This is bixoto's tech blog. Here you will find useful tips, tutorials & interesting information about tech related stuff (Python, PHP, JavaScript, Dokku, etc).
Mattermost was created as a free and open-source alternative to Slack, but over the years they also added an “Enterprise” paid version, with more features. It can be a bit confusing, because the free and open-source version is called “Team Edition”, but the Enterprise one also has a free plan. Mattermost makes it very easy … Read more
When we started Bixoto.com, we chose Magento for the website because at that time it was the best open-source platform for ecommerce with an API to deal with supply and catalog, and later to go headless. In July 2023, we replaced 99% of the frontend with SvelteKit, and kept only some essential pages in Magento for now. This … Read more
At Bixoto we used to use Poetry to manage all our Python projects, but we recently started to migrate to uv, which is a lot faster. However, the commands of each tool don’t always match, which can cause some confusion. In this post we provide a partial cheatsheet of the most common commands and their … Read more
At Bixoto we have a lot of apps deployed using Dokku and we are very happy with it. However, for some complex apps we would like to be able to use docker-compose.yml files, but Dokku doesn’t support them. Back in February, we deployed a Coolify instance on a new server. Coolify looked like a good … Read more
While setting up a self-hosted single-server Coolify installation to test it as an alternative to Dokku, I was struggling with a strange intermitent SSH connection issue: when saving the configuration of the server, I would sometimes get a success message, but most of the time the following error: I tried to change the server IP/domain … Read more
At Bixoto we strive to have a fast and efficient website so our customers can buy their Christmas gifts even if they are outside on a 3G connection. One of our goal in the last months was to completely eliminate the layout shifts from all the pages, something that’s measured as the “Cumulative Layout Shift” … Read more
Serving localhost with HTTPS is a common need while developping a Web application that needs resources from another host, but it’s cumbersome because of the CORS issues and the need to install self-signed certificates or disable security features in the browser. Thankfully, Pierre-Mikael Legris, a developer in Switzerland, recently released Backloop.dev: the DNS entries for … Read more
Back in May 2023, Gitlab made it mandatory to have an expiry date on personal access tokens. This is pretty inconvenient in some setups, and fortunately they eventually removed the requirement in Gitlab 17.4, released in September 2024. Make sure you have a version higher or equal to 17.4, then go in the admin dashboard, … Read more
What is a configurable product? A configurable product exposes several variations of a same product according to one or more attributes. It could be a shoe with different sizes, a perfume bottle with different volumes, a pet food item with different weights or a shirt with multiple sizes and colours. In Magento back-end, it is … Read more