dpaste.com: New stuff

DPASTE, DJANGO, WEB DEVELOPMENT, PROJECT HOSTING

In July I deployed a major update to dpaste.com. Nothing exploded. Good things resulted.

The TLDR

Example

It looks different of course, but here’s the other stuff that’s new:

  • Proper user accounts replaced the old cookie-based “accounts”
  • Signup via GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, Google, or plain ol’ username/password
  • “Favorites” feature
  • Optional public profile (linked from items you post)
  • Responsive HTML layouts (looks good on your phone now!)
  • 100% HTTPS
  • More robust database setup
  • Application hosting by PythonAnywhere
  • Lengthened the base-32 item IDs from 7 to 9 digits (and dropped the ambiguous 0, 1, O, I)
  • Added a latest-item blurb (with geolocation when available) to the About page, for fun. E.g. “3.6 KB of Python console session from a registered user in Москва, Россия”
  • Switched from Twitter to Mastodon for the status feed.

Project hosting: Sourcehut

I also moved my project hosting from Bitbucket to Sourcehut, driven by my need for Mercurial support. See my Transit of Mercurial post for more on that.

I like that it’s an open source project. I hit one error in the system early on, and reported it. I soon received an email notifying me that the fix had been deployed, with a link to the patch.

I signed up for a paid account.

Application hosting: PythonAnywhere

Another milestone: I’m no longer self-hosting. For many years I’ve used a FreeBSD VPS for hosting all my projects. One by one I’ve been porting them to more suitable lower-maintenance platforms (this blog, for instance, is now served from Azure static storage).

After surveying the current Python-web-app hosting options, I chose PythonAnywhere. It provides the pieces I need to deploy my production Python web app, but doesn’t make me manage them like a sysadmin.

I can still SSH to the server to run management commands or do hot fixes, but I don’t have to think much about the platform itself.

Having previously been the target of a DDoS attack, I did initially balk at giving up access to the web server configuration (for more efficient blocking than you can do in the application layer), but that’s one of the only things I’ve pined for.

I traded the freedom (and burden) of running and maintaining everything myself, for the ability to focus only on building the application. That’s been great.

What’s next

The update has made it easier (and more fun) to work my way down the to-do list. Features in the queue include API auth, syntax-coloring improvements, and syntax-guesser improvements. Watch the status feed for news.

The original dark theme

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