What powers yesteapea.com

This article gives a fair amount of detail on how is yesteapea.com up and running (If you are seeing this, the site is up!). The website has the following components

• Domain/dns setup : Thats how user requests arrive my server(s)
• Flask + gunicorn python webserver : contains my slack plugin
• Web server written in golang : contains my bookmarks
• Nginx : hosts all the static content including the blog and acts a proxy for the above 2 servers

Domain, DNS and Compute

I bought the domain from aws. I have one aws virtual machine(aka ec2) with 1 GB ram and 8GB disk. Aws changes the public ip of VM if the VM dies and DNS change propagations can take upto 2 days. So I have an ‘elastic ip’ which can be tied to any VM in aws. I use this ‘elastic ip’ in my DNS entry.

The python webserver

This server hosts my slack plugin. The plugin shows word/phrase definitions on urbandictionary and vocabulary.com on user invoking a ‘slack slash command’. For more details click here

I cache the data from these websites on dynamo db. I also store auth-tokens of slack teams in dynamo db. I use Flask web framework running on gunicorn server. I played around with markdown blog on flask. This was supposed to be the server serving my website. But later I moved to jekyll for static content and made nginx the entry point for my website

The Golang webserver

This serves my bookmarks website. I bookmark urls by giving them friendly names and the server creates a redirect url based on the friendly names.
Ex: yesteapea.com/red/latency-numbers redirects to gist.github.com/jboner/2841832

I had this working in php before. But later migrated this to golang because I wanted try the language. I store the data on sqlite(the poor man’s DB), because Im resource constrained. This works well as the data is expected to be pretty small

Nginx and static data

This blog, the homepage and all the static content of the website is generated using jekyll. The main advantages with jekyll are, I can publish content in markdown and I can host it very easily (s3, nginx, etc) because its static. Im using nginx for serving static files.

I also use nginx as a proxy server and for ssl offloading (I need ssl for the slack app). These are the rules I have on Nginx

• /slack/* : python server
• /under_armour/* : python server (this is for my mapmyfitness webapp)
• /bm/* and /red/* : golang webserver
• everything else : nginx static files

Source code

• Python Server
• Go Server
• Static Content