I never liked Wordpress too much and neither do I like anything database related.
After a long time of not building websites, I would like to build a small one with a blog and some static pages and wonder if my Wordpress alternative to go to from the past, https://www.getgrav.org is still a good choice or if there are better alternatives out there in the meantime...

Being flat file- and not database driven is a must.

Thank you in advance for your possible recommendations!
Take care, Amitz

Cloudflare has recently adapted their SSL for SaaS product, which was originally limited only to their Enterprise customers but has now been released publicly. Yesterday they announced their Cloudflare for SaaS solution available to everyone. And to reflect their recent service evolution of the product they have re-named it to: Cloudflare for SaaS.

You may ask yourself: What exactly is SaaS?
Software as a Service (SaaS) is a method of providing software to an end-user where the software is not installed and maintained by the user, but via hosted services (most often through a web browser). Popular examples of such a service include Salesforce, Google Apps, Microsoft Office 365, etc.

Since the 15th of April, they have released their beta stage, which is available for sign up if you submit your request here. Before the introduction of Cloudflare for SaaS, your best bet was for your customer to set up a CNAME record and have them generate a private key and CSR.

On top of that, you would be required to maintain a solution to generate and securely store private keys. But with the introduction of Cloudflare for SaaS, it is now more freely accessible and has provided less of a burden when managing multiple customers.

Cloudflare Workers

Back in January when SSL for SaaS was announced, 80% of beta users were already building their application on Cloudflare workers. But by combining the use of Cloudflare for SaaS with Cloudflare workers, will overall reduce the time and core resources from building your application.

Security

It also has already provided DDoS Protection and Web Application Firewall (WAF) built-in. Alongside the benefits offered to the Enterprise customers at no additional cost.

So, if you want to have more control of your SSL certificate solution and would like a simple but manageable solution, then why not sign up for the beta.

What is Docker?

If you're reading this, most probably you already know Docker or have at least heard about it a lot. But still, for the uninitiated, Docker is an open platform for developing, shipping, and running applications and it enables you to separate your applications from your infrastructure so you can deliver software quickly. Find Docker interesting and want to know more? Head over to their docs and you can find all the information you need!

What is Portainer?

So, talking about the elephant in the room, Portainer is a fully-featured web based GUI management tool for Docker. It runs locally, giving developers a rich UI to build and publish container images, deploy and manage applications and leverage data persistence and horizontal scaling for their applications.
Worried about the cost? Portainer Community Edition is open source, free forever and used by more than 500,000 developers worldwide.

What can I use Portainer for?

1. Visualize your server's docker environment on your web browser. (I know that you don't fear the terminal, but hey, a little help won't harm anybody!)
2. Aggregate view of Docker Swarm clusters (Yeah, it's that fancy!)
3. Deploy containers with some pre-built templates, right from inside the Portainer.
4. Start, Stop, Kill, Restart, Pause, Resume and Remove the containers easily with the web-GUI.
5. Facing any issue while deploying containers? Don't worry, Portainer to rescue! You can inspect the logs for any containers directly from the GUI and see what is stopping you from conquering the world.

How do I install Portainer?

So, you're happy to give Portainer a go and want to know how can you install it? I have got you covered:

1. Make sure you have Docker Engine installed on your server. You can follow the install instructions given here.
2. Run the following command to create a docker volume which should give output as portainer_data indicating the command was successfully executed:

sudo docker volume create portainer_data

3. Once the volume is created, run the following command to create and run the Portainer container:

sudo docker run -d -p 8000:8000 -p 9000:9000 --name=portainer --restart=always -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock -v portainer_data:/data portainer/portainer-ce

The above command should create and run the Portainer container on your server's port number 9000, which can be generally accessed in following ways:

a) By opening http://your_server_ip:9000 in your favorite browser.
b) If you have a domain name pointed towards your server's IP, by opening yourdomain.com:9000 in your browser.

Note: If you want to access Portainer over a subdomain instead of every time typing yourdomain.com:9000, you can put it behind a reverse proxy with the help of any web server, like Caddy.

4. Alright, once the container is up and running, access it via any of the above methods and you will be greeted by the following initial setup screen of Portainer:

Set the username and password for admin user here and click on Create User.

5. Next, select Docker as the container management environment you want Portainer to connect to (yes Portainer can connect to Kubernetes too, but that's a story for another day):

6. Voila! now you have successfully connected your local Docker environment to Portainer and you should be able to see below screen:

7. Click on the local endpoint to see all the containers, images, volumes, networks etc. in your Docker environment:

8. You can also deploy app templates containers right from inside the Portainer:

This is it! Go on, play around a bit and I'm sure you'll love how easy Portainer makes it to manage Docker containers. Given how many of the self-hosted apps can be deployed using Docker containers, Portainer is a must-have tool in your arsenal.