So every once in a while I shuffle around configurations that should be default (for the way I use things). One of these such configurations is my Emacs configurations files, as well as bashrc scripts or other useful scripts that I like to log around. I thought to myself that it would be great if a dead-simple service thought it would be a good idea to store these files for me, so that when I’m at a console without an x-server, or just don’t want to go hunt for files, I could easily remember a URL and either download some, or all of my configuration files and small scripts.

Configr.io was born from that pain-point. Configr.io is a simple service that stores configuration files, and makes them publicly accessible. Simple as that.

With the emergence of various services/programs like Docker, Vagrant, Chef, Puppet to mainstream popularity/use, I think that managing and semantically understand configuration files will be more and more important. As we abstract away from doing manual installs, I think useful data can be extracted from the configuration metadata that will arise.Though I have some more plans for the service, I will get to that a little later 😉 .

Configr.io was a great chance for me to get more acquainted with some companies,technologies,frameworks and methodologies that I haven’t yet got a chance to work with in a real production site:

– Non-managed VPS (Trying out INIZ)

– NGINX

– NodeJS

– ExpressJS

– ForeverJS

– Grunt

– Stripe

– Postgres (I’m far more familiar with MySQL)

While I think the project turned out pretty lackluster, I did one thing wrong — I really didn’t check if anyone needed this product. Though, I will be using it, so I guess I need it — but I still didn’t really do any market research, and to be honest, It’s kind of fine if it fails, or nobody likes it, or anything, mostly because I am absolutely in love with my INIZ web hosting. Not only is it cheap, I have had almost no downtime, awesome access and ease of setup, and was able to get everything up and running very quickly!

The server was up and running in a day (they took my credit card payment and immediately issued me a server so I was free to work and start getting things set up), within a couple days I learned the basics of Express (I’m no stranger to web frameworks, and at some point they all look very similar), and started getting my development environment set up in the nodejs/express way, and incorporated grunt. I am pleased to say that the workflow was actually pretty amazing, and Grunt is an awesome tool, and just fits to nicely with NPM and the whole node ecosystem.

After working on it for a few weekends (and honestly, not very hard) — I figured it was time to release it (I feel like I’ve got somewhat of an MVP ready) — and make it as easy as possible for people to use it.

Well, here goes nothing!