Run Piwik on Cloud Foundry
Piwik is an open-source analytics platform based on PHP and MySQL. That makes it a perfect application to be run on Cloud Foundry-based platforms. So, in case you are tired of sending all your data to Google Analytics but rather want to have your own analytics platform in place, this tutorial is for you. We will see what it takes to run Piwik on Cloud Foundry and what modifications are necessary to integrate it smoothly into our platform.
Configure Front End Apps With Environment Variables on Cloud Foundry
The 12 factor manifest tells us in point III that apps should retrieve their config from environment variables to strictly separate config from code. “Config” meaning everything that is likely to vary between deployments (staging, production, developer environments, etc.). Cloud Foundry allows us to do that easily using either the manifest.yml file or the cf set-env command. However, this only works for apps which have a dynamic back end. What if we want to configure a front end app that we have pushed to Cloud Foundry using the Staticfile Buildpack?
Cloud Foundry Route Services
In Cloud Foundry, we use services to provide additional functionality as reserved resources to our apps. They get bound to the app(s) directly and are accessible from these bound apps only. The image below shows how they get provisioned through the service broker and are then accessible to the client through the app. This is obviously a great setup for services like databases, messaging brokers, app data loggers or other handy additions for our apps to consume.
Observables With Angular and Feathers
Feathers is a modern API framework for Node.js. It exposes its backend services as a REST API or as a WebSocket API. To consume the exposed WebSockets from an Angular app, it makes sense to create Angular services to abstract the respective Feathers services in a way that makes it easy for our Angular components to consume them. This tutorial is assuming that you are using the Angular CLI for your app.
Run a CI/CD Server on Cloud Foundry
Pushing Apps to Cloud Foundry is as easy as it gets, thanks to the cf push command. However, it is still tedious to push your code after every change you make, just to see if it still runs in the cloud. That’s where a CI/CD server is useful. It tests, builds and deploys your code every time you git push to any Git repo. Strider is an open-source CI/CD server based on Node.