Patterns for Web Development

Request handling (GET and POST)

• Always redirect after a POST

Coding Conventions

• The convention I’m using is that URLs without a trailing slash are "action" URLs which modify the database.

Site Operation

• always run your web apps as a nonroot user

• Each site (staging, live, or any other website) has its own folder. Within that we have a separate folder for the source code, the database, and the static files

• That’s the Debian/Ubuntu preferred way of saving Nginx configurations—​the real config file in sites-available, and a symlink in sites-enabled; the idea is that it makes it easier to switch sites on or off.