The lead developer at Mosaic, Brighton with a passion for web application development and motorcycles.

An Excellent Development Server for a Team of Developers

Introduction

When working in a team it is very useful to have a central web server with multiple environments and a configuration as close to the live server as possible. This can be a bit of a nightmare though if you need to setup a new VirtualHost container in Apache every time a new project is brought on or when a developer wants to work on a version of the site in their own environment.

The good news is that this can all be handled automatically and new sites can be setup by simply adding a new directory to the file system. There are at least two ways of getting this going; the first of which is the mod_vhost_alias module for Apache and the second is enabled via mod_rewrite. I prefer to use the second method as it is more flexible and it allows you tap into the ability of mod_rewrite to introduce environment variables and redirect requests (this is particularly useful for robots.txt - you’ll see).

The Apache2 Manual does have a very good page dedicated to overcoming this problem, but I will be sharing with you all the settings I am using which you will need to stop Google et. al. from crawling your sites served from the staging environment for example.

Redis: under the hood (internals)

External Link: Redis: under the hood (internals)

I was curious to learn more about Redis’s internals, so I’ve been familiarizing myself with the source, largely by reading and jumping around in Emacs. After I had peeled back enough of the onion’s layers, I realized I was trying to keep track of too many details in my head, and it wasn’t clear how it all hung together. I decided to write out in narrative form how an instance of the Redis server starts up and initializes itself, and how it handles the request/response cycle with a client, as a way of explaining it to myself, hopefully in a clear fashion.

(Source: twitter.com)