I decided to create a separate GitHub project for the Ansible playbook I'm currently using to fully provision a production server for my open-source app, GlucoseTracker, so it can be reused by people who are using the same stack.

You can download the playbook here: https://github.com/jcalazan/ansible-django-stack

The playbook can fully provision an Ubuntu 12.04 LTS server (will test 14.04 soon) from the base image with the following applications, which are quite popular in the …

I had to rebuild my Rackspace VPS last night where my Django app runs as I wanted to downgrade it because it was underutilized. Since I was already at the lowest tier for that category of servers, there's no option to resize it down, I would need to spin up a new server from a different server category.

Thanks to Ansible, though, provisioning a new server with all the applications and configurations I needed …

I've been working on fully automating server provisioning and deployment of my Django app, GlucoseTracker, the last couple of weeks with Ansible. Since I made this project open-source, I needed to make sure that passwords, secret keys, and other sensitive information are encrypted when I push my code to my repository.

Of course, I have the option to not commit them to the repo, but I want to be able to build …

I just finished fully automating my entire server stack for my Django app with Ansible and Vagrant (using VirtualBox). One of the reasons I did this is to make my development environment as close to production as possible to hopefully eliminate any surprises when deploying to production. It also allows me to setup a development environment very quickly as I won’t have to deal with manual installation and configuration of different packages. In a team …

Here’s a quick and easy way to figure out what kind of web server a website is using with good, old telnet. I like this method as most operating systems (both old and new versions) have a telnet client already installed.

Steps:

1. Open a command/terminal window.

2. Telnet to the server/website on port 80, e.g.

telnet www.glucosetracker.net 80

3. Type the following once you’re connected:

HEAD / HTTP/1.0

4. Hit the Enter key …