@jesseplusplus@mastodon.social
@jesseplusplus@mastodon.social avatar

jesseplusplus

@jesseplusplus@mastodon.social

Whatever crosses my mind on tech, internet, federated social, and (sometimes) politics.

Infrequent poster; shouting into the void of the internet is still weird.

Founder of @frequency, a followers-only federated photo-sharing app for your friends and fam 💜👯‍♂️🌄

Formerly GitHub, ModCloth, PivotalLabs, UC Berkeley

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

jesseplusplus, to random
@jesseplusplus@mastodon.social avatar

I'm testing deployment of my mastodon fork to fly.io after using heroku for a while.. going to document my process and the issues I run into

First problem after signing up: it asks me to add a credit card, but then gives me this error. I'm guessing it actually needs me to verify my email before adding a credit card, but that's not the flow it lead me through 😅

jesseplusplus,
@jesseplusplus@mastodon.social avatar

Yep, that was the issue! Once I activated my account from the confirmation email, the card I had tried to add twice was there and ready to be used.

jesseplusplus,
@jesseplusplus@mastodon.social avatar

A new account also apparently starts with a free trial? That wasn't really clear to me when signing up, but now it says I'm on the Hobby plan with a trial discount and there are a few scattered indicators of that on the billing tab

Screenshot of Discount: Hobby Trial Discount
Screenshot of invoice for Hobby Plan with $0.00 due

jesseplusplus,
@jesseplusplus@mastodon.social avatar

So the first thing I wanted to try was using fly launch. Since I'm running a custom fork and I like to do branch deploys to test out changes, I can't just use the default mastodon Docker image.

I got an error when it tried to create the postgres database: Failed creating the Postgres cluster frequency-test-db: The GraphQL API no longer supports volume operations, please use the machines API instead (or update your flyctl version)

jesseplusplus,
@jesseplusplus@mastodon.social avatar

Very odd, since this is a fresh install of flyctl via homebrew. Trying to run fly version update didn't install the new version, nor did brew upgrade flyctl (I'm running 0.0.474, and it says 0.1.147 is available). I'm going to try installing via curl to see if I can get the latest version.

jesseplusplus,
@jesseplusplus@mastodon.social avatar

Success! Uninstalling the homebrew version and installing via the shell script found at https://fly.io/docs/hands-on/install-flyctl/ got me the latest version of flyctl installed properly :)

jesseplusplus,
@jesseplusplus@mastodon.social avatar

@bootlegbilly Thanks Billy! Installing via curl got me the updated version (https://mastodon.social/@jesseplusplus/111880843433773946)

jesseplusplus,
@jesseplusplus@mastodon.social avatar

I'm now testing a few different paths to installing mastodon on fly. I started off following https://blog.alyxpractice.com/create-a-mastodon-instance-with-fly-io/ to set up a test server, but saw that fly has some docs to migrate from heroku (https://fly.io/docs/rails/getting-started/migrate-from-heroku/), so I've switched over to trying that

jesseplusplus,
@jesseplusplus@mastodon.social avatar

fly launch seems to provision my app, postgres, and redis just fine, but runs into an error generating a dockerfile:

installing: ./bin/rails generate dockerfile --label=fly_launch_runtime:rails --skip --postgresql --no-prepare --redis
/Users/jesseplusplus/.rbenv/versions/3.0.5/lib/ruby/3.0.0/psych.rb:457:in `parse': (<unknown>): mapping values are not allowed in this context at line 22 column 63 (Psych::SyntaxError)

This might an issue with the ruby version I'm running, or with parsing yaml

jesseplusplus,
@jesseplusplus@mastodon.social avatar

Hm, doesn't seem to be the ruby version (I had been using an EOL 3.0.x version, but upgrading to 3.1.x has the same issue). Even a plain ./bin/rails generate dockerfile throws the same error. Must be an issue with generate on my current version of rails (6.1.7) on mastodon 4.1.13. Upgrading either of those versions is out of scope, so I'm going to take a look at what fly launch is trying to do at https://github.com/superfly/flyctl and see if I can just modify the existing Dockerfile to what I need

jesseplusplus,
@jesseplusplus@mastodon.social avatar

I just found https://github.com/fly-apps/dockerfile-rails, which is what adds the bin/rails generate dockerfile command. The docs mention:

"This is being proposed as the generator to be included in Rails 7.1"

and

"Supports all Rails supported releases, not just Rails 7.1, and likely works with a number of previous releases."

jesseplusplus,
@jesseplusplus@mastodon.social avatar

After further investigation all the way up the stack trace, any rails command is now throwing this error when requiring "rails/commands" in my environment. All of this was working last week when I was doing some active dev work and using the console a bunch, and it has now broken after a restart, which is my favorite type of error 🫠

/bootsnap/load_path_cache/core_ext/kernel_require.rb:32:in require' from bin/rails:4:in <main>'

jesseplusplus,
@jesseplusplus@mastodon.social avatar

I still find these dev environment errors to be the hardest to debug, even after a decade of being a software developer. It worked before the restart, works on heroku with the exact same code and config, doesn't work after a restart, still doesn't work with a completely fresh install in my dev environment (!!)

The fact that it's failing so early and on a require of the basic rails commands is puzzling to me.

