is becoming a reality if that dockerize.io soln plays out (I got that working, its cheap - however they haven’t answered any of my email queries… so I do wonder how real it actually is). The fallback would definitely be something like Hetzner or Digital Ocean I guess. Tim

On 12 Apr 2021, at 08:47, Norbert Hartl <norbert@hartl.name> wrote:

...

Am 12.04.2021 um 04:02 schrieb Jeff Gray <jeff@rogerthedog.com>:

Considering easiest and cheapest, there's always self hosting, or are you discounting that idea? Most geeks have a bit of spare hardware laying around and broadband up-speeds aren't too bad. I'm guessing that if we are in the $5 a month ball park then we aren't needing a guaranteed up time.

My cloud instance is 3€/month. With an additional 20% amount the instance has a backup. And setting it up is way simpler then getting dynamic DNS updates and all of that configured. Times have changed a bit.

Norbert

Norbert, you nailed it ;-) Easy and cheap and lots of layers of magic infrastructure nailed and hammered onto each other don't go well with each other. I am still a fan of having some server - virtual or physical - that I can reinstall from scratch and as little moving parts as possible on top of that. I rather have a little collection of sheets on which I wrote down each single step of installing what's needed and a good backup of ini files and whatnot than a pile of "stuff" that makes things "easy". I know, that's so 90ies, but hey, we're using Smalltalk from the 70ies ;-) Joachim Am 13.04.21 um 18:09 schrieb Norbert Hartl:

I read the title which contains „easiest/cheapest“ and then you drop names „docker“, "CI which injects“ and „stages" … this invalidates at least „easiest“ and maybe „cheapest“ as well. I think I missed the intent of this mail. So can you give a few more details otherwise it is hard to meet the „easiest on this level of requirements“

Norbert

...

Am 12.04.2021 um 10:36 schrieb Tim Mackinnon <tim@testit.works>:

That is cheap 3e/m is definitely worth considering… but I guess you do have to take care of your own patching etc right (which isn’t necessarily horrible, but does require a bit of extra effort to track things). I was interested in whether the next step up in the food chain using Docker images that are hosted for you, might lessen the burden a bit? E.g. if your CI injects a pharo image into the latest “safe” docker image from the community - then hopefully you are insulated from all of this. It does look like this is becoming a reality if that dockerize.io soln plays out (I got that working, its cheap - however they haven’t answered any of my email queries… so I do wonder how real it actually is). The fallback would definitely be something like Hetzner or Digital Ocean I guess.

Tim

...

On 12 Apr 2021, at 08:47, Norbert Hartl <norbert@hartl.name> wrote:

...

Am 12.04.2021 um 04:02 schrieb Jeff Gray <jeff@rogerthedog.com>:

Considering easiest and cheapest, there's always self hosting, or are you discounting that idea? Most geeks have a bit of spare hardware laying around and broadband up-speeds aren't too bad. I'm guessing that if we are in the $5 a month ball park then we aren't needing a guaranteed up time.

My cloud instance is 3€/month. With an additional 20% amount the instance has a backup. And setting it up is way simpler then getting dynamic DNS updates and all of that configured. Times have changed a bit.

Norbert

-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Objektfabrik Joachim Tuchel mailto:jtuchel@objektfabrik.de Fliederweg 1 http://www.objektfabrik.de D-71640 Ludwigsburg http://joachimtuchel.wordpress.com Telefon: +49 7141 56 10 86 0 Fax: +49 7141 56 10 86 1

