Given: There’s a CI system that automatically builds docker images from your VCS (e.g. git), we use self-hosted gitlab.Goal: Both initial and subsequent automated deployments to different environments (staging and production). Rejected ApproachesMost existing blog articles and howtos for this use case, specifically in the context of gitlab, tend to be relatively simple, relatively easy, […]

No.Not satisfied? Fine, fine. I’ll write a longer answer.Let’s talk about what we’re talking about. JWT stands for JSON Web Tokens, a reasonably well defined standard for authenticated tokens. Specifically they have a header with format information, a payload, and a signature or message authentication code. The core idea is that whoever has the corresponding […]

One of the lesser known features of modern SQL are so-called “Common Table Expressions” (CTE) or “WITH queries”. I’ll explain the mental model that helped me make sense of them, and how to use them to execute recursive queries. Afterwards I’ll show how to apply these techniques in Django.Syntactically a CTE consists of one or […]

We’ve recently begun dockerizing our applications in an effort to make development and deployment easier. One of the challenges was establishing a good baseline Dockerfile which can maximize the benefits of Dockers caching mechanism and at the same time provide minimal application images without any superfluous contents.The basic installation flow for any Django project (let’s […]