orbiter-mods.com - announcing development of open source mods repo

[Majid]

Hey yall. In the spirit of Orbiter going open source, I thought it might be nice to have an open source mods repository, and a resource to help make the add-on experience for Orbiter better. I have registered orbiter-mods.com and started a repo here: https://github.com/computerex/orbiter-mods.com

It uses php/mysql/nginx/slim. It uses docker/docker-compose, so it's easy to run on your local system. If you are in Windows, install WSL2 + docker for desktop, for osx/linux users you just need to install docker/docker-compose. Then you can clone the repo, cd into it and and execute

make docker-start

I think I'll most likely use S3 + cloudflare for storage/egress.

I am going to be a bit busy following 2 weeks but I plan on working on this for the long haul as life allows. I want to make this a resource to help people use Orbiter add-ons. Just wanted to share this with yall. Welcome to any ideas.

 

[jedidia]

I think I'll most likely use S3 + cloudflare for storage/egress.

Uhm... Using S3 for serving web content means it's static. I can't quite see how that would make sense for a mod repository. I mean, you'll have to run an API somewhere.

 

[Majid]

That's just for the mod files. The MySQL + webserver will most likely be on some digital ocean droplets I control or if the volume gets too high (I wish) will swap to AWS managed RDS + EC2.

 

[jedidia]

That sounds reasonable, but as somebody working with AWS daily, I feel there's a warning in order.
S3 is cheap for storage, true. It has rather juicy network transfer costs, though. It's where it generates its money, really. We have an almost completely AWS based infrastructure, but we are using DO spaces for certain data that we do not need to access, but that is accessed a lot by customers, because it's a hell of a lot cheaper.
Data that we need to access frequently is better on S3, because there is no transfer costs for sending it around inside a vpc of the same region, but for this use case I'd do a bit of estimative arithmetics and see if you might not be better off using DO for storage.

And for RDS and EC2, you'd better have some sort of financing plan in place. Of course you probably wouldn't need much resources for an Orbiter Mod repo, but especially with RDS and enough S3 downloads you might be looking at 40 to 50 bucks a month pretty quickly. It's not much, but it might get annoying real soon.

 

[Majid]

Cloud flare is really nice to bring down the egress cost of S3, I think the combination is very affordable. Also I checked the AWS calculator and I could get a managed instance for a couple hundred bucks for the entire year.

I’ll probably set it up to use digital ocean to start with and if we run into any issues it’ll be easy to switch to a managed service.

I am traveling due to my wife’s immigration interview, I expect to ramp up on this in about 2 weeks. Will create a trello board and treat it pretty much like a work project.

 

[Majid]

Site is deployed to: http://orbiter-mods.com/
Will setup SSL + github hooks to auto-build on code changes

 

[Face]

Site is deployed to: http://orbiter-mods.com/
Will setup SSL + github hooks to auto-build on code changes

Link is not working. Loading times out after like 30 seconds.

 

[Majid]

Link is not working. Loading times out after like 30 seconds.

Hm... This digitalocean droplet ran for like 10 years. I updated it to latest version of Ubuntu and now this ... Taking a look Can't even SSH into it xD

 

[Majid]

Hm... They have never done this before.

 

[Majid]

I have never had issues like this with digital ocean.



And here I was thinking that I can just attach DO block storage to the droplet and call it a day.

 

[Majid]

Stark warning to anyone considering DO for anything important. Droplet has been down for close to 2 hours, asked them when this is going to end, and received this in response:

 

[jedidia]

Stark warning to anyone considering DO for anything important

Yeah, that's kind of a known DO issue. There's even been a small company that went bankrupt once because DO blocked their account because they triggered some undocumented safeguard in the API, and then just wouldn't activate the account anymore for like over a week, just always sending back standard emails in response to the complaints. It's well possible no human person ever read them until they realised that they were trending on twitter in a way you don't want to be...

We're using DO strictly for storage of data that can be regenerated if lost, and where an hour or two of outage every once in a while isn't that big of a deal.

 

[Majid]

Site is up now.

 

[Face]

Can confirm that it loads now. But should it also do anything? Neither the pictures are clickable, nor the search field shows a reaction.

 

[STS]

Can confirm that it loads now. But should it also do anything? Neither the pictures are clickable, nor the search field shows a reaction.

Same for me...

... I think that you are developing this website incorrectly ...

 

[Majid]

sorry for the confusion - I deployed what I have so far so people can follow along, perhaps clone the repo and run it on their machines.

The site is not usable right now in anyway. But the invisible “grunt work” of setting up the infrastructure, setting up composer, installing dependencies, bundling js output, etc is done.

Now the fun part starts where we can actually start building stuff.

I’ll shortly create a public trello with cards to better communicate progress to yall.

 

[Majid]

Hey y’all, I got covid. Luckily I already got it back in 2020 and have been double vaccinated since then so symptoms aren’t nearly as severe as last time. Still the fever sucks.

Just a friendly update ?

 

[BrianJ]

Take it easy and get better soon, mate!

 

[N_Molson]

Hey y’all, I got covid. Luckily I already got it back in 2020 and have been double vaccinated since then so symptoms aren’t nearly as severe as last time. Still the fever sucks.

Just a friendly update ?

Been there, done that. Nothing life-threatening, but 5 days in bed, I had vertigo when standing up for more than a few seconds. Not funny, but you'll get better

 

[Face]

Hey y’all, I got covid. Luckily I already got it back in 2020 and have been double vaccinated since then so symptoms aren’t nearly as severe as last time. Still the fever sucks.

Just a friendly update ?

Had it along with all my family members (some vaccinated, some not) in January, and it was the same for all of us: 2 days fever around 38.5°C, a week of coughing, done. No breathing troubles, no smell or taste dysfunctions, no Long-Covid symptoms. I guess we got lucky.
Get better soon!