Tag: Tips

"Platform" by "Brian Crawford" on Flickr

Cross Platform Decision Records/Architectural Decision Records – a HowTo Guide

JonTheNiceGuy Leave a comment

Several months ago, I wrote a post talking about Architectural Decision Records with adr-tools, but since then I’ve moved on a bit with things, so I wanted to write about alternatives.

Late edit 2021-12-14: I released (v0.0.1) my own rust-based application for creating Decision Records. Please feel free to make pull requests, raise issues, etc :)

I also wanted to comment a bit on why I use the term “Decision Records” (always “decision record”, never “DR” due to the overloading of that particular abbreviation) rather than “Architectural Decision Records” (ADR), but I’ll get to that towards the end of the post 😊

Using Decision Records the Manual Way

A decision record is usually basically a text file, using the “Markdown” format, which has several “standard” blocks of text in it. The “npryce” version, which most people use, has the following sections in it:

  1. Title (as a “level 1” heading) which also holds the date of the record.
  2. A (level 2 heading) status section, holding the status of this decision (and any links to documents which supersede or relate to this decision).
  3. The context of the decision.
  4. The decision.
  5. The consequences of that decision.

So, somewhat understandably, your organisational tooling should support you making your own documents, without using those tools.

There are conventions about how the index-critical details will be stored:

  1. Your title block should follow the format # 1. Decision Title. The # symbol means it is the primary heading for the document, then the number, which should probably be lower than 9999, is used as an index for linking to other records and then the text of the title should also be the name of the file you’ve created. In this case, it will likely be 0001-decision-title.md.
  2. The status will usually be one of: Approved or Proposed. If a document is superseded, it should remove this status. Any other link type will live under the line showing the current status.

So, there’s no reason why you couldn’t just use this template for any files you create:

# NUMBER. TITLE

Date: yyyy-mm-dd

## Status

Accepted
Superseded by [2. Another Decision](0002-another-decision.md)

## Context

The context of the decision.

## Decision

The decision.

## Consequences

The consequences of that decision.

BUT, that’s not very automated, is it?

ADRs using Bash

Of course, most people making decision records use the Bash command line….. right? Oh, perhaps not. I’ll get back to you in a tic. If you’re using Bash, the “npryce” tooling I mentioned above is the same one I wrote about those months ago. So, read that, and then crack on with your ADRs.

ADRs using Powershell

So, if you’re using Windows, you might be tempted to find a decision record tool for Powershell. If so, I found “ajoberstar” on Github had produced just such a thing, and you “just”, as an administrator, run:

Install-Module -Name ArchitectureDecisionRecords
Set-ExecutionPolicy -ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned

Then edit the script you installed (in C:\Program Files\WindowsPowerShell\Modules\ArchitectureDecisionRecords\0.1.1\ArchitectureDecisionRecords.psm1) and search-and-replace UTF8NoBOM for UTF8 and then save it…

And then you can run commands like Initialize-Adr or New-Adr -Title 'Use a database'. However, this script was last touched on 2nd July 2018, and although I’ve raised a few issues, they don’t seem to have been resolved (see also replacing UTF8NoBOM above).

ADRs using VSCode

By far, so far, the best tooling I’ve seen in this space is the adr-tools extension for VSCode. It too, however, has it’s own caveats, but these are not disastrous. Essentially, you need to create a path in which you store the template to use. You can get this from his own repo, here: https://github.com/vincent-ledu/adr-template.git and put it in .adr-templates in the root directory of your project. This, however, is customizable, by going to the settings for your user or workspace, searching for ADR and adjusting the paths accordingly.

A settings pane showing the Adr paths in your project’s tree

To add a new decision record, press Ctrl+Shift+P or click the cog icon in the sidebar, and select “Command Palette…”

Opening the Command Palette in VS Code

Then start typing “adr” to select from “ADR New”, “ADR Init”, “ADR Change Status” or “ADR Link”.

The Command Palette showing your options for commands to run

All of these will walk you through some options at the top of the screen, either asking for some text input, or asking you to select between options.

