Few days back one of my friend's project database credentials got exposed. After some investigation, we realized that it is because of the .git config commit. I would recommend configuring your sensitive credentials with operating system environment variables. This way you can protect information from the code base. This post will explain how to set up an environment variable for an Apache web server.

Pocketbase is an open-source application and alternative to Google Firebase. This is offering realtime database, authentication(including social), and file storage for your next web and mobile application. This article is about how to host the Pocketbase application server which usually runs at 8090 port with your existing application server. If you are using Linux and Apache based server, the following steps will help you to virtual host different ports host to the default 80 port.

Google cloud platform is a cloud computing service and a perfect alternate for Amazon Webservices. Nowadays most of the top companies are moving towards Google services for better results. Google cloud platform is offering a $300 free trial for one year. This post is about how to set up VM instances with firewall rules in addition to creating a XAMPP server with Ubuntu operation system. This is almost similar to my previous article about the Amazon EC2 setup. Try this and enrich your side projects.

Microsoft Azure is another great alternate cloud service and it is offering a one-year free trial with $200 credit. This post is almost similar to my previous Cloud service article. This will explain to you how to set up a virtual machine instance with secure firewall rules and setting up a XAMPP(PHP Maria DB Server) using the Ubuntu operating system. Microsoft Azure has lots of free project management services. This is very useful for your side projects.