https://andypowell00.github.io/AP CodingBlog of a programmer, mostly C#, AI, APIs, and other fun discoveries for my reference and others. 2025-03-07T14:26:07-05:00 Andy Powell https://andypowell00.github.io/ Jekyll © 2025 Andy Powell /assets/img/favicons/favicon.ico /assets/img/favicons/favicon-96x96.png Using Redis for a cache with a Next.JS app2025-01-30T15:21:59-05:00 2025-01-30T15:21:59-05:00 https://andypowell00.github.io/posts/Redis-NextJS/ Andy Powell Migrating from unstable_cache to Redis in Next.js Why Redis? When deploying Next.js applications on Vercel, the built-in unstable_cache can be unreliable. Redis provides a more robust caching solution with several advantages: Persistent storage across server restarts and deployments Configurable Time-To-Live (TTL) for cache entries Reliable performance at scale Consistent behavior a... Utilizing fail2ban on Lightsail Wordpress Site2025-01-30T15:21:59-05:00 2025-01-30T15:21:59-05:00 https://andypowell00.github.io/posts/Fail2Ban-Wordpress/ Andy Powell Securing Your WordPress Site on AWS Lightsail with Fail2Ban Introduction Fail2Ban is a powerful intrusion prevention tool that helps protect your server from brute-force attacks by monitoring log files and temporarily banning IP addresses that show malicious behavior. We ran into an increase of bot activity on a particular site, which lead me to start researching some extra ways to mitigate ... Setting up a simple Azure DevOps Pipeline2025-01-15T15:21:59-05:00 2025-01-15T15:21:59-05:00 https://andypowell00.github.io/posts/Azure-Pipeline/ Andy Powell Migrating from GitHub Actions to Azure DevOps Pipelines for .NET Deployment Recently, I transitioned my .NET Core API deployment from GitHub Actions to Azure DevOps Pipelines. While the process seemed straightforward at first, I ran into a few challenges—particularly around self-hosted agents, deployment methods, and ensuring my API was properly updated. In this post, I’ll walk through th... Adding Unit Tests to Azure Pipeline2024-12-12T15:21:59-05:00 2024-12-12T15:21:59-05:00 https://andypowell00.github.io/posts/Unit-Tests-Azure-Pipeline/ Andy Powell Adding Unit Tests to Your Azure DevOps Pipeline Looking to make my Azure DevOps pipeline more efficient, I wanted to start with just auto running my Unit Tests by adding a task that focuses on running dotnet test in the build stage before deployment. Updating azure-pipelines.yml Below is an updated azure-pipelines.yml file: trigger: branches: include: - main # Runs on main branc... Creating a New Collection with TTL in Cosmos MongoDB2024-12-12T13:00:00-05:00 2024-12-12T13:00:00-05:00 https://andypowell00.github.io/posts/CosmosDB-Azure/ Andy Powell When working on my dashboard application, I needed to set up a new collection in Cosmos DB using the MongoDB API. One important feature I wanted was a Time to Live (TTL) policy for documents, ensuring automatic expiration after 35 days. I was looking into just writing a script, but this seemed like the best way forward. The TTL does not affect existing documents, so you either have to do an u...