This raises a good point from Norbert - what does simple mean? I think we all agree on what is cheap - in my mind sub 10euros (ideally 5) - which seems totally doable from what people are saying (of course this goes up if you want big databases and load balanced stuff etc - although you might squeeze it in from the suggestions so far - but lets take this one as given - I’d like to run some simple apps for me or my family). So revisiting simple - I started out thinking Docker was overkill and Swarms and Kubernetes made me sick (I’m sure there is a point where you get to these, but then you probably have a bigger team and lots more skills to potentially consider it - although my observation to date was that these things seems to suck up needless time). HOWEVER - I acknowledge that times have moved on, and I was deeply impressed with Pablo’s article on quickly standing up Pharo in a Docker image based on a community container… what struck me about this was that I didn’t really need to know or care about underlying Linux - and apt-get update and friends… nor about sysctrl and restarting things… so for me simplicity is eliminating all the OS, patches and updates and potentially even scaling - and they get handled in a not-Kubernetes way (or at least the K is totally hidden from me). Equally - for persistence, just want a db as a service - with credentials injected into my image so that it can be safely updated/password rotated etc without me caring much. I can just connect to it (and ideally its backed up for me, if I tick a box and pay a bit more money). I think we may be close to this - particularly as Pierce pointed out that you can build your ST image outside of a container (like many do today - and Github/lab have reasonable tooling to let you metacello a clean image and keep logs to see what has happened, as well as cache the right bits for you so its nice and fast) and then you simply ADD it into Docker with a few lines of Dockerfile. So I am wondering if in 2021, whether Docker might actually have got us to a point of simplicity, and for simple workloads if something like dockerize.io <http://dockerize.io/> (or others - but it seems the closest to what I am imagining although I’ve not used it much so far) abstracts you far enough from the Linux/Networking/Secuirty drudgery that makes web development suck. (Don’t get me wrong - I know some of you are wizards at this stuff, and its second nature to jump into bash and do the right things - but I find that while I can get so far, inevitably you get reams of console slush where some package conflicts with another and then you are on stackoverflow or here trying to work out how your distro has cocked something up, or you missed some special switch to keep things sane). But I am curious about what others have experienced - as I know many of you have played with Swarm, Kubernetes etc, and equally maybe native, non Docker has a way of avoiding the OS updates and restart magic in a simpler way? I thought DigitalOcean might do this - but it still seemed that you need to go lower level than I have time for. Tim

On 13 Apr 2021, at 17:48, Christian Haider <christian.haider@smalltalked-visuals.com> wrote:

Yes, this is my camp 😊.

Every layer or tool adds many cool features (their raison d'être) which you don’t need for the "easy" setup. You typically need only a handful of the configuration parameters at most (imagine PostgreSQL, Apache, Jenkins etc.). Yet, all the myriad of super-duper feature settings add to confusion and are nice traps for interesting bugs.

The complexity of a system is probably exponential to the number of tools or layers... And each one of them wants to be updated... And each has its own documentation (which you have to read when you get unlucky) with its own conventions...

No thanks. I try to keep my stack as simple as possible. That’s also a good reason for Smalltalk, because it makes it much easier to keep all pieces together.

Happy hacking, Christian

...

-----Ursprüngliche Nachricht----- Von: jtuchel@objektfabrik.de <jtuchel@objektfabrik.de> Gesendet: Dienstag, 13. April 2021 18:15 An: pharo-users@lists.pharo.org Betreff: [Pharo-users] Re: Whats the easiest/cheapest way to run a Pharo web app in 2021?

Norbert,

you nailed it ;-) Easy and cheap and lots of layers of magic infrastructure nailed and hammered onto each other don't go well with each other. I am still a fan of having some server - virtual or physical - that I can reinstall from scratch and as little moving parts as possible on top of that. I rather have a little collection of sheets on which I wrote down each single step of installing what's needed and a good backup of ini files and whatnot than a pile of "stuff" that makes things "easy".

I know, that's so 90ies, but hey, we're using Smalltalk from the 70ies ;-)

Joachim

Am 13.04.21 um 18:09 schrieb Norbert Hartl:

...

I read the title which contains „easiest/cheapest“ and then you drop names „docker“, "CI which injects“ and „stages" … this invalidates at least „easiest“ and maybe „cheapest“ as well. I think I missed the intent of this mail. So can you give a few more details otherwise it is hard to meet the „easiest on this level of requirements“

Norbert

...

Am 12.04.2021 um 10:36 schrieb Tim Mackinnon <tim@testit.works>:

That is cheap 3e/m is definitely worth considering… but I guess you do have to take care of your own patching etc right (which isn’t necessarily horrible, but does require a bit of extra effort to track things). I was interested in whether the next step up in the food chain using Docker images that are hosted for you, might lessen the burden a bit? E.g. if your CI injects a pharo image into the latest “safe” docker image from the community - then hopefully you are insulated from all of this. It does look like this is becoming a reality if that dockerize.io soln plays out (I got that working, its cheap - however they haven’t answered any of my email queries… so I do wonder how real it actually is). The fallback would definitely be something like Hetzner or Digital Ocean I guess.

