Over the past couple of months, I’ve been migrating this site (and others) off of an older virtual server that ran Gentoo Linux onto a newer one running Alpine Linux and Docker. I have a pile of scripts that set up and maintain each service on the new server, and Ouroboros keeps most things up to date faster than an emerge -uNDv world && emerge --depclean ever did. For the services that Ouroboros doesn’t keep up to date (because they’re containers I generated myself), there’s a script that regenerates them with whatever upstream sources are current. So far, I’ve only been stung once when an upgrade of MariaDB to 11.3 broke most of my websites, but rolling it back to 11.2 set things right again.

There are also some things that got revisited in the move that needed to be brought up to date. For instance, there used to be a mailing list called the Homebrew Digest. It’s been gone for some time now, but it had nearly 100k posts to it going back as far as the late ’80s covering all aspects of homebrewing. Someone else had an archive up, but it’s also succumbed to bit rot. 15 or so years ago, I put up my own searchable archive, but it had suffered from neglect and the resulting breakage from moving to newer versions of PHP. I’ve recently dusted it off, tweaked it where needed, and put it up again at hbd.beerandloafing.org. It was previously integrated into another website I’d not changed much since 2004, but has been broken out into its own site running in its own container.

That other site, www.beerandloafing.org, is now home to a BrewBlogger instance. That’s another piece of web code that hasn’t been maintained much…it still needs PHP 5 to run. Putting it in its own container made it easy to cater to its needs while the other PHP-based sites I have (including the HBD archive) can run on more up-to-date versions. (If you’re interested in running BrewBlogger on Docker, you can pull it from Docker Hub or grab the Dockerfile from my GitLab.) Once I got it running, I imported the database from the old server into it. Most of my recipes are still in ProMash, an even older piece of software and the main reason I have WINE running on my computers. (ProMash was written for Windows, but my computers spend 99%+ of their time running some form of Linux.) As I get around to it, I’ll transcribe the recipes and brew sessions from ProMash into BrewBlogger.