You may be tempted to just run this up now, and select “ADR New”, and it’ll look like it’s working, but, you first need to have obtained the template and create the directory structure. Selecting “ADR Init” will create the directory structure for your project and will try to perform a git clone of the repo mentioned above, but if you are already in a git repository, or you have some form of MITM proxy in the way, this will also break silently. The easiest thing to do is to either manually create the paths in your tree, according to what you have set or selected, or just run the ADR init, and then obtain the template from the git repo.

Talking of templates, in the previous scripts, the script would come with a template file built-in, and it would do a simple string replacement of the values “NUMBER”, “TITLE” and “STATUS”. With this script it instead uses it’s own template, which is stored in your project’s file tree, and uses parameter substitution, finding strings wrapped in pairs of curled braces (like {{ this }}). The downside to this is that you can’t just reuse the template I listed above… but no worries, get the file from the repo and stick it in your tree where it’s expecting it, or let the adr init function clone the template into your path – job done.

What other options are there?

Well, actually, this comes down to why I’m using the term “decision records” rather than “architectural decision record”, because I’m writing my own tool, and all the “adr” namespaces on Github were taken, and I’d seen a fair amount of posts suggesting that the “A” in “ADR” should stand for “Any”.. and I figured why should it exist at all?

The tool I’ve written so far is written in Javascript, and is starting from a (somewhat loose) TDD development process. It’s here: https://github.com/DecisionRecords/javascript-decision-records

Why Javascript? Frankly, I needed to learn a modern programming language, and wanted to apply it to a domain I was interested in. It’s currently not complete, it creates the record path and a configuration file, and I’m currently writing the functions to create new records. Also, because it’s Javascript, in theory I can also use the internals to create a VSCode extension with this later… MUCH later!

Why re-implement this at all? Firstly, it looks like most of the development work on those projects halted around 3-4 years ago, with no further interest in updating them to resolve bugs and issues. I didn’t want to fork the projects as-is, as I think they were largely written to scratch a particular itch (which is fine!) but they all miss key things I want to provide, like proper unit testing (only the npryce project comes close to this), internationalisation (none of them have this) and the ability to use a company- or project-wide template (only the VSCode extension does this). I also saw requests to support alternative file formats (like Restructured Text, which was completely rejected) and realised that if you built the script in such a way that these alternate formats could be used, then there was no reason not to support that.

In summary

There are tools you can use, whatever platform you’re using. My preference is the VSCode extension, and eventually will (hopefully!!) be the script I’m writing… but it’s not ready, yet.

Featured image is “Platform” by “Brian Crawford” on Flickr and is released under a CC-BY license.

"Bat Keychain" by "Nishant Khurana" on Flickr

Unit Testing Bash scripts with BATS-Core

JonTheNiceGuy Leave a comment

I’m taking a renewed look into Unit Testing the scripts I’m writing, because (amongst other reasons) it’s important to know what expected behaviours you break when you make a change to a script!

A quick detour – what is Unit Testing?

A unit test is where you take one component of your script, and prove that, given specific valid or invalid tests, it works in an expected way.

For example, if you normally run sum_two_digits 1 1 and expect to see 2 as the result, with a unit test, you might write the following tests:

  • sum_two_digits should fail (no arguments)
  • sum_two_digits 1 should fail (no arguments)
  • sum_two_digits 1 1 should pass!
  • sum_two_digits 1 1 1 may fail (too many arguments), may pass (only sum the first two digits)
  • sum_two_digits a b should fail (not numbers)

and so on… you might have seen this tweet, for example

https://twitter.com/sempf/status/514473420277694465
Things you might unit test in a bar.

Preparing your environment

Everyone’s development methodology differs slightly, but I create my scripts in a git repository.

