Somewhat recently I reduced the size of the virtual machine in which I host this blog. It is quite short on memory, but for the price I pay, can’t really complain. Just now I was looking on memory usage on the machine, and noticed ps reporting over 100MB being help by npm: andre@webserver ~]$ ps aux --sort -rss USER PID %CPU %MEM VSZ RSS TTY STAT START TIME COMMAND ghost 247 0.

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Ghost’s out of the box import/export backup mechanism works well, but doesn’t backup images. I wanted a simple command line I could call to backup my blog and move the backup file out of the server’s file system. Also, I didn’t want to stop Ghost’s node process to create the backup. By default, Ghost uses sqlite as a database, which provides an easy way to perform online backups. Below is a Gist of a small Bash script I put together to login to the blog’s server, perform the online backup of the database, gzip that together with the image folder and then copy over to the local machine.

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Finally I got the blog setup with an HTTPS endpoint on Azure. I thought I would write up on the points that weren’t that straight forward. Get a free SSL certificate I used Let’s encrypt to generate me a free SSL certificate for the blog. It will provide you with a domain-validated certificate, which only vouches for the domain identity (good enough for a blog, if you ask me). To issue a certificate to a domain, they will challenge you to prove that you control the domain.

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Andre Esteve

Curious about this picture? These are Tulipa gesneriana, red tulips. This picture was taken on the northwest coast of the Washington state, and then a voronoi blur applied on it.