Four packages, one playbook. This should be a boring afternoon, and it mostly is — except for one ordering problem that breaks almost every tutorial on the subject, in a way that only shows up on a genuinely fresh server.
So let me start there, because if you understand it the rest is just YAML.
If you came here looking for how to install open-source Puppet on a current Ubuntu, the short answer is that you can't, and it is not your fault for not knowing. The instructions everyone wrote — add deb.puppetlabs.com, install puppet-agent — stopped producing new versions in early 2025.
Run Emacs inside tmux with the stock configuration and you hit the problem within about four seconds. tmux's prefix key is C-b. In Emacs, C-b is backward-char — one of the six or seven keys you press most in any editing session.
Here is the Dockerfile almost everyone writes first:
Every other piece of a search engine operates on data you already have. The crawler is the one component that reaches out and spends somebody else's money — their bandwidth, their CPU, their database connections — without asking first.
So far in this series we have crawled pages, broken them into tokens, and built an index that can tell us which documents contain a term. That leaves the question every search engine actually lives or dies by: in what order do we show them?
Every year, on schedule, someone writes the obituary for self-hosted email. The argument is always the same shape: Gmail and Microsoft control the inbox, residential and small-VPS IP ranges are pre-blocked before you've sent a single message, and the only rational move is to hand your mail to a SaaS provider and get on with your life.
For decades, SSH has been the universal tool for managing Linux servers.
Need to restart a service?
SSH.
Need to update PHP?
SSH.
Need to fix a configuration file?
SSH.
Need to investigate a production problem at 2 a.m.?
SSH.
There is nothing inherently wrong with SSH.
Most developers begin their careers thinking almost exclusively about applications.
Artificial Intelligence has rapidly become one of the most important technologies of the modern era. Governments, businesses, universities, journalists, software developers, and ordinary citizens increasingly depend on AI systems for research, content creation, software development, decision making, and communication.