I start from a new repo, like this:

mkdir my_script
cd my_script
git init

echo '# `my_script`' > README.md
echo "" >> README.md
echo "This script does awesome things for awesome people. CC-0 licensed." >> README.md
git add README.md
git commit -m 'Added README'

echo '#!/bin/bash' > my_script.sh
chmod +x my_script.sh
git add my_script.sh
git commit -m 'Added initial commit of "my_script.sh"'

OK, so far, so awesome. Now let’s start adding BATS. (Yes, this is not necessarily the “best” way to create your “test_all.sh” script, but it works for my case!)

git submodule add https://github.com/bats-core/bats-core.git test/libs/bats
git commit -m 'Added BATS library'
echo '#!/bin/bash' > test/test_all.sh
echo 'cd "$(dirname "$0")" || true' >> test/test_all.sh
echo 'libs/bats/bin/bats $(find *.bats -maxdepth 0 | sort)' >> test/test_all.sh
chmod +x test/test_all.sh
git add test/test_all.sh
git commit -m 'Added test runner'

Now, let’s write two simple tests, one which fails and one which passes, so I can show you what this looks like. Create a file called test/prove_bats.bats

#!/usr/bin/env ./libs/bats/bin/bats

@test "This will fail" {
  run false
  [ "$status" -eq 0 ]
}

@test "This will pass" {
  run true
  [ "$status" -eq 0 ]
}

And now, when we run this with test/test_all.sh we get the following:

 ✗ This will fail
   (in test file prove_bats.bats, line 5)
     `[ "$status" -eq 0 ]' failed
 ✓ This will pass

2 tests, 1 failure

Excellent, now we know that our test library works, and we have a rough idea of what a test looks like. Let’s build something a bit more awesome. But first, let’s remove prove_bats.bats file, with rm test/prove_bats.bats.

Starting to develop “real” tests

Let’s create a new file, test/path_checking.bats. Our amazing script needs to have a configuration file, but we’re not really sure where in the path it is! Let’s get building!

#!/usr/bin/env ./libs/bats/bin/bats

# This runs before each of the following tests are executed.
setup() {
  source "../my_script.sh"
  cd "$BATS_TEST_TMPDIR"
}

@test "No configuration file is found" {
  run find_config_file
  echo "Status received: $status"
  echo "Actual output:"
  echo "$output"
  [ "$output" == "No configuration file found." ]
  [ "$status" -eq 1 ]
}

When we run this test (using test/test_all.sh), we get this response:

 ✗ No configuration file is found
   (in test file path_checking.bats, line 14)
     `[ "$output" == "No configuration file found." ]' failed with status 127
   Status received: 127
   Actual output:
   /tmp/my_script/test/libs/bats/lib/bats-core/test_functions.bash: line 39: find_config_file: command not found

1 test, 1 failure

Uh oh! Well, I guess that’s because we don’t have a function called find_config_file yet in that script. Ah, yes, let’s quickly divert into making your script more testable, by making use of functions!

Bash script testing with functions

When many people write a bash script, you’ll see something like this:

#!/bin/bash
echo "Validate 'uname -a' returns a string: "
read_some_value="$(uname -a)"
if [ -n "$read_some_value" ]
then
  echo "Yep"
fi

While this works, what it’s not good for is testing each of those bits (and also, as a sideline, if your script is edited while you’re running it, it’ll break, because Bash parses each line as it gets to it!)

A good way of making this “better” is to break this down into functions. At the very least, create a “main” function, and put everything into there, like this:

#!/bin/bash
function main() {
  echo "Validate 'uname -a' returns a string: "
  read_some_value="$(uname -a)"
  if [ -n "$read_some_value" ]
  then
    echo "Yep"
  fi
}

main

By splitting this into a “main” function, which is called when it runs, at the very least, a change to the script during operation won’t break it… but it’s still not very testable. Let’s break down some more of this functionality.

#!/bin/bash
function read_uname() {
  echo "$(uname -a)"
}
function test_response() {
  if [ -n "$1" ]
  then
    echo "Yep"
  fi
}
function main() {
  echo "Validate 'uname -a' returns a string: "
  read_some_value="$(read_uname)"
  test_response "$read_some_value"
}

main

So, what does this give us? Well, in theory we can test each part of this in isolation, but at the moment, bash will execute all those functions straight away, because they’re being called under “main”… so we need to abstract main out a bit further. Let’s replace that last line, main into a quick check.

if [[ "${BASH_SOURCE[0]}" == "${0}" ]]
then
  main
fi

Stopping your code from running by default with some helper variables

The special value $BASH_SOURCE[0] will return the name of the file that’s being read at this point, while $0 is the name of the script that was executed. As a little example, I’ve created two files, source_file.sh and test_sourcing.sh. Here’s source_file.sh:

