I’m collecting Dutch P2000 messages sent out by Dutch emergency services to “page” them. These public FLEX-protocol based messages are broadcasted all over the Netherlands and you can receive them via a cheap DVB-T-receiver. Sometimes, when I hear a siren in my neighbourhood (or wherever in the Netherlands I am), I’m curious as to what is happening. Accessing my smartphone, connecting via VPN en accessing my Elasticsearch cluster via Kibana does mostly satisfy my curiosity, but it’s not a convenient and fast process. Then why not use one of the many P2000 websites that are out there already? I simply don’t like them enough. Also, I love to play around with frontend-stacks (so many choices!), being mostly a backend/infrastructure kind of guy. So, that got me on the look for a cheap (or preferably free-tier) container-based hosting solution that can serve P2000 messages to other curious people like me.

To set your alpine-based container to output the date in your favorite local timezone, pass it the TZ=Europe/Amsterdam environment variable and also install the tzdata package using apk. A date command will then give you your local time instead of (the default) UTC time.