January 2015 Summaries

Libscore is an open-source project that scans the top million websites to determine which third-party JavaScript libraries they are using. The tool aims to help front-end open source developers measure their impact. To achieve this, Libscore uses a headless browser to thoroughly scan each website's run-time environment and detect as many libraries as possible. The technology leverages meta-heuristics to weed out false positives for third-party plugins. On the backend, crawls are queued via Redis with results stored in MongoDB, allowing for fast RESTful API serving. The project has faced challenges, including memory constraints, but is expected to provide valuable insights into library usage and adoption trends, as well as serve as a data store for open source projects.

We're happy to announce that FreeBSD is now available for use on DigitalOcean, marking the first non-Linux distribution to be offered on our platform. This move comes after a long-standing request from users, who have been eager to use this stable and performant operating system. DigitalOcean's engineering team has undergone significant changes over time, which led to the development of new systems and tools that enabled the integration of FreeBSD. The company's metadata service, built last year, played a crucial role in making this possible by allowing droplets to configure themselves independently. This milestone is a testament to the power of clear goals, communication, and defined restraints, and marks the beginning of exciting projects for DigitalOcean in 2015.

The text discusses the benefits of automating common development tasks such as building, testing, and deploying applications. It highlights the convenience of using the DigitalOcean API to create new Droplets and automatically run applications on them. The article provides examples of how to use the API to deploy a Rails 4 application to a Droplet, including cloning the repository, installing Docker, and running the container. It also covers more complex scenarios such as deploying multiple applications and using configuration management tools like Puppet, Ansible, and Chef. Additionally, it introduces the concept of User-Data, which allows developers to automate the deployment process by executing standard commands like `curl` from within the Droplet's Cloud Config. The article concludes that automating infrastructure with User-Data enables teams to spin up new instances of their applications quickly and efficiently, making it an attractive option for development teams.