#!/bin/bash

echo "Source: ${BASH_SOURCE[0]}"
echo "File: ${0}"

And here’s test_sourcing.sh:

#!/bin/bash
source ./source_file.sh

What happens when we run the two of them?

user@host:/tmp/my_script$ ./source_file.sh
Source: ./source_file.sh
File: ./source_file.sh
user@host:/tmp/my_script$ ./test_sourcing.sh
Source: ./source_file.sh
File: ./test_sourcing.sh

So, this means if we source our script (which we’ll do with our testing framework), $BASH_SOURCE[0] will return a different value from $0, so it knows not to invoke the “main” function, and we can abstract that all into more test code.

Now we’ve addressed all that lot, we need to start writing code… where did we get to? Oh yes, find_config_file: command not found

Walking up a filesystem tree

The function we want needs to look in this path, and all the parent paths for a file called “.myscript-config“. To do this, we need two functions – one to get the directory name of the “real” directory, and the other to do the walking up the path.

function _absolute_directory() {
  # Change to the directory provided, or if we can't, return with error 1
  cd "$1" || return 1
  # Return the full pathname, resolving symbolic links to "real" paths
  pwd -P
}

function find_config_file() {
  # Get the "real" directory name for this path
  absolute_directory="$(_absolute_directory ".")"
  # As long as the directory name isn't "/" (the root directory), and the
  #  return value (config_path) isn't empty, check for the config file.
  while [ "$absolute_directory" != "/" ] && 
        [ -n "$absolute_directory" ] && 
        [ -z "$config_path" ]
  do
    # Is the file we're looking for here?
    if [ -f "$absolute_directory/.myscript-config" ]
    then
      # Store the value
      config_path="$absolute_directory/.myscript-config"
    else
      # Get the directory name for the parent directory, ready to loop.
      absolute_directory="$(_absolute_directory "$absolute_directory/..")"
    fi
  done
  # If we've exited the loop, but have no return value, exit with an error
  if [ -z "$config_path" ]
  then
    echo "No config found. Please create .myscript-config in your project's root directory."
    # Failure states return an exit code of anything greater than 0. Success is 0.
    exit 1
  else
    # Output the result
    echo "$config_path"
  fi
}

Let’s re-run our test!

 ✗ No configuration file is found
   (in test file path_checking.bats, line 14)
     `[ "$output" == "No configuration file found." ]' failed
   Status received: 1
   Actual output:
   No config found. Please create .myscript-config in your project's root directory.

1 test, 1 failure

Uh oh! Our output isn’t what we told it to use. Fortunately, we’ve recorded the output it sent (“No config found. Please...“) so we can fix our test (or, find that output line and fix that).

Let’s fix the test! (The BATS test file just shows the test we’re amending)

@test "No configuration file is found" {
  run find_config_file
  echo "Status received: $status"
  echo "Actual output:"
  echo "$output"
  [ "$output" == "No config found. Please create .myscript-config in your project's root directory." ]
  [ "$status" -eq 1 ]
}

Fab, and now when we run it, it’s all good!

user@host:/tmp/my_script$ test/test_all.sh
 ✓ No configuration file is found

1 test, 0 failures

So, how do we test what happens when the file is there? We make a new test! Add this to your test file, or create a new one, ending .bats in the test directory.

@test "Configuration file is found and is OK" {
  touch .myscript-config
  run find_config_file
  echo "Status received: $status"
  echo "Actual output:"
  echo "$output"
  [ "$output" == "$BATS_TEST_TMPDIR/.myscript-config" ]
  [ "$status" -eq 0 ]
}

And now, when you run your test, you’ll see this:

user@host:/tmp/my_script$ test/test_all.sh
 ✓ No configuration file is found
 ✓ Configuration file is found and is OK

2 tests, 0 failures

Extending BATS

There are some extra BATS tests you can run – at the moment you’re doing manual checks of output and success or failure checks which aren’t very pretty. Let’s include the “assert” library for BATS.

Firstly, we need this library added as a submodule again.