I think I need to take a break and look at this later with a refreshed brain 😅

jesseplusplus,
@jesseplusplus@mastodon.social avatar

@samruby I just spent some time walking further up the stack trace and found the issue! One of my docker commands had generated a warning that was then saved into an environment variable that was being loaded in my config/secrets.yml file, so that's why it was throwing the error on any rails command, not just the generator 😂 All is working again now. That was a fun one to track down!

jesseplusplus,
@jesseplusplus@mastodon.social avatar

Woot! Okay, I'm back on track. The original issue that derailed me was that I had a suuuuper old version of the mastodon docker image on my machine, and it was throwing a warning when generating the secrets required for mastodon's env

export SECRET_KEY_BASE=$(docker run --rm -it tootsuite/mastodon:latest bin/rake secret)

This one specifically had a few lines of "warning: already initialized constant" saved before the real value, and was throwing an error when the yaml parser tried to read it

jesseplusplus,
@jesseplusplus@mastodon.social avatar

I'm currently running fly deploy after having to fix up an issue with my node version that was causing the build to fail (heroku is fine building with node version specified as "16.x", but the dockerfile needs a proper version string like ">=16.0 <17.0")

It's taking quite a while! Will report back when it finishes :)

jesseplusplus,
@jesseplusplus@mastodon.social avatar

Ooof, just got a failure after a very loooong time waiting for a build:

=> [internal] load build context 4167.7s
=> => transferring context: 663.91MB 4167.7s
Error: failed to fetch an image or build from source: error building: failed to receive status: rpc error: code = Unavailable desc = error reading from server: EOF

I'm going to pick this up tomorrow, and maybe try building locally instead.

jesseplusplus,
@jesseplusplus@mastodon.social avatar

When I jumped back into this today, I noticed fly.io had an ongoing incident with "GraphQL API timing out". Trying to do another fly deploy resulted in the same error with nothing else showing up in fly logs, so I'm doing a fly deploy --local-only right now so that the docker image builds (much faster) on my machine and I can debug any issues that come up due to differences between my fork and base mastodon 🤞🏼

kissane, to random
@kissane@mas.to avatar

File under: cautionary tales / the failure of "we're idealists who mean well!" to be even a speedbump in the path of capital

https://waxy.org/2024/01/the-quiet-death-of-ellos-big-dreams/

jesseplusplus,
@jesseplusplus@mastodon.social avatar

@kissane thank you for sharing this. There are some tough lessons in there for those of us holding similar ideals and trying to build in the federated space. It’s a real shame the PBC construct didn’t end up forcing them to stick to their promises around user data.

andybaio, to random
@andybaio@xoxo.zone avatar

I wrote a long deep-dive into the history of Ello, from its launch and funding to its quiet sale and sudden death last year, noticed only by the community of artists and writers who used and loved it. https://waxy.org/2024/01/the-quiet-death-of-ellos-big-dreams/

jesseplusplus,
@jesseplusplus@mastodon.social avatar

@andybaio thank you for writing this! These lessons are very relevant to folks building in the federated space now with similar ideals. Do you know why the PBC designation didn’t force them to keep their promises of not selling the user data in the end? I thought the point of such a thing was that those commitments were enforceable, but IANAL.

jesseplusplus,
@jesseplusplus@mastodon.social avatar

@andybaio exactly! Selling all the data to Talenthouse without letting users know or opt out certainly felt like a violation in spirit, if not in letter.

jesseplusplus, to random
@jesseplusplus@mastodon.social avatar

Each Facebook User is Monitored by Thousands of Companies

"On average, each participant in the study had their data sent to Facebook by 2,230 companies. That number varied significantly, with some panelists’ data listing over 7,000 companies providing their data. "

😱 😱 😱

https://themarkup.org/privacy/2024/01/17/each-facebook-user-is-monitored-by-thousands-of-companies-study-indicates

jesseplusplus, to random
@jesseplusplus@mastodon.social avatar

Just catching up on Apple's non-app-store purchases BS now and.... wow. This is the bad-faith-iest implementation of this I could imagine

https://www.macrumors.com/2024/01/16/us-app-store-alternative-purchase-option/

jesseplusplus,
@jesseplusplus@mastodon.social avatar

You have to apply for an entitlement to even do it, the warning that pops up when a user clicks the link clearly discourages it and makes it seem dangerous, and then you still have to give them a 12-27% commission? Unbelievable.

jesseplusplus,
@jesseplusplus@mastodon.social avatar

Good on Tim Sweeney and Epic for continuing to fight the good fight for all of us by promising to contest this in court

https://twitter.com/TimSweeneyEpic/status/1747408148799881390

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • •
  • megavids
  • kavyap
  • DreamBathrooms
  • GTA5RPClips
  • magazineikmin
  • InstantRegret
  • cubers
  • thenastyranch
  • Youngstown
  • rosin
  • slotface
  • osvaldo12
  • ngwrru68w68
  • ethstaker
  • JUstTest
  • everett
  • Durango
  • normalnudes
  • Leos
  • mdbf
  • khanakhh
  • tester
  • modclub
  • cisconetworking
  • anitta
  • tacticalgear
  • provamag3
  • lostlight
  • All magazines
    •