Last year I announced Blunt, a pointless Haskell tool. By “pointless”, I mean that it converts Haskell expressions between pointfree and pointful styles. The pointfree style is sometimes called pointless.

This year I am happy to say that Blunt now lives pointfree.info, which is much more memorable than its old URL. The guts of the site have stayed mostly the same, but the way that it is deployed is completely different.

I used to deploy Blunt to Heroku for two reasons. One, it was free. And two, it was easy, once it was set up. But setting it up was a huge pain and not something that I wanted to do again. And Heroku changed their free plan to only allow 18 hours per 24 hours. Even though Blunt wasn’t exactly high availability, I wanted it to be available whenever.

So I needed a new deployment solution. Being a fan of Docker containers, I looked for somewhere to host them and found Joyent’s Triton infrastructure. For less than $3 a month they could run a container for me.

I spent about an hour setting up both Docker and Joyent. Then I spent another hour waiting for my newly purchased domain name’s DNS changes to propagate. Finally I waiting a third hour for Docker Hub to build my image. Once all that was done, I had my container running and available at pointfree.info.

I really enjoyed containerizing my Haskell application and deploying it to Triton. I highly recommend it!