# This module provides the formatting for the other non-core libraries
git submodule add https://github.com/bats-core/bats-support.git test/libs/bats-support
# This is the actual assertion tests library
git submodule add https://github.com/bats-core/bats-assert.git test/libs/bats-assert

And now we need to update our test. At the top of the file, under the #!/usr/bin/env line, add these:

load "libs/bats-support/load"
load "libs/bats-assert/load"

And then update your tests:

@test "No configuration file is found" {
  run find_config_file
  assert_output "No config found. Please create .myscript-config in your project's root directory."
  assert_failure
}

@test "Configuration file is found and is OK" {
  touch .myscript-config
  run find_config_file
  assert_output "$BATS_TEST_TMPDIR/.myscript-config"
  assert_success
}

Note that we removed the “echo” statements in this file. I’ve purposefully broken both types of tests (exit 1 became exit 0 and the file I’m looking for is $absolute_directory/.config instead of $absolute_directory/.myscript-config) in the source file, and now you can see what this looks like:

 ✗ No configuration file is found
   (from function `assert_failure' in file libs/bats-assert/src/assert_failure.bash, line 66,
    in test file path_checking.bats, line 15)
     `assert_failure' failed

   -- command succeeded, but it was expected to fail --
   output : No config found. Please create .myscript-config in your project's root directory.
   --

 ✗ Configuration file is found and is OK
   (from function `assert_output' in file libs/bats-assert/src/assert_output.bash, line 194,
    in test file path_checking.bats, line 21)
     `assert_output "$BATS_TEST_TMPDIR/.myscript-config"' failed

   -- output differs --
   expected : /tmp/bats-run-21332-1130Ph/suite-tmpdir-QMDmz6/file-tmpdir-path_checking.bats-nQf7jh/test-tmpdir--I3pJYk/.myscript-config
   actual   : No config found. Please create .myscript-config in your project's root directory.
   --

And so now you can see some of how to do unit testing with Bash and BATS. BATS also says you can unit test any command that can be run in a Bash environment, so have fun!

Featured image is “Bat Keychain” by “Nishant Khurana” on Flickr and is released under a CC-BY license.

"Picture in Picture" by "Mats" on Flickr

Hints and Tips when using Vagrant on Windows

JonTheNiceGuy Leave a comment

I’ve been using HashiCorp’s Vagrant with Oracle’s VirtualBox for several years (probably since 2013, if my blog posts are anything to go by), and I’ve always been pretty comfortable with how it works.

This said, when using a Windows machine running Microsoft’s Hyper-V (built into Windows since Windows 7/2018) VirtualBox is unable (by default) to run 64 bit virtual machines (thanks to Hyper-V “stealing” the VT-x/AMD-V bit from the BIOS/EFI).

Around last year or maybe even the year before, Microsoft introduced a “Hypervisior Platform” add-on, which lets VirtualBox run 64 bit machines on a Hyper-V host (more on this later). HOWEVER, it is much slower than in native mode, and can often freeze on booting…

Meanwhile, Vagrant, (a configuration file that acts as a wrapper around various hypervisors, using VirtualBox by default) boots machines in a “headless” mode by default, so you can’t see the freezing.

I’m trying to use an Ubuntu 18.04 virtual machine for various builds I’m creating, and found that I’d get a few issues on boot, so let’s get these sorted out.

VirtualBox can’t start 64bit virtual machines when Hyper-V is installed.

You need to confirm that certain Windows features are enabled, including “Hyper-V” and “Windows Hypervisor Platform”. Confirm you’re running at least Windows 10 version 1803 which is the first release with the “Windows Hypervisor Platform”.

GUI mode

Run winver to bring up this box. Confirm the version number is greater than 1803. Mine is 1909.

A screenshot of the “winver” command, highlighting the version number, which in this case shows 1909, but needs to show at least 1803.

Right click on the start menu, and select “Apps and Features”. Click on “Programs and Features”.

The settings panel found by right clicking the “Start Menu” and selecting “Apps and Features”. Note the desired next step – “Programs and Features” is highlighted.

In the “Programs and Features” window, click on “Turn Windows Features on or off”. Note the shield icon here indicates that administrative access is required, and you may be required to authenticate to the machine to progress past this stage.

