Category: software

setting up Kanboard on Ubuntu with Caddy V2

January 8, 2021 / abhijit

Kanboard is wonderfully simple project and task management application.

The board view gives a nice Trello like interface, where cards can be dragged & dropped across columns.

A really nice and clean user and role management system.

It has a bunch of plugins, like OAuth2, so that third party authentication systems can be used.

And again, like other software that I like, it uses SQLite out of the box which makes moving the entire application around trivial.

Additionally, I’ve started using Caddy V2 which provides LetsEncrypt SSL certificates out of the box and renews them automatically.

pipe localhost to the internet using inlets over Nginx

February 21, 2020 / abhijit

Many times during developing some application it becomes important to show the progress to someone over the internet.

Most of the time we end up using some screen sharing software. That, however, can only show my screen to the other person. They cannot really interact with the application.

We can use some software for remote desktop sharing but then I cannot work while the other person is using my screen.

One very nice solution is ngrok, which essentially creates a tunnel from the local system to ngrok’s servers and gives a nice URL.

However, I was a bit concerned since all my traffic was getting redirected via ngrok’s servers.

I was looking around for something which would do the same thing but via my servers and finally came across inlets. This is an open source project, written in Go, which can be easily self hosted.

setting up Wallabag with SQLite on Ubuntu

November 15, 2018 / abhijit

After I got Shaarli setup, I realized that a lot of bookmarks I had imported had broken links and I had no idea what those links were and what they contained.

This caused me a bit of grief, until I came across this software called Wallabag.

Wallabag promised to save pages to my server after cleaning up scripts and unnecessary junk from the html pages.

And the best part was I could choose from Shaarli which pages to save for posterity in Wallabag!

setting up Shaarli on Ubuntu

November 6, 2018 / abhijit

Browser bookmarks has been an essential part of browsing for me. But once multiple browsers started appearing, I found that I couldn’t share my bookmarks across browsers.

And then delicio.us appeared. And they even had a free tier! That was such a lifesaver. But like all good things it came to an end and I had to choose something different. I exported all my bookmarks to Diigo and had been using it for ages.

But from the time I got more comfortable with the server side of things, I wanted get off Diigo as well. I didn’t want to face the same problem again in the future.

I came across Shaarli some years ago and always wanted to install it on my own server. Shaarli seemed to always get recommended as an easy-to-install software.

setting up Syncthing on Ubuntu – Part 2

October 18, 2018 / abhijit

Syncthing by default runs on localhost on port 8384

I wasn’t too keen to run syncthing publicly directly, so I created an nginx reverse proxy for it.

The other reason being I wanted to put a basic authentication to access the syncthing main page so nginx seemed perfect for this job.

setting up Syncthing on Ubuntu – Part 1

October 10, 2018 / abhijit

Syncthing is an application to sync files across devices. Supports Windows and Linux. Also has an Android App. Since my server is Linux and I work across Windows desktops, this seemed ideal to use.

Setting up syncthing wasn’t too difficult. Lots of tutorials abound. The basic commands involve installing using apt-get.

setting up Fossil on Ubuntu – Part 3

September 30, 2018 / abhijit

Once fossil is set up, I wanted it to start automatically on system reboot, so that I needn’t worry about it in the future.

After trying many different ways of doing this and failing, I ended up with a configuration which included a shell script and supervisor to start it.

setting up Fossil on Ubuntu – Part 2

September 17, 2018 / abhijit

Setting up Nginx with fossil is also not too much of a problem.

Essentially, nginx has to be redirected to the /repos path to be able to work with fossil server command correctly.

setting up Fossil on Ubuntu – Part 1

September 16, 2018 / abhijit

I’ve always been a fan of Fossil which has been my go-to version management system since ages.

I wanted to set up fossil for all the code that I write. Fossil being a single binary file which I can put anywhere (and add that to the path) has always been a breeze to use.

Install MySQL on Ubuntu

April 15, 2018 / abhijit

Many applications require MySQL as a database.

Installing it requires just a few steps.

First update the system using

sudo apt-get update