Altoplace

I have been experimenting with website development and Hugo for sometime. It would be nice to see which posts are being viewed. Since this is a hobby site for me (non-commercial), I don’t want to pay for a commercial, third party service to track my website usage. I wanted to find a simple, self-hosted solution that provides basic analytic data. Also, I am using a managed VPS that does not allow root access. They do support Docker, working in a rootless mode. I needed to find a Docker solution that would work in my environment.

After I moved from WordPress to Hugo , I was missing a commenting system. Actually, I never did receive that many comments when using WordPress, but I still want to give folks the ability to leave comments. I was looking for a simple, self-hosted solution that would work with my VPS. My VPS provider does not permit root access, so that was an additional restriction. My VPS does support using a “rootless” version of Docker, and I learned that Remark42 would work with it.

Welcome to Altoplace. This is my place for sharing my technology and life interests as I learn how to create websites. This is a hobby for me, but I do hope that you find useful information. I like saving “notes” about what I have learned. Then I can refer back to them as needed.

My site is powered by Hugo , the Zen theme , and Pair Networks .

As I inferred above, I am learning how to develop websites. Thus, the look and feel of this website will change over time, but I am trying to maintain (and grow) the content. For now, this is just a “retirement” hobby for me.

This post is not exciting. I am still creating my Hugo infrastructure. I am adding a Life category to write about non-technical topics.

I have fully converted my WordPress website to Hugo. I have added some basic styling, which I will tweak over time. But I believe that I have a fully functional blog. Building a website with WordPress seemed to be easier than using Hugo. One plus was the built in commenting system. However, the vast majority of comments were spam or boarding on being spam.

Wishing you a very happy and blessed 2023 New Year!

I wanted to take a moment to welcome you to the new, updated 2023 Altoplace. I have been doing a lot of behind the scenes work on Altoplace, fully converting it to use Hugo for building websites. I am using the Zen theme, which provides a foundation for my website. It uses a very solid HTML5 compliant code base that provides a lot of website functionality. Over time, I hope to spruce up the website design and style. But for now, I believe that it is a very functional blogging site.

Recent versions of macOS now use zsh as the default command line shell. I typically use the bash shell on Linux servers, so I prefer using it on my Mac. However, zsh is a very good shell to use, especially for interactive use.

This post is going to describe how to switch from the zsh shell to the bash shell.

Before Starting

You should be familiar with using the macOS Terminal command line.

I have been creating a Website Development Environment on my Mac, which is currently running macOS Sonoma. I have added a MAMP (LAMP when running on Linux) stack to support various website development tools, such as WordPress. A MAMP stack is based on the macOS operating system, the Apache 2 web server, the MySQL database management system, and the PHP scripting language. You can easily install a MAMP stack by installing a MAMP App as described by the WordPress Codex, Installing WordPress Locally on Your Mac with MAMP . However, I chose to manually install my MAMP stack because I wanted to learn more about the technology.

This post describes how to install and configure Apache and PHP-FPM to create a macOS local web development environment. I also describe how to use Dnsmasq, which adds a local DNS caching server to support using virtual hosts.

I am using Homebrew to install most of the software. Please go to their site for installation instructions.

This post is just about Apache, PHP, and Dnsmasq; I wrote about MySQL in a separate post. In this post, I also describe some tools that I wrote to manage Apache, PHP, and dnsmasq processes.

I am going to show you show you how I use SSH to log into a Linux server from macOS. I am going to use my Pair Networks shared host as an example. I like having shell access to my web host, which is one of the great features that Pair offers. In addition to SSH, you can also use scp to transfer files. Once you have set up SSH, scp should work automatically if you so desire to use it. By setup, I mean being able to log in to the server without having to enter a password every time.

This post describes how I configured Postfix on my Mac to relay outbound email via my Pair Networks SMTP service.

Why? I am creating a local website development environment where PHP applications may generate email messages for contact forms or notifications. For example, after installing WordPress, it generates an email message announcing a successful install. However, I can use the built-in mail command to run a simple test to verify that my send-only mail service is working.