A fragment of the “Programs and Features” window, with the “Turn Windows features on or off” link highlighted.

Next, ensure that the following “Windows Features” are enabled; “Hyper-V”, “Virtual Machine Platform” and “Windows Hypervisor Platform”. Click on “OK” to install these features, if they’re not already installed.

A screen capture of the “Turn Windows features on or off” dialogue box, with certain features obscured and others highlighted.

Note that once you’ve pressed “OK”, you’ll likely need to reboot your machine, if any of these features were not already installed.

CLI mode

Right click on the start menu, and start an Administrative Powershell session.

Run the command Get-ComputerInfo | select WindowsVersion. You should get a response which looks like this:

WindowsVersion
--------------
1909

Note that the version number needs to be greater than 1803.

Next, find the names of the features you need to install. These features have region specific names, so outside EN-GB, these names may not match your requirements!

Run the command Get-WindowsOptionalFeature -online | select FeatureName,State and you’re looking for the following lines (this has been cropped to just what you need):

FeatureName                                     State
-----------                                     -----
HypervisorPlatform                            Enabled
VirtualMachinePlatform                        Enabled
Microsoft-Hyper-V-All                         Enabled

If any of these three features are not enabled, run Enable-WindowsOptionalFeature -online -FeatureName x where “x” is the name of the feature, listed in the above text block, you want to install. For example: Enable-WindowsOptionalFeature -online -FeatureName HypervisorPlatform,VirtualMachinePlatform,Microsoft-Hyper-V-All. If you run this when they’re already enabled, it should return RestartNeeded : False, but otherwise you’re likely to need to reboot.

After the reboot

After you’ve rebooted, and you start a 64 bit virtual machine in VirtualBox, you’ll see this icon in the bottom corner.

A screen grab of the VirtualBox Status Bar, highlighting the “Slow Mode” icon representing the CPU

Booting the Virtual Machine with Vagrant fails because it takes too long to boot

This was historically a big issue with Vagrant and VirtualBox, particularly with Windows Vagrant boxes, but prior to the Hyper-V/VirtualBox solution, it’d been largely fixed (or at least, I wasn’t seeing it!) There is a “standard” timeout for booting a Virtual Machine, I think at approximately 5 minutes, but I might be wrong. To make this “issue” stop occurring, add this config.vm.boot_timeout = 0 line to your Vagrantfile, like this:

Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|
  config.vm.boot_timeout = 0
end

This says to Vagrant, don’t worry how long it takes to boot, just keep waiting until it does. Yes, it will be slower, but it should get there in the end!

Booting the Virtual Maching with Vagrant does not fail, but it never authenticates with your Private Key.

Your VM may sit at this block for quite a while:

==> default: Waiting for machine to boot. This may take a few minutes...
    default: SSH address: 127.0.0.1:2222
    default: SSH username: vagrant
    default: SSH auth method: private key

If this occurs, you may find that your virtual machine has hung during the boot process… but weirdly, a simple work-around to this is to ensure that the VirtualBox GUI is open, and that you’ve got a block like this (config.vm.provider / vb.gui=true / end) in your Vagrantfile:

Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|
  config.vm.provider "virtualbox" do |vb|
    vb.gui = true
  end
end

This forces VirtualBox to open a window with your Virtual Machine’s console on it (much like having a monitor attached to real hardware). You don’t need to interact with it, but any random hangs or halts on your virtual machine may be solved just by bringing this window, or the VirtualBox Machines GUI, to the foreground.

Sometimes you may see, when this happens, a coredump or section of kernel debugging code on the console. Don’t worry about this!

Vagrant refuses to SSH to your virtual machine when using the vagrant ssh command.

Provisioning works like a treat, and you can SSH into the virtual machine from any other environment, but, when you run vagrant ssh, you get an error about keys not being permitted or usable. This is fixable by adding a single line, either to your system or user -wide environment variables, or by adding a line to your Vagrantfile.

The environment variable is VAGRANT_PREFER_SYSTEM_BIN, and by setting this to 0, it will use bundled versions of ssh or rsync instead of using any versions provided by Windows.

