Self-Hosted GitHub Actions Runners

Turning your old laptops into GARs

This post will focus more on the “why” and some of the quirks around doing so instead of the “how” since GitHub already have a very comprehensive guide around it. Just wanted to take a bit of time to acknowledge that it’s been almost 3 years since I last wrote a blog post. It’s been a busy 3 years for sure but hopefully I’ll be writing more consistently moving forward. (I do have quite a few half-written drafts that I’ve never published which I can’t tell if it’s still relavant at this point.) ...

April 25, 2025

PostgreSQL on Azure Pipeline with OSX

While the defacto way of running postgres on Azure Pipeline according to this guide seems to be using the docker image, the MacOS image on Azure Pipeline does not have docker support due to some licensing issue. So instead, this has to be setup and handled manually. We’d use brew here since it comes installed in the OS image and is the easiest way to deal with it as far as I’m aware. ...

July 18, 2021

How to host multiple domain names and projects on one server

NGINX is one magical tool

I own multiple domain names, and each one hosts a different side project. For the longest time, everything that required ‘hosting’ was hosted on Heroku. But their free tier can be quite limited, it can also get costly quickly if you are paying for each separate project. So instead, I decided to explore putting all of them together using NGINX (recommended to me by Jane Manchun Wong). Required Resources # Virtual Private Server (VPS) # You’ll need a virtual server such as DigitalOcean or EC2 by AWS. Personally I uses Vultr (here’s the non-referral link) which costs me about $2.50 / month. ...

August 29, 2018

Hosting your own Git server with Gitea

Having additional backups are never a bad idea

Most people (including myself) host their personal projects on a third-party free Git hosting websites like GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket etc. While that is sufficient for most people, it is also pretty fun to have your own Git service hosted on your own domain name of choice. While I trust my fellow engineers at these companies, I am using this as a personally backup to those services if anything goes wrong (like GitLab. Though to their credit, they were able to recover most of it). ...

August 20, 2018

Getting started with Travis-CI

Add that fancy badge onto your GitHub repository README

What is CI and why should I care about it? # CI stands for Continuous Integration which as the name suggests, is an integrated tests that runs continuously on every time when someone pushes a commit (or mostly when opening a Pull Request). As for why is it important, it automates the whole testing modules. Ideally, you would still want to test your changes locally before pushing them to remote but in some occasion where you forgot or the program requires a lot more resources than your current machine can handle, CI comes in very handy. That aside, if your project happen to have people wanting to contribute code, a properly written test with CI will help you in reviewing the changes and ensuring that the contribution would not break the build. ...

April 22, 2018