Introduction

Jeff here, I run two forums. One of them is using some ancient perl code, the other is a Simple Machines forum that I wanted to upgrade to Xenforo. When I went looking for a script to help setup a webserver that'd use php/nginx/mysql, stumbled across Centminmod. I'm more used to working with Ansible style tools where you save the server config in code, and ideally never SSH into the server, you just run Ansible against it and it handles everything. I considered writing that, but George has done a fantastic job building a bunch of optimizations into Centminmod to tweak default installations of things, so decided to go with that instead.

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It's been great actually. Working through the php and nginx config has filled in some knowledge gaps about stuff that I normally don't have to deal with (for example in python opcaching is built-in so you don't ever think about it). It's much nicer to not have to worry about that stuff, but at the same time, all abstractions are a bit leaky, so understanding what's happening under the surface is very handy...