You can add a line like this ENV['VAGRANT_PREFER_SYSTEM_BIN']="0" to your Vagrantfile, outside of the block Vagrant.configure…end, like this:

ENV['VAGRANT_PREFER_SYSTEM_BIN']="0"
Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|
end

Sources

Featured image is “Picture in Picture” by “Mats” on Flickr and is released under a CC-BY-SA license.

"2015_12_06_Visé_135942" by "Norbert Schnitzler" on Flickr

Idea for Reusable “Custom Data” templates across multiple modules with Terraform

JonTheNiceGuy 1 Comment

A few posts ago I wrote about building Windows virtual machines with Terraform, and a couple of days ago, “YoureInHell” on Twitter reached out and asked what advice I’d give about having several different terraform modules use the same basic build of custom data.

They’re trying to avoid putting the same template file into several repos (I suspect so that one team can manage the “custom-data”, “user-data” or “cloud-init” files, and another can manage the deployment terraform files), and asked if I had any suggestions.

I had three ideas.

Using a New Module

This was my initial thought; create a new module called something like “Standard Build File”, and this build file contains just the following terraform file, and a template file called “build.tmpl”.

variable "someKey" {
  default = "someVar"
}

variable "hostName" {
  default = "hostName"
}

variable "unsetVar" {}

output "template" {
  value = templatefile("build.tmpl",
    {
      someKey  = var.someKey
      hostName = var.hostName
      unsetVar = var.unsetVar
    }
  )
}

Now, in your calling module, you can do:

module "buildTemplate" {
  source   = "git::https://git.example.net/buildTemplate.git?ref=latestLive"
  # See https://www.terraform.io/docs/language/modules/sources.html
  #   for more details on how to specify the source of this module
  unsetVar = "Set To This String"
}

output "RenderedTemplate" {
  value = module.buildTemplate.template
}

And that means that you can use the module.buildTemplate.template anywhere you’d normally specify your templateFile, and get a consistent, yet customizable template (and note, because I specified a particular tag, you can use that to move to the “current latest” or “the version we released into live on YYYY-MM-DD” by using a tag, or a commit ref.)

Now, the downside to this is that you’ve now got a whole separate module for creating your instances that needs to be maintained. What are our other options?

Git Submodules for your template

I use Git Submodules a LOT for my code. It’s a bit easy to get into a state with them, particularly if you’re not great at keeping on top of them, but… if you are OK with them, you’d create a repo, again, let’s use “https://git.example.net/buildTemplate.git” as our git repo, and put your template in there. In your terraform git repo, you’d run this command: git submodule add https://git.example.net/buildTemplate.git and this would add a directory to your repo called “buildTemplate” that you can use your templatefile function in Terraform against (like this: templatefile("buildTemplate/build.tmpl", {someVar="var"})).

Now, this means that you’ve effectively got two git repos in one tree, and if any changes occur in your submodule repo, you’d need to do git checkout main ; git pull to get the latest updates from your main branch, and when you check it out initially on another machine, you’ll need to do git clone https://git.example.net/terraform --recurse-submodules to get the submodules populated at the same time.

A benefit to this is that because it’s “inline” with the rest of your tree, if you need to make any changes to this template, it’s clearly where it’s supposed to be in your tree, you just need to remember about the submodule when it comes to making PRs and suchforth.

How about that third idea?

Keep it simple, stupid 😁

Why bother with submodules, or modules from a git repo? Terraform can be quite easy to over complicate… so why not create all your terraform files in something like this structure:

project\build.tmpl
project\web_servers\main.tf
project\logic_servers\main.tf
project\database_servers\main.tf

And then in each of your terraform files (web_servers, logic_servers and database_servers) just reference the file in your project root, like this: templatefile("../build.tmpl", {someVar="var"})

The downside to this is that you can’t as easily farm off the control of that build script to another team, and they’d be making (change|pull|merge) requests against the same repo as you… but then again, isn’t that the idea for functional teams? 😃

Featured image is “2015_12_06_Visé_135942” by “Norbert Schnitzler” on Flickr and is released under a CC-BY-SA license.

