Github-Actions on SQP Dev

Helena & Teodor's Game Lab — A Family Side Project

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Sometimes the best projects start with a simple idea: what if the kids could make their own games?

That’s how Helena & Teodor’s Game Lab came about — a small website where my children, Helena and Teodor, get to have their own collection of browser games. The concept is straightforward: a colourful landing page that showcases each game, and clicking “Play” takes you straight in. No downloads, no installs, just open and play.

SQP Kanban — Containerising a Node.js App with Docker

Thu, 14 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been building a simple kanban board called SQP Kanban — a Node.js/Express app backed by MongoDB. The app itself was functional, but it was running bare on my machine with no containerisation, no CI/CD, and no deployment pipeline. Time to fix that.

The App

SQP Kanban is a drag-and-drop project board with columns (To Do, In Progress, Completed, Omit), task cards with date tracking, and colour-coded projects. The frontend is vanilla HTML/JS, the backend is Express with Mongoose, and data lives in MongoDB.

SQP Kanban — The Deployment Process

Thu, 14 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This is the second post about containerising SQP Kanban. Here’s how the actual process went.

Step 1 — Dockerfile

Straightforward. Alpine-based Node image, copy package.json first (so npm install gets cached), then copy the app code. The main lesson was getting the layer order right for efficient rebuilds.

Step 2 — Manual Docker Run

Before Docker Compose, I ran everything manually to understand what each piece does:

docker network create sqp-network
docker run -d --name sqp-mongo --network sqp-network -v sqp-mongo-data:/data/db mongo:8
docker build -t sqp-kanban .
docker run -d --name sqp-kanban --network sqp-network -p 4000:4000 -e MONGO_URI=mongodb://sqp-mongo:27017/sqp-kanban sqp-kanban

Four commands. Each one taught me something — networks, volumes, port mapping, environment variables. Worth doing manually at least once before reaching for Compose.

Automating Terraform with GitHub Actions

Thu, 07 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Manually running terraform apply from a laptop works for learning. In the real world, infrastructure changes go through a pipeline. This is how I set one up.

The Goal

Every Pull Request → run terraform plan automatically
Every merge to main → run terraform apply automatically
AWS credentials stored securely as GitHub Secrets — never in code

Workflow File

name: Terraform CI/CD

on:
  push:
    branches: [main]
  pull_request:
    branches: [main]

jobs:
  terraform:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    defaults:
      run:
        working-directory: exercise-02-variables-outputs

    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v3
      - uses: hashicorp/setup-terraform@v2
      - uses: aws-actions/configure-aws-credentials@v2
        with:
          aws-access-key-id: ${{ secrets.AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID }}
          aws-secret-access-key: ${{ secrets.AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY }}
          aws-region: eu-west-2

      - run: terraform init
      - run: terraform fmt -check
      - run: terraform validate
      - run: terraform plan
        if: github.event_name == 'pull_request'
      - run: terraform apply -auto-approve
        if: github.ref == 'refs/heads/main' && github.event_name == 'push'

Problems I Hit

Workflow not showing in Actions tab — GitHub only reads workflow files from the main branch. The file needs to be merged before it’s recognised.