Balliza Tech Stack

Balliza is finally available to the general public. Although to be a registered user you still need an invite.

To mark this launch, I thought it would be interesting to share the main components used to build the site.

PHP + Laravel

Language and framework. I have written in this blog about my move from CakePHP to Laravel. After these months I am even more pleased with my decision. It’s the ideal framework to develop this project.

PostgreSQL

Database. There are many good reasons to choose PostgreSQL over MySQL, and maybe I should have done it a long ago. But the truth is that I am using PostgreSQL because initially I had planned host the site on Heroku, which uses this as the default database.

Foundation + Sass

CSS framework and pre-processor. In my opinion Foundation is the best CSS framework, and an easy choice compared to Twitter Bootstrap.

DigitalOcean

Server. For me, the issue with AWS is the difficulty in predicting the cost. That’s why I chose a “more traditional” service with a fixed monthly cost, no surprises. DigitalOcean proved to be an excellent choice. If you want to try out the service click on this link and receive a $10 balance (enough for 2 months of the smaller server).

Laravel Forge

Server management. One of the tools from the “Laravel ecosystem”. It manages the server and deploys the app automatically, whenever there are changes in the repository. One of the tools that makes my life significantly easier, highly recommended.

Bitbucket

Git repository. The fact that it allows private repositories in the free plan was one of the main reasons to choose it.

Mandrill

Transactional email sending.

Google Analytics

Site traffic analysis. Although it’s necessary to deal with spam problems it remains a useful tool.

New Relic

Server and site performance analysis.

Homestead + Vagrant + VirtualBox

Local development virtual machine. Homestead is the official Laravel Vagrant “box”. It’s the easiest way to start working with Laravel. It has the advantage of being an equivalent server to the one created by Forge.

SourceTree

Git client. Although I am looking for alternatives with better performance.

Pivotal Tracker

Project management.

Putty  + pgAdmin III + WinSCP

Access to the server and database