Setup

I set up my Hack Club Nest VM by installing MariaDB to hold relational data; Cloudflared to tunnel traffic from my domain to the server; and Nginx to host the web server itself.

Architecture

For whatever reason, I have an affinity towards older software, so I decided to use a PHP backend for this website. Usually, PHP is paired with an Apache web server, but I decided to use Nginx instead because it is non-blocking and even-driven, so it doesn’t use up as much memory (mainly cuz I only have 2 GB of RAM on the VM ).

I guess that makes this an LNMP stack? Idk.

Mail!

So I’m planning on having a password reset mechanism and automated email notifications, so I needed something more secure than PHP’s native mail() function. I chose to use PHPMailer with Brevo as the SMTP service provider because they offer a very generous free tier.

Stuff I Gotta Work On

• The emails are going to my junk folder?
• The emails are also getting wrapped in a really odd way