Happy Cinco de Mayo! So it’s clearly been a while since my last update… I’ve not been sitting on my hands but rather they’ve been too busy to write about what I’ve been working on. I hope that going forward I can work out a better balance of writing (reflection) and experimenting with projects (learning). I think matching up learning and reflection helps it stick - I still remember (almost) everything I wrote here! At least I remember enough to know I want to make a correction.
An update on building HAProxy from source
I still highly recommend HAProxy, it’s a great application with a surprisingly simple to understand configuration syntax. The documentation can be a little bit of a beast to get around but I think that is a reflection of how powerful the application really can be. Anyway, back to the point of this quick update. I realized a few months back that HAProxy really only uses their GitHub mirror to track current development and the first release of a given minor release, such as 2.2.0 or 2.3.0. If you want to stay up to date with development releases then this isn’t really a problem, but if you want to track stable releases then something else is required.
The HAProxy team maintains a separate git repository with all the minor release updates, but it’s a little slow to interact with and is probably intended for them to work on and not for constant use in deployment. For rapid deployment I would instead recommend grabbing a source tarball to unpack. The build process is the same as I described in the article I wrote on HAProxy Basics, and I’m updating that article to reflect this.