DRAFT

VPS FOR MAKERS

VPS for Makers is a book about setting up your own virtual server for the purposes of running a web application. It teaches you the basic theory of system administration and goes through many practical tasks that all result in a deployed Ruby on Rails application backed by PostgreSQL database on a Fedora operating system.

The book is intended for beginners and false beginners in system administration. I am designing it to be a good first exposure and deliberately focusing on fundamentals. It should help you understand if server maintenance is something you might enjoy or something you leave to others.

Things you will learn

• Creating your first server online.
• Connecting to the server remotely and securely with SSH.
• Installing packaged and non packaged software such as language runtimes, databases and utilities.
• Keeping your system and software up-to-date and patched.
• Managing users and defining their permissions.
• Running and monitoring processes including process managers.
• Managing services with systemd and even writing your own.
• Nginx web server basics. Serving static website.
• Using Nginx as a proxy and for serving static assets.
• Running application servers such as Puma behind Nginx using UNIX sockets.
• Running example Ruby on Rails application, managing environment variables.
• Managing user uploaded data on the filesystem.
• Configuring PostgreSQL database and dealing with backups.
• Creating SWAP partitions.
• Running with SELinux enabled and building your own SELinux module.
• Setting up a git-push deploy for smooth deployment.
• Moving your project to a custom domain name.
• Setting up SSL certificates to take advantage of HTTPS.

Exact chapters will be announced later.

What is this book not about?

• About teaching you how to program. I assume you already know some programming or will take on learning programming basics later. We will use simple Bash commands that I will explain in the book. There is no Ruby, Perl or Python for you to know.
• About well rounded knowledge in system administration. This is because I am ommiting some areas not revelant for the purpose of this book (e.g. I am not covering mounting NFS disks since you don't need to know about NFS to run your web application). System administration is much much bigger than this book! However it's a great start and even doing a commertial certification later would be much easier.

FAQ

What is even a VPS?

VPS stands for Virtual Private Server. You can think of it as Digital Ocean droplet or Amazon EC2 instance. It's your very own virtualized server with operating system and all (virtualized means they are many of them on one physical server).

VPS is most likely the cheapest option how to run your project. They are many $5/month options around the web.

Does VPS scale?

Maybe you were reading up a lot about cloud computing lately, serverless buzz and what's not, but you can scale your project even on one single VPS. For example Digital Ocean offers 192 GB RAM and 32 vCPUs on a single virtual server. You will have to have a very successful project first to even need to scale to more servers.

Why learning about VPS if there is Heroku?

Managed platforms such as Heroku or OpenShift are great and I used them myself. They will kickstart your projects and are fast to learn. Hovewer in the end I move things to my own VPS. Why? For me it's the cost and flexibility.

By learning about VPS you will learn how things work at the fundamental level.

It gives you understanding what you are actually paying for if you are using a managed platform. That way you know whether that's worth it for your project or not.