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I needed a local mercurial hosting option. The following is what I came up with. Hopefully, you will find it useful or the post at least gives you some ideas. My requirements were basic. Web browsable repositories Minimal and maintenance-free Support for pushing new changesets Accessible through a URL to easily pull dependencies Needed access from a single computer (which let me omit authentication) I didn’t need bug tracking, code review, or anything fancy.

SpamAssassin won’t do much if it hasn’t been trained. While it does come with a few plugins enabled for DKIM, SPF, RBL, and content checks, SpamAssassin is limited unless you train its Bayesian filter. The Bayesian filter will compare past content from known spam and ham emails to determine the likelihood of spam. Bayes' theorem, named after 18th-century British mathematician Thomas Bayes, is a mathematical formula for determining conditional probability.

Are you curious about SpamAssasin’s sa-update tool and what it does? As with many other programs geared towards servers, there are additional tools that are run inside of cron jobs and used by administrators. Knowing what these tools do and how they work can help you better understand your server and fix issues down the line. The sa-update tool is used to pull new configuration files and rules from channels. These new files are used by SpamAssassin to classify emails as spam in addition to the Naive Bayes filtering.

Starting with microservice design, it’s easy to follow your old habits of designing each microservice as if it was a normal application. One aspect of this, that I fell into when first moving to microservice applications, was adding authentication to my microservices that were only accessible from internal systems. The level in which you secure your microservices is dependent on your infrastructure, who will be using the microservices, and the availability of the microservice.

With Docker, it’s easy to end up with images many times larger than they need to be. Even if you remove unnecessary files and packages, you’ll still see your image size be much larger than expected. The size of the image may not seem too important to some, but there are many benefits to having smaller docker images. A smaller image will allow you to upload and download the images faster.