I’ve been using Commento, the web comment engine, for quite a while on this website, as well as some other sites. I even wrote a post on running Commento with Docker Compose. Commento used to be a free and lightweight alternative to Disqus, Facebook Comments, and such.
But Commento is now dead, which is why I decided to relaunch it — under the new name of Comentario (yes, with one m)!
A while ago I’ve made a decision to migrate off Disqus, which is arguably the most popular external commenting system for website owners.
My current project makes use of the MySQL database, which runs in a Docker container.
At a certain moment connecting to the database became excruciatingly slow, taking tens of seconds to establish a single connection. After that everything would work as expected.
The application opens a connection some hundred times, so the startup time had become really unacceptable.
I’ve spent a lot of time hunting that down, and then even more time looking for a solution as I failed to find any on StackOverflow. But finally I’ve solved this.
If you work with Docker a lot, you might have noticed that the list of containers tends to grow out of control over time. Now and then you bump into an abandoned dusty container somewhere in the dark corner of your /var/lib.
So I’ve created a tiny application indicator for Ubuntu/Unity to simplify managing my container collection. Please welcome the Docker Indicator!
It’s been about a year since I’ve switched to developing this website (built with Yii 2/PHP/MySQL) using Docker. After just one try I realised that Docker is the best thing happened to development. Well, after Vim, of course.
So I’ve decided to write a brief tutorial on setting up a dockerised development environment, in the hope it could be helpful for those who never tried Docker or experience difficulties getting started.