I’ve been an avid Reddit user since 2014. In 2019, I built a web app to review saved Reddit posts and provide a clean, minimal reader preview of the post that’s saved. It was a cool little project I mostly did over Christmas break, and I was pretty excited when I got the finishing touches on including a Chrome extension. (Since then, Chrome extensions have changed their submission process. I’ve re-applied but not sure if my app will be granted without some sort of terms and privacy agreements.)
In 2023 or so, Reddit had made some API authorization changes and, at the time, I thought it was pretty much the end of my ability to scrape Reddit pages. I had been consumed with work enough to abandoned the project. Well, I had some time recently to do some maintenance on my server and wah-lah, Reddzit is back. I do have to fix the pagination on it, however, so please don’t bark at me about it until I do (all my dozens of users). I had also faced some decisions in terms of updates to React and its associated libraries, but ultimately came to the conclusion it would require more effort than simply keeping things the same. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
Just some background on how it’s hosted:
– React 16
– Uses Reddit OAuth API
– Montserrat font
– Node / Express JS
– Readability package (i believe this is deprecated now)
– pm2.js for cluster management (I’ve had to occassionaly log in to the server to reboot)
– Nginx on Digital Ocean.
– Ubuntu 18
– Let’s Encrypt for SSL certs (I’ve had to update the let’s encrypt certs this year and it was surprisingly easy with a cli command)
Lesson: VHost Configuration
sites-enabled to route /etc/hosts domains to the right directory.
cd /etc/nginx/sites-enabled
Leave a Reply