DEV Community: Nazareno Pesado

Install ext-sodium on AWS Lightsail Bitnami LAMP Instance

Nazareno Pesado — Fri, 30 Jul 2021 14:07:46 +0000

One of my agency projects on Laravel has a composer dependency that needs "sodium PHP extension", but Bitnami LAMP instance doesn't come with it installed.

So after trying for almost one hour i successfully install it following this steps:

First you need to install libsodium-dev through apt

sudo apt install libsodium-dev

Then, using PECL (PHP Extension Manager) you have to install the extension per se

sudo pecl install -f libsodium

Finally, edit php.ini file to activate the extension and restart the services

sudo nano /opt/bitnami/php/etc/php.ini
# find "extension=sodium" and uncomment it

sudo /opt/bitnami/ctlscript.sh restart

With these steps you have installed PHP sodium extension in your instance

Use a custom domain and SSL on AWS Lightsail instance

Nazareno Pesado — Wed, 21 Jul 2021 13:17:40 +0000

In our agency bitopia.digital we need to migrate a platform, which we have hosted in a GoDaddy VPS to a AWS Lightsail instance.

We started to love❤️ Lightsail because it's simplicity to up and run different system blueprints that makes our business run smooth.

We found two issues in the process, so i'm writing this to help any of you who maybe are trying to achieve this kind of stuff.

The learning process

Update domain zone

The first one is that we already have a domain name registered in GoDaddy and we need to point it to the need instance.

We opened domain panel in GoDaddy and updated the A record in our DNS Zone to point to the AWS Lightsail instance static public IP

That process takes a little while, so you can check the DNS propagation process with a tool like https://dnschecker.org

After that we already have our domain pointed to our new instance but here is where it came the second issue.

Reissue the SSL certificate

This step could be tricky, but it's easy to follow along.
The first thing we need to do is to generate a a new private key for our AWS Lightsail instance.

We logged in through SSH in our instance and we run the following command to generate a new private key:



sudo openssl genrsa -out /opt/bitnami/apache2/conf/bitnami/certs/server.key 2048

With that key we need to create a certificate to send to the Certificate Authority:



sudo openssl req -new -key /opt/bitnami/apache2/conf/bitnami/certs/server.key -out /opt/bitnami/apache2/conf/bitnami/certs/cert.csr

Send cert.csr to the certificate authority. When the certificate authority completes their checks, they will hand over your new certificate to you.

With the new certificate file (probably a *.crt file), we need to upload it to our instance with the following name:



/opt/bitnami/apache2/conf/bitnami/certs/server.crt

After this step we need to update the server name in the apache2 httpd.conf file with the domain name

With this we have our new instance up and running with a domain and a SSL certificate.

Convert images to WebP

Nazareno Pesado — Wed, 03 Feb 2021 14:48:33 +0000

When you try to optimize the front-end of you website you realized that PageSpeed from Google suggests to use WebP images because, as they say, are 26% smaller in size.

I'm going to teach you how to use Spatie Media Library, an awesome PHP + Laravel library to achieve this.

class Course extends Model implements HasMedia
{
    use InteractsWithMedia;

    public function registerMediaConversions(Media $media = null): void
    {
        $this->addMediaConversion('cover')
            ->format(Manipulations::FORMAT_WEBP)
            ->width(320)
            ->height(200)
            ->nonQueued();
    }
}

Important things

Calling to

->addMediaConversion('cover')

we define the name of the conversion that we are going to need later to get the image.

->format(Manipulations::FORMAT_WEBP)

is the method that makes the magic of conversion to WebP (or to another format)

We include

->nonQueued()

to perform the conversion without queue it.

Retrieve the image

So after the conversion we need to retrieve the image to use it in the front-end.

$urlToFirstImage = $course->getFirstMediaUrl('images', 'cover');

The first parameter we define the collection where we retrieve the image.
Te second parameter we specify the conversion name we defined before.

So in that simple way we can convert an image to WebP using Spatie Media Library.

Please refer to the library documentation to expand the usage and adjust this to your specific needs.

DEV Community: Nazareno Pesado

Install ext-sodium on AWS Lightsail Bitnami LAMP Instance

Use a custom domain and SSL on AWS Lightsail instance

The learning process

Update domain zone

Reissue the SSL certificate

Convert images to WebP

Let's start

1. Install Spatie Media Library

2. Prepare your model

3. Associate a file to your model

4. Converting your images

Important things

Retrieve the image