Application is important – Andy Balaam’s Blog

October 21, 2024

I have recently evaluated and installed software to provide comments and statistics for this blog. Here is my experience of the deployment process:

• Python comment system. Using one of 17 outdated installer/packaging systems for Python (none of which work). Read a lot of docs and make sure I have a virtual env before installing anything. pip install failed to compile any of its C dependencies on the target host because I didn’t have the Python development library installed and couldn’t install the package. Tried lots of different things to get it to work, including pyinstaller. Really want this to work. It didn’t work, and I gave up.

• Node statistics system. Required node, which conflicted with the outdated node already installed, until I finally figured it out and put the path to the node I downloaded into the PATH, earlier than anything else. Need yarn but I can npm install It does not matter. Building a large number of things on your deployment host, including compiling various C dependencies, and creating several types of map data. Completely killed my VPS, took my website down. The next day my web hosting company killed all processes on my VPS, probably due to excessive memory usage. Finally got around to building it locally and copying the built artifacts. Is there a better way? Anyway, it works now.

• Go comment system. You just download one EXE and run it. It worked straight away.

Placement is important. There used to be a time when PHP beat all the newcomers because everyone was using outdated web hosts (as I still do) that provided Apache already set up for PHP. Today, languages ​​that compile to EXEs are more advanced.

Side note: of course I would use a Rust program for both of these jobs if I could find a mature program that suited my needs, but I can’t. Rust’s adoption story is almost as good as Go’s. (“Almost” is because Go programs tend not to rely on the C standard library, so there are even fewer errors.)