Blogging Roller

A note about this site: I just upgraded rollerweblogger.org to run the recently released Roller 6.1.1, and Java 17. There was one snag. This site uses the Roller-JSPWiki plugin and old Lucene dependency in that plugin prevented Tomcat from loading Roller. It took me a couple of hours to figure out how to upgrade the plugin to use the latest version of JSPWiki. That fixed it.

I barely even update this blog, but I do update the software that powers it and I'm happy to still have the help of an awesome team of volunteers who pitch in when they want to and always when needed. Today we released Apache Roller 6.1.0, a release we had been talking about, but that was prompted by the Log4J vulnerability. See the project's blog for details.

I'm not the one making the most code changes in Roller now days, but I do help with releases. I've been spending my spare cycles hacking on BlogQL, a Node/TypeScript-based blog server with a GraphQL API and a React front-end. It's really more of an example app to help me understand those technologies, kind of like Roller was. Maybe I'll write about it someday. That's all for now.

The Roller PMC has approved the release of Apache Roller 6.0.2, a minor bug fix release.

This latest release of Roller includes a new UI that uses Twitter Bootstrap 3 and is based on work I started in 2015 and first committed on December 21, 2015 with this commit: 2da6c3c2e28419f68244e0c362c15be96013d5f9. You can find the details on on the Roller project blog. I got lot of help along the way with testing, fixes, dependency upgrades, Java 11 support and more, so thanks to all that helped make this happen.

Just a note to say that I've switched this site over to Digital Ocean Kubernetes service, which is in Limited Availability right now.

Digital Ocean's Kubernetes service is just as simple and well designed as the rest of Digital Ocean. I mentioned before that I rolled my own Kubernetes cluster via Ansible and Kubeadm. Now I can delete all those config files and that's a good thing. Plus, the price is right; I can get by with one $10/month node (1 CPU / 2 GB memory) and a $10/month load balancer.

To get this site up and running I had to deploy four things to my cluster. I installed the NGINX Ingress Controller, Cert-Manager for automatic creation of Let's Encrypt TLS certs, PostgreSQL and my custom build of Apache Roller. All of that went pretty smoothly and I didn't run into and problems that I could blame on Digital Ocean.

Upgraded this site to Roller 6.0.0-SNAPSHOT today, which meant an hour of fiddling around with my private Docker registry, then giving up and using the one free private repository offered by DockerHub and then, another hour of futzing around trying to figure out my PostgreSQL JDBC driver doesn't work anymore (I inadvertently upgraded from JDK 1.7 to 1.8) and why I can't seem to upgrade it (Kubernetes caches Docker images unless you set imagePullPolicy to always). In the end, I got it working. This post is written in the yet to be officially release Apache Roller 6.0.0-SNAPSHOT version.

Side note: the new rich-text editor in Roller is now Summernote and it seems quite nice. I need to tweak it a bit because there is currently no way to set the font or add a link unless you switch to raw HTML mode.

About three years ago I decided to modernize and improve the Apache Roller web UI by rewriting the JSP pages to use the Struts 2 Bootstrap tags, which use Twitter's Bootstrap v3 components and JavaScipt. I also wanted to replace all the HTML table-based formatting with div's and Bootstrap, do a bunch of other improvements and make Roller's web UI less clunky and annoying.

Converting Roller's eight-five JSP pages was a big task and I did not have much time for it. That's why it took three years. Ironically, the Roller modernization project leaves Roller three years out of date. Still, I think it is a huge improvement over the Roller v5 web UI and I want to get it released in Roller v6. Currently, this work is available as Pull Request #22 and you can find some screenshots there too. Here's one:

Try it with Docker-Compose

I also did some work to make it super-easy to try the Roller v6 snapshot pre-release for yourself, by using Docker Compose. You don't have to fiddle with Tomcat or PostgreSQL. You can find a simple Dockerfile for running Roller v2 snapshot and a docker-compose.yml file linked below. And you can find a Docker image in my DockerHub repo.

docker-compose up

Alternatively, if you want to try Roller the hard way, you can get the regular-style v6 SNAPSHOT release files here roller/roller-6.0/v6.0.0.

Let us know how it goes

I hope you'll give Roller v6 snapshot a try and let the project know how it can be improved for your use. Send feedback to the Roller mailing lists or ttweet at us at @apache_roller.

