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How to create a Hugo website without a theme

By Seth Jensen
February 14, 2023

Since converting this website to the Hugo static site generator a couple of years ago, I’ve used Hugo for lots of other projects. It’s blazing fast, simple, and makes small website projects much easier.

One of the sites I’ve built with Hugo is a simple site to keep notes for my university classes. Hugo’s documentation tends to assume you’re using a theme, but for such a basic site using a theme would add unnecessary complexity I didn’t want to deal with. So, in this article I’ll show you how to create a site without a theme.

Creating a site

First, install Hugo.

If you want to use SCSS, as I do in the example below, make sure to install the “extended” version of Hugo.

Then, run the following command to create a Hugo site:

$ hugo new site notes

Get into the new notes directory, and let’s edit the config file:

baseURL = "http://example.org/"
languageCode = "en-us"
title = "Notes"
pluralizelisttitles = false

Other than the title, the only thing I changed here is disabling pluralizelisttitles. Hugo expects you to name your sections something singular (e.g., put your blog posts in a post directory), …

Find Text in Any Column of a PostgreSQL Table

By Josh Tolley
February 6, 2023

It’s not uncommon for me to want to find a particular text snippet in a PostgreSQL database. Easy enough, you might say. After all, that’s what databases are for: You feed them a bunch of information, ask them questions in the form of a query, and they give you the answer. So just write a query, right?

Well, maybe.

SQL stands for “Structured Query Language”, and the fact that it’s “structured” means not only that the database abides by some defined structure, but that your queries do, too, which implies that you know at the time you’re writing the query where in the structure you want to look. And that’s where the problem arises. What if I know “Kilroy” is somewhere in a table, but I don’t know what column to look in to find him? How do I write that query?

The first answer I came up with to that question depends on pg_dump: dump the contents of a table, search the results with grep, and there you have it.

$ pg_dump -t person mydb | grep -i kilroy
633132  F       NH      \N      Cristen212      J    Kilroy44        1983-09-28 00:00:00     \N      t       \N      \N      \N      \N      F       USA  \N       \N …

Data Migration Tips

By Josh Tolley
February 4, 2023

When you’re in the business of selling software to people, you tend to get a few chances to migrate data from their legacy software to your shiny new system. Most recently for me that has involved public health data exported from legacy disease surveillance systems into PostgreSQL databases for use by the open source EpiTrax system and its companion EMSA.

We have collected a few tips that may help you learn from our successes, as well as our mistakesparticularly educational experiences.

Customer Management

Your job is to satisfy your customers, and your customers want to know how the migration is progressing. Give them an answer, even if it’s just a generalization. This may be a burndown chart, a calculated percentage, a nifty graphic, or whatever, but something your project managers can show to their managers, to know more or less how far along things are.

Your job is also to know your system; that’s not the customer’s job. They shouldn’t have to get their data into a specific format for you to make use of it. Be as flexible as possible in the data format and structure you’ll accept. In theory, so long as your customer can provide the legacy …

Implementing Basic HTTP Authentication in Rails

By Kevin Campusano
January 26, 2023

Nowadays it’s rather unusual to deploy HTTP Basic Authentication in a production web application. However, the need came up recently from a client. In a nutshell, due to integration requirements with a third party system, we had to provide a web app which expected credentials supplied via Basic HTTP Auth and validated against an external web service.

Luckily for us, like a great many other things, this is very easy to implement with Ruby on Rails.

Setting up a new Rails project

If you want to work along with me, and you like Docker and VS Code, take a look at this blog post to learn about the easiest way to set up an environment for development with Ruby on Rails in a container.

If not, you can follow the official docs for installing Ruby.

Once you have your environment with Ruby ready, we can go ahead and create a new Rails project to demonstrate how to set up Basic HTTP Auth.

