While building the development environments for a code base that would eventually be deployed to an auto-scaling AWS environment, a client request pivoted the database tier architecture away from MySQL to PostgreSQL. This pivot was timely given Amazon’s most recent RDS offering, announced as recently as re:Invent. Awesome! Now to integrate PostgreSQL with the existing Vagrant/Chef development environment deployments; not as awesome! What follows is a summary of and solution to several common pitfalls experienced by those deploying PostgreSQL with Chef (omnibus installer). Note: this post assumes some familiarity with Chef. A quick overview of how our deployment gets PostgreSQL … Read More
Secure and Easy WordPress Core/Plugin Updates with SSH2
The Problem: multiple individuals working on the same WordPress installation require an easy method for updating the plugins they’re responsible for; simultaneously, the sysadmin doesn’t feel cozy allowing the web server group to have write access to indiscriminate locations throughout the filesystem, something required by WP’s default ‘direct’ update method. The Solution: updates via SSH2 using a dedicated WP update user with restricted SSH access. There are several guides out there that will walk you through the process of setting up SSH2 update access for WordPress, but don’t quite satisfy various security and convenience restraints you may be looking for; … Read More