"DeBugged!" by "Randy Heinitz" on Flickr

Debugging Bash Scripts

JonTheNiceGuy 1 Comment

Yesterday I was struggling a bit with a bash script I was writing. I needed to stop it from running flat out through every loop, and I wanted to see what certain values were at key points in the script.

Yes, I know I could use “read” to pause the script and “echo” to print values, but that leaves a lot of mess that I need to clean up afterwards… so I went looking for something else I could try.

You can have extensive debug statements, which are enabled with a --debug flag or environment variable… but again, messy.

You can run bash -x ./myscript.sh – and, indeed, I do frequently do that… but that shows you the commands which were run at each point, not what the outcome is of each of those commands.

If my problem had been a syntax one, I could have installed shellcheck, which is basically a linter for Bash and other shell scripting languages, but no, I needed more detail about what was happening during the processing.

Instead, I wanted something like xdebug (from PHP)… and I found Bash Debug for VSCode. This doesn’t even need you to install any scripts or services on the target machine – it’s interactive, and has a “watch” section, where you either highlight and right-click a variable expression (like $somevar or ${somevar}) to see when it changes. You can see where in the “callstack” you are and see what values are registered by that script.

Shellcheck shows me problems in my code…
But Bash Debug helps me to find out what values are at specific points in the code.

All in all, a worthy addition to my toolbelt!

Featured image is “DeBugged!” by “Randy Heinitz” on Flickr and is released under a CC-BY license.

"Exam" by "Alberto G." on Flickr

My no-spoilers thoughts on the GitLab Certified Associate certification course and exam

JonTheNiceGuy Leave a comment

On Wednesday, 21st April, I saw a link to a blog post in a chat group for the Linux Lads podcast. This blog post included a discount code to make the GitLab Certified Associate course and exam free. I signed up, and then shared the post to colleagues.

Free GitLab certification course and exam – until 30th April 2021.

GitLab has created a “Certified Associate” certification course which normally costs $650, but is available for free until 30th April using the discount code listed on this blog post and is available for one year after purchase (or free purchase).

I’ve signed up for the course today, and will be taking the 6 hour course, which covers:

Section 1: Self-Study – Introduction to GitLab

* GitLab Overview
* GitLab Comparison
* GitLab Components and Navigation
* Demos and Hands On Exercises

Section 2: Self-Study – Using Git and GitLab

* Git Basics
* Basic Code Creation in GitLab
* GitLab’s CI/CD Functions
* GitLab’s Package and Release Functions
* GitLab Security Scanning

Section 3: Certification Assessments

* GitLab Certified Associate Exam Instructions
* GitLab Certified Associate Knowledge Exam
* GitLab Certified Associate Hands On Exam
* Final Steps

You don’t need your own GitLab environment – you get one provided to you as part of the course.

Another benefit to this course is that you’ll learn about Git as part of the course, so if you’re looking to do any code development, infrastructure as code, documentation as code, or just learning how to store any content in a version control system – this will teach you how 😀

Good luck to everyone participating in the course!

After sharing this post, the GitLab team amended the post to remove the discount code as they were significantly oversubscribed! I’ve heard rumours that it’s possible to find the code, either on Gitlab’s own source code repository, or perhaps using Archive.org’s wayback machine, but I’ve not tried!

On Friday I started the course and completed it yesterday. The rest of this post will be my thoughts on the course itself, and the exam.

Signing up for the course and getting started

Signing up was pretty straightforward. It wasn’t clear that you had a year between when you enrolled for the course and until you first opened the content, but that once you’d opened the link to use the Gitlab demo environment, you had 21 days to use it. You’re encouraged to sign up for the demo environment on the first stage, thereby limiting you to the 21 days from that point. I suspect that if you re-visit that link on a second or third time, you’d get fresh credentials, so no real disaster there, but it does make you feel a bit under pressure to use the environment.

First impressions

The training environment is pretty standard, as far as corporate training goes. You have a side-bar showing the modules you need to complete before the end of the course, and as you scroll down through each module, you get various different media-types arriving, including youtube videos, fade-in text, flashcards which require clicking on and side-scrolling presentation cards. (Honestly, I do wonder whether