Pod Hunt Helps You Find Great Podcast Episodes to Listen To

In this episode of Running in Production, Mubashar Iqbal talks about building a site to find podcast episodes with Laravel and PHP. It’s hosted on DigitalOcean using Forge and has been up and running since mid 2019.

Mubs talks about using a bit of Vue as needed, not upgrading to the latest Laravel immediately, interesting problems around parsing RSS feeds, how Forge lets him easily host his site, understanding the nuances of your app’s domain and more.

Topics Include

• 4:50 – Motivation for using Laravel and PHP over a bunch of other choices
• 8:20 – It’s using Laravel 6 with VueJS on the front-end for some parts
• 11:30 – The app will get updated to the TALL stack but not quite yet
• 13:04 – It’s a monolithic app in 1 git repo
• 16:07 – It’s mostly using Blade templates with Vue thrown in where needed
• 19:12 – MySQL is powering the database which is managed by RDS
• 21:09 – Reading in RSS feeds in background jobs and processing Open Graph images
• 26:07 – You need to get approved by Mubs before you can submit episodes
• 28:35 – Redis is powering the background jobs
• 33:11 – nginx / Let’s Encrypt and it’s hosted on DigitalOcean using Forge
• 39:06 – The deployment process from development to production
• 45:49 – There’s about 3k lines of PHP code and a few hundred lines of JS
• 47:16 – Secrets are managed through an env file that you put on your server
• 48:41 – Database backups happen every day and everything else is backed up too
• 51:38 – Sentry is in charge of exception handling and Uptime Robot for site monitoring
• 55:26 – Best tips? Understand the nuances of the app you’re building
• 56:30 – Web tech is moving fast, will HTML over the wire be main stream soon?
• 59:06 – Mubs has his own site at https://mubs.me and he’s on Twitter too

Links

📄 References

• https://transistor.fm/
• https://twitter.com/taylorotwell (creator of Laravel)
• https://twitter.com/calebporzio/ (creator of Livewire)
• https://twitter.com/jeffrey_way (creator of Mix / Laracasts)
• https://forge.laravel.com/
• https://podcastindex.org/

⚙️ Tech Stack

• laravel →
• php →
• vue →
• digitalocean →
• lets-encrypt →
• mysql →
• nginx →
• rds →
• redis →
• sentry →
• slack →
• uptime-robot →
• webpack →

🛠 Libraries Used

• https://github.com/spatie/browsershot

Support the Show

This episode does not have a sponsor and this podcast is a labor of love. If you want to support the show, the best way to do it is to purchase one of my courses or suggest one to a friend.

• Dive into Docker is a video course that takes you from not knowing what Docker is to being able to confidently use Docker and Docker Compose for your own apps. Long gone are the days of "but it works on my machine!". A bunch of follow along labs are included.

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