Technical

Ask any developer the quickest and hackiest way of locking unauthorised users out of your website and they will probably mention HTTP Basic Auth. As an extremely simple method of authentication that is built-in to the HTTP protocol standard and supported by every web browser, it’s the universal, go-to method of setting up a username and password authentication prompt with minimal work. Simplicity and minimalism of course bring with them compromise, and most things you may associate with authentication systems cannot be achieved easily or at all with HTTP Basic Auth, so you would probably not consider it your primary authentication method for anything but the most basic of needs. But for our needs, it’s the perfect method of stopping casual snooping and accidental usage of a non-live system. ...

In my previous blog post, I gave a brief introduction to containerisation, and the differences between Docker and Docker Compose. Here I’m going to share the Docker Compose commands that I use on a daily basis and have found the most essential. In my opinion, if you only learn 5 Docker Compose commands, they should be: docker-compose up Run this command to launch your project. The up command builds or creates all the services in the docker-compose file and starts a container for each of them. ...

I joined Resolver in February 2020 and was put into the Accord team, working on a brand new project (they had literally typed the words ‘rails new’ the week before I joined). This meant I would be involved from the ground up, that I would see the app grow and develop from the very start, and that I wouldn’t need to get to grapple with years of legacy code. As we had decided to build the app with Docker, which I haven’t used before, it also meant I was about to get to grips with it very quickly! This whale of a task initially felt quite daunting, but thanks to the gloriously comprehensive Docker documentation, Linux Academy courses about Orchestration, Containers and Docker, Rob Isenberg’s invaluable Docker for Rails Developers book, and, of course, a lot of Googling, I’m now happy to share my understanding of containers and Docker in my next few blog posts. I hope they can help make the topic a little less confusing! ...

There was a time when asset storage was one of the problems facing web app developers - maybe you stored assets on the web server (easy if you only have one, more difficult if you need to sync them up between multiple servers), or maybe you had a shared disk mounted using NFS. In any case, the easier part was granting access to these assets to the right users. Given that assets are normally stored outside the web server’s root directory, it’s easy to write a script that checks user access then serves the asset. ...

A common issue for developers and operations staff when it comes to domain names is whether to choose the apex domain (e.g. example.com) or the www subdomain (e.g. www.example.com) as their primary domain, and then how to redirect one to the other. Choosing to use www over the apex At Resolver, we use AWS for the majority of our infrastructure, and we generally have staging and production environments for each product or service we build. We use subdomains as namespaces to separate the environments whilst providing similar URLs for each. ...