A Video Course Platform Built for a Course Called Modern DevTools

In this episode of Running in Production, Umar Hansa talks about building a video course platform with Express and Node. It’s hosted on a single $10 / month DigitalOcean server. It took about 3 months of part time development and has been up and running since late 2017.

Umar talks about keeping it simple, building a server rendered monolith, using SQLite and not being afraid to build something from scratch. He covered a lot of ground in this episode.

Topics Include

• 4:03 – Motivation for using Node and Express
• 8:21 – A break down of what features the platform currently has
• 10:26 – Currency exchange rates, PayPal and Stripe integration options
• 17:46 – It’s a monolithic app with 4,000 lines of code that evolved slowly over time
• 21:53 – It’s using server rendered templates with progressive JS enhancements
• 29:29 – TypeScript is being used here and there and Gulp is building assets
• 32:49 – How asset cache busting works with Gulp and the template language
• 34:43 – SQLite is being used with the Knex library as a query builder
• 38:50 – A background worker isn’t being used but adding one is a work in progress
• 43:18 – Sending emails out with Postmark and dealing with 3rd party APIs being down
• 46:53 – It’s hosted on a single $10 / month DigitalOcean server running Ubuntu 18.04 LTS
• 52:13 – Managing the Node process using PM2 in production with minimal down time
• 58:37 – Setting the server up by hand by following tutorials and then using ServerPilot
• 1:04:34 – Using GitHub Actions in the future and secret management
• 1:09:03 – Depending on DigitalOcean’s automated backups and handling logs
• 1:14:37 – Best tips? Don’t be afraid to build something from scratch
• 1:16:03 – You can find Umar on Twitter at @umaar and he goes by the same name on multiple sites, also check out his new course at https://learnbrowsertesting.com

Links

📄 References

• https://github.com/nickjj/flask-static-digest
• https://martinfowler.com/bliki/BlueGreenDeployment.html

⚙️ Tech Stack

• express →
• node →
• cloudflare →
• digitalocean →
• gulp →
• nginx →
• postmark →
• server-pilot →
• sqlite →
• ubuntu →
• updownio →
• vimeo →

🛠 Libraries Used

• https://www.npmjs.com/package/open-exchange-rates
• https://github.com/totaljs/node-paypal-express-checkout
• https://github.com/ericf/express-handlebars
• https://github.com/mozilla/nunjucks
• https://github.com/knex/knex
• https://github.com/Unitech/pm2
• https://github.com/motdotla/dotenv

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.

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