Phage Directory Phage Directory

Historical software credits

Historical archive: This is the software list from our earlier website. It describes the tools and hosting used then, rather than the current site.

Open Source Tools, Credits, and Tech Stack

Phage Directory runs on a lot of software, most of it's open source. Here are the tools we use to make it all happen on a day to day basis.

Software Tools

These are tools we use from a day to day basis to keep the website going, and we're doing it for almost $0/month, as we're using the free tier for almost every tool (Airtable is the exception, since we have a lot of data).

Website Tools

Because we're a two-person team, we stack is chosen to make us run as efficiently, cheapest, and with hopefully the fewest amount of headaches as possible. For this reason, we run a JAMstack setup, where most of the site runs on the front-end with VueJS, and the content is handled with a few APIs (Airtable) and serverless functions (http://webtask.io), and served as a static page (Surge.sh).

  • Google Analytics to help us understand who uses the website (retargeting, ads and deeper analytics are turned off)
  • Segment is used only as a middle layer to send data to Google Analytics
  • Airtable is for CRM and CMS purposes. (Yep, all our site data runs off of Airtable)
  • Github is our open source code repo and versioning
  • Sublime Text because I haven't switched to VS Code yet
  • Webtask Serverless for running server-side tasks, like generating the RSS feed or processing form requests
  • Surge.sh was our previous, trusty hosting solution. It's great for static pages (Phage Directory v1 and v2) but we started growing too big for Surge. Now we use Zeit Now for v3.
  • Zeit Now is our hosting solution for v3. It compiles your frontend into lambdas, and lets you further write lambdas. Those are what powers the early version of the Phage Directory API in v3.
  • Mailgun runs our automatic email system
  • Markdown: is used for our site content, publication content and weekly Capsid & Tail
  • Fontello was used to create a custom icon font
  • Font Awesome for the awesome brand and UX icons
  • Entype icons are also used
  • Academicons was used for the awesome academic icons, like ResearchGate or Orcid
Open Source

The site relies on a whole truckload of open source tools and frameworks to make it work. Here's what powers the Phage Directory website: