Okay week, awesome pipeline.

Well well well, guess who was being stupid and forgot to write a blog post for like a week?

Me.

Anyways, here I am. This week has been pretty good, work has been good, I had lots of device building to do this week which is definitely one of the more enjoyable parts of my job, especially as I created out deployment process (custom ISO) so I can essentially visualise the process in my brain which helps me to keep track of what I'm doing, plus it's super quick and efficient so yeah, definitely Sam approved lol.

I had a few iPads to do as well so I smashed them out and they're all setup and in their trolley at the site they were for so we have happy staff members which is always nice.

Anyway, that aside, let's talk about the pipeline for the next week.

I've been at somewhat of a crossroads with database hosting and it's beginning to become an issue. Now, I currently use Supabase for databases, mainly because it's plug and play, but also because Supabase isn't just a database, it's essentially a storage facility for everything server-side that you would need, including auth which is a big one, and with their auth setup you can literally use whatever OAuth provider you want, which is pretty neat.

The problem with Supabase, or at least the free plan, is that you have to keep the project alive else it will disable itself after x amount of days of inactivity, and you can also only ever have 2 projects live on the free plan at one time, which is fine for some people, but for someone like myself who has multiple projects that are needing DB, Auth, etc, it becomes quite frustrating to manage.

So, here is the solution I intend to build:

I think what I want to do is essentially run a PGAdmin instance, which is a free, open-source PgSQL admin tool that allows for multiple databases to be managed in one place (exactly what I need). Then, for the databases themselves, whenever I need a DB for a project, I'll spin up a PostgreSQL docker container, probably with docker compose, and then bind it do a different port each time so I can use 1 WAN address for all of the containers' external access. Then, I can add each individual PgSQL instance to PGAdmin, and then I can migrate my supabase DB's to my own setup, which is the end goal.

Having said that, I still need to consider a couple of things, the main one being auth. Honestly, I've not even looked yet to see what solutions are out there, I'm guessing there is something open-source I can make use of but if not, I'll figure something out in terms of an auth server and then I'll template an auth flow that can be used for each project. Regardless, it will all handshake with the same server that the DB's are hosted on as that's the only server I don't self-host so it has the necessary security in place...

Apart from that, I've not got anything else I'm working on at the moment aside from an open-source IPTV app, but that's still very much in development, mainly because the entire codebase is React Native + Expo and I regret not using Native Swift instead for Apple devices, but hey, a mistake is only a mistake if you don't learn from it.

That's all for now, feel free to leave a comment if you have any input or open a ticket if you want a consultation for works.

Peace ✌️