Just a quick note to say that I ditched Docker Swarm and now this rarely updated blog is powered by Kubernetes. Total overkill, I know. Like Roller itself, I did it as a learning exercise. I hope to blog more about what I learned by doing this. For now, here's a quick summary of what I've done so far.

Created a cluster

I created a 2-node Kubernetes cluster on Digital Ocean using some hand-crafted Ansible scripts that call apt-get to install and kubeadm to start Kubernetes. I considered using Typhoon to create the cluster, but I really wanted to learn how to install Kubernetes "from scratch".

Ran two Ingress Controllers

To avoid using Digital Ocean's $20/month load balancer I'm running an Nginx Ingress controller on each node, and pinning containers to nodes using labels and nodeSelectors. I had to borrow Nginx Controller setup files from the Typhoon project because I'm still kind of bewildered by Ingresses.

Deployed my containers

Next, I wrote Kubernetes YAML files for deploying my containers: a private Docker Registry, PostgreSQL and my custom Roller image. Getting the private registry working properly was the biggest challenge. I need private because I don't want to make my custom Roller image public. Next, I'll install Jenkins next for CI/CD of my custom Roller build via the Jenkins Kubernetes plugin.

Let me know if there are any aspects of this that you'd like to see covered in a blog entry, or suggestions for running the cluster without two Ingress Controllers. I've already got a post cooking about installing a TLS secured Docker Registry on Kubernetes.

version: '3.2'

services:

   postgresql:
      image: "postgres:10.0"
      ports:
         - "5432:5432"
      deploy:
         resources:
           limits:
              memory: 50M
      volumes:
         - type: bind
           source: /var/lib/postgresql/data
           target: /var/lib/postgresql/data
      environment:
        - POSTGRES_USER=roller
        - POSTGRES_DB=rollerdb
        - POSTGRES_PASSWORD_FILE=/run/secrets/pg_passwd
      secrets:
        - source: db_passwd
          target: pg_passwd

   roller:
      image: "rwo:latest"
      ports:
        -  "80:8080"
      depends_on:
        - postgresql
      deploy:
         resources:
           limits:
              memory: 800M
      volumes:
        - type: bind
          source: /var/lib/roller
          target: /var/lib/roller
      environment:
        - DB_HOST=postgresql
        - STORAGE_ROOT=/var/lib/roller
        - JAVA_OPTS="-Xmx700m"

secrets:
  db_passwd:
    file: ./db_passwd.txt

I don't blog very often but I still find time to work on my blog's software: Apache Roller.

Recently, I decided to focus on improving Roller's ancient Struts 2-based user interface (UI). I had considered adding a comprehensive API to Roller and building a new UI based on that API, but wow that is a huge amount of work. Instead, I decided to modernize the Roller UI by using Twitter's Bootstrap components and CSS styles.

So far, I've devoted a couple of weekends to this work and made some pretty good progress. I'm about half-way done. I'm using the Struts2-Bootstrap plugin, adding better client-side form validation with JavaScript and doing my best to improve the overall user experience. You can see an album of the pages I've done so far on Flickr:
Roller UI with Bootstrap.

I would love any contributions, so if you are interested in helping out, please submit Pull Requests against the bootstrap-ui branch in the Apache Roller repo on GitHub.

MbCanvas is a fun project that I did in 2015: a simple Mandelbrot Set viewer written in Typescript and using the HTML5 Canvas. I did the project to learn more about Typescript and the HTML5 Canvas and I must say, Typescript very nice -- so much easier to read and write than plain old JavaScript, at least for me.

Here's an example image from the viewer.

The project is fairly easy to build if you've got Node and NPM installed, or you can play around with it here: mbcanvas - Mandelbrot viewer in TypeScript

If you're interested in trying the not-yet-released Apache Usergrid 2 you might want to checkout my Usergrid-Vagrant project on GitHub. I just updated the project to support Usergrid 2, using the latest code from the Usergrid "release" brach. The big changes were switching to OpenJDK 8 and adding ElasticSearch. I also rewrote the scripts to use plain old Bash instead of Groovy.

https://github.com/snoopdave/usergrid-vagrant

If you want the old Usergrid 1 Vagrant-file then checkout the "1.x" branch.