Tim

...

On 12 Apr 2021, at 08:47, Norbert Hartl <norbert@hartl.name> wrote:

...

Am 12.04.2021 um 04:02 schrieb Jeff Gray <jeff@rogerthedog.com>:

Considering easiest and cheapest, there's always self hosting, or are you discounting that idea? Most geeks have a bit of spare hardware laying around and broadband up-speeds aren't too bad. I'm guessing that if we are in the $5 a month ball park then we aren't needing a guaranteed up time.

My cloud instance is 3€/month. With an additional 20% amount the instance has a backup. And setting it up is way simpler then getting dynamic DNS updates and all of that configured. Times have changed a bit.

Norbert

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LOL - Yes, time marches forward, and definitely an old dog :-) That ( and some of the other services mentioned already) is pretty inexpensive. What storage do you get for your 3 euros? -- Sent from: http://forum.world.st/Pharo-Smalltalk-Users-f1310670.html

What do you use that's so cheap/affordable? El lun., 12 de abril de 2021 04:48, Norbert Hartl <norbert@hartl.name> escribió:

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Am 12.04.2021 um 04:02 schrieb Jeff Gray <jeff@rogerthedog.com>:

Considering easiest and cheapest, there's always self hosting, or are you discounting that idea? Most geeks have a bit of spare hardware laying around and broadband up-speeds aren't too bad. I'm guessing that if we are in the $5 a month ball park then we aren't needing a guaranteed up time.

My cloud instance is 3€/month. With an additional 20% amount the instance has a backup. And setting it up is way simpler then getting dynamic DNS updates and all of that configured. Times have changed a bit.

Norbert

These are some useful inputs - its definitely getting to a place where a little pocket money gives you a real environment to hobby deploy to (even professionally if you are careful i guess). Sven - presumably this Graviton setup is an EC2 instance - and so you patch your own OS and provide any additional pieces like SSL cert etc right? (which I know you are ace at doing - but I find that that I painfully learn how to do it one month, and then 6 months later have to relearn it all again). So I'm interested in how reasonable it is to live higher up the food chain - where it seems that a Docker image insulates you (in theory) from a lot of this. Is this true - and are options like dockerize.io (or others that perhaps I am missing) viable options for the time constrained? (really appreciate all the input in this thread everyone - its very instructive) Tim On Tue, 13 Apr 2021, at 7:43 AM, Sven Van Caekenberghe wrote:

Although my main instance is on Digital Ocean, I have a test/play instance on AWS.

This is really hip & cool: it is an AWS Graviton 2 instance (Amazon's own ARM64 CPU, much like Apple Silicon) [ https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/graviton/ ]. I run a small t4g.micro instance, 1GB RAM, 8GB Disk.

Last bill was just USD 2.89 which is crazy cheap for a full month 24/7.

Thanks to the fact that Pharo has a full JIT VM on ARM64, this is crazy fast as well.

I am sure that the reason this is so cheap is the fact that it is super efficient.

You can try this easily for yourself.

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On 13 Apr 2021, at 01:57, Esteban Maringolo <emaringolo@gmail.com> wrote:

What do you use that's so cheap/affordable?

El lun., 12 de abril de 2021 04:48, Norbert Hartl <norbert@hartl.name> escribió:

...

Am 12.04.2021 um 04:02 schrieb Jeff Gray <jeff@rogerthedog.com>:

Considering easiest and cheapest, there's always self hosting, or are you discounting that idea? Most geeks have a bit of spare hardware laying around and broadband up-speeds aren't too bad. I'm guessing that if we are in the $5 a month ball park then we aren't needing a guaranteed up time.

My cloud instance is 3€/month. With an additional 20% amount the instance has a backup. And setting it up is way simpler then getting dynamic DNS updates and all of that configured. Times have changed a bit.

Norbert