Tips

A Better Minimum Compression Size in Nginx

💡 Compressing anything that's small is unlikely to shrink much. In some cases, it even make it bigger!

👉🏼 That's why I always make sure to set "gzip_min_length" in Nginx to something higher than the default.

Secure Phrase Generator for Passwords and Secrets

💡 I often find myself needing to come up with a secure phrase for app cookies and other secrets.

👉🏼 I love using https://randomkeygen.com/ for that. It generates strings from memorable to fort-knox secure. 😄

Disable Nginx Server Header

💡 You can tell Nginx to not reveal its version number to client responses. The less information an attacker has on your system, the better.

👉🏼 Set "server_tokens" value to "off" in the main http directive.

Improve Nginx Performance: Multi-Threading

💡 Nginx is an awesome web server and reverse proxy. But some if its defaults are better changed to more sane values.

👉🏼 One such value is "worker_processes". By default, Nginx uses only one CPU core. Set this to "auto" to use all available cores on the system.

Use Systemd to Manage Processes

💡 Systemd may seem daunting at first, but it's pretty simple once you get the hang of it.

👉🏼 Place a unit file describing your process in /etc/systemd/system/[process-name].service, and run:

➡️ systemctl daemon-reload && systemctl start [process-name]

Get Process Environment From Terminal

💡 How do you get the ENV vars of a running Node.js (or any) process?

➡️ cat /proc/$PID/environ | tr '\0' '\n'

Prints out the initial environment of the process.

Get Node.js Port Using PM2 Name

💡 I recently needed to get the port of a @nodejs process from its PM2 name with a one-liner:

➡️ ss -ntlp | grep $(pm2 ls | grep <app_name> | awk '{print $12}') | awk '{print $4}' | grep -oP '(?<=:)[0-9]{2,}'

Quick Server for Incoming Webhooks

💡 Need a quick way to process incoming webhooks?

👉🏼 Webhook allows you to easily create HTTP endpoints (hooks), which you can use to execute commands. Useful if you're configuring auto-deployments from a repository.

https://github.com/adnanh/webhook

Update Packages on Ubuntu

💡 First thing I do on a new VPS instance is to update all packages for the latest security & bug fixes:

➡️ apt update && apt upgrade

What commands do you run on a fresh new server?

Assign a Random Port to Node.js Server

💡 How do you conveniently assign an available port to an app?

👉🏼 Use PORT=0! The kernel will pick a random unused port number and bind it to your app. This is useful when you're deploying multiple apps on a single server.