Creating a service like Forge from scratch

Here is an article you can start with https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/an-introduction-to-configuration-management

Thanks for the link. Forge is different from configuration management because it abstracts at the datacenter level and will set up the server for you before doing any of the things those tools do. So there is some overlap but the two tools are not the same thing.

This is a tool that focuses on the datacenter abstraction part.

https://www.terraform.io/intro/vs/chef-puppet.html

It's possible that Forge uses a combination of these tools on the back end or maybe they are doing something else. That's what I am trying to figure out.

i think if we simplify it a bit to use AWS for example.. all i think forge does is talk to AWS API to get things done, like create a server, bring it up/down.. and perhaps have its own 'scripts' (for example when u create a fresh server it does all the things it needs to).. it might have its own database to link you as a user on its service to you as a user in AWS...

They are definitely connecting to the APIs. For your simplified example you just connect directly but for what Forge does, there needs be some abstraction in between in order to support multiple providers.

They also connect with SSH keys for setting up the software inside the server after it is created. That is the configuration management part. So there are at least 2 separate things they are doing.

These are a couple other companies doing similar things.

https://www.cloudways.com/

https://runcloud.io/

I notice that the control panel looks almost exactly like Gridpane. So perhaps they are reselling that service.

https://gridpane.com/

More likely it’s a bad knockoff by the looks of it. It’s easy enough to get a forge account and ripoff the HTML. It’s not a particularly hard design to copy, I believe all based on Bootstrap or it was.

Or Taylor did his own white label of Forge and GridPane is actually his. Hehe. Unlikely since it doesn’t look as high quality but possible.

Not sure if this is still something you're interested in, but you can execute shell commands by using back ticks.

echo `ls -la`;

You can also connect to a server and run commands using Spatie/ssh

https://github.com/spatie/ssh

$output = Ssh::create('username', $server)
    ->usePrivateKey($key)
    ->execute('cd wordpress-site.com && wp plugin list --status=active --format=json')
    ->getOutput();

dump(json_decode($output));