Creating the new project

First, install the rails gem:

$ gem install rails

Then, make sure you are located in the directory where you want to create the new project and do:

$ rails new . --minimal -O

--minimal is a new option to rails new added in version 6.1 that disables a lot of default features …

Bypassing a CDN to browse a website directly on your origin host

By Seth Jensen
January 20, 2023

Using a content distribution network (CDN) has many advantages over serving a website directly, and for any reasonably large website, you should use one. Those advantages include:

• Caching at each of the CDN’s PoPs (points of presence).
• Often thousands of PoPs around the world, so traffic will be quick for everyone regardless of how far away they are from your origin server.
• Blocking of some Bad Guys automatically at the edge, including DDoS (distributed denial of service attacks) mitigation help.
• Origin IP address insulation. Hiding the origin IP address is useful to protect against DDoSes, since CDNs are generally well-defended against DDoS and your origin server probably is not as much.

You should generally be cautious about revealing your websites’ origin IP address. We serve other sites from our origin directly, so we don’t worry too much about sharing it here.

Straight to the source

Sometimes, though, you need to bypass your CDN and test your website directly on its origin server. For example, if you need to test that your website would still work if the CDN goes down, or to sidestep CDN caching or content modification when troubleshooting a problem.

It …

Using Devise for Authentication in Rails Without Database Stored Accounts

By Kevin Campusano
January 19, 2023

We can pretty much say that thanks to the venerable Devise gem, the authentication problem has been solved in Ruby on Rails. There are some instances however, when the requirements veer a little further away from convention and some customization needs to happen.

Such was the case of a recent project where we had to implement authentication and session management on a small web application that would serve as an API gateway into other system components. The interesting part was that there was no database to store accounts, and credentials would have to be validated against an external web service.

Luckily for us, the Devise gem is customizable enough to be able to fulfill this requirement via custom authentication strategies. With custom authentication strategies, one can implement completely bespoke authentication logic while still enjoying a lot of the features that Devise offers out of the box.

In this article, we’re going to walk through doing just that. Let’s get started.

To learn more about this capability of Devise, and how it relates to the underlying Warden concepts, here are some interesting sources:

• Remote authentication with devise
• Devise authentication …

Developing Rails Apps in a Dev Container with VS Code

By Kevin Campusano
January 13, 2023

One of the great gifts from the advent of Docker and containers is the ability to get a good development environment up and running very quickly. Regardless of programming language or tech stack, there is probably an image in DockerHub or elsewhere that you can use to set up a container for development, either verbatim or as a basis for more complex setups.

Moreover, even if your development environment is complex, once you have containerized it, it’s easy to replicate for new team members.

VS Code, one of the most popular editors/IDEs today, with help from the Dev Containers extension, makes the task of setting up a container for software development easier than ever.

To demonstrate that, we’re going to walk through setting up such an environment for developing Ruby on Rails applications.

Setting up a Ruby Dev Container

As I alluded to before, all we need is Docker, VS Code, and the extension. Once you have those installed, we can easily create a new Docker container ready for Ruby on Rails development and have VS Code connect to it, resulting in a fully featured development environment.

Creating the configuration file

To get started, create a new directory and open …

Updating Ruby on Rails

By Couragyn Chretien
January 12, 2023

Updating your app to the latest versions of the framework it was built on, and dependencies it uses, is an important part of the development process. It may seem like a waste to invest time and money into it, but it can bring as much value as a new feature.

One good thing about using a framework like Ruby on Rails is that security features are baked in. This saves development time as the developer doesn’t have to re-create the wheel for logins, permissions, authentication, etc. There are many users of the framework who work together to can catch and patch vulnerabilities. Unfortunately, this means if your app hasn’t been updated its weaknesses become more obvious. A black hat attacker has easy access to a list of past Rails vulnerabilities.

Have you ever been to a website that hasn’t been updated for a while and found that everything moves slower than you’re used to? As technology improves and functions are optimized application processing time can be reduced. Most releases come with a performance update that can help your application keep up with the best of them.

The gems your application uses also come out with updates to add new features and …