Pim Widdershoven

For DevOps engineers like me, command-line tools help me to automate stuff. Rancher provides two CLI tools: rancher and rancher-compose. I use these two tools to automate deployments, upgrades, and cleaning up if environments aren't in use anymore. Basically, it is possible to completely automate your continuous integration (CI) and continuous deployment (CD) pipeline (but that is something for another blog post!).

Number one challenge when you are using Docker in production environments is storage. On you local development machine it is possible to mount a local directory path into your docker container, but in production environments, this isn't an option because you don't know if the path exists and if the docker container is always running on the same node. A solution is NFS, and when using Rancher, Rancher-NFS.

Do you want to use Docker containers in production on a CentOS 7 machine, but you think it is hard? Then have a look at Rancher! Rancher is a container management platform to deploy docker containers in a production environment very easily.

As a developer, I used GitHub a lot to store my (private) projects. This works great, but I do miss the CI integration as done by GitLab. I could use public services like Travis, but they do charge for private projects.

Because we're using GitLab and GitLab CI at work I wondered how much work it would be to setup my private GitLab server on my Rancher environment. In this blog post, I will share the results with you.

Password strength is a more and more important subject for (web) applications. I guess we have all read at least one time about user accounts got hijacked because the user used a password like "1234567890" and "qwerty". As developer, we can prevent this pretty easy by adding validation on the user password.

Testing your Symfony application with Behat and Selenium2 is a good approach to check if your application is performing as expected. When using this combination in your continuous integration pipeline you likely also want to know, not only if the application is working correctly from a user perspective, but also if background processes are correctly executed. How about testing that an email is sent to the user if the user requests a password reset? This is possible by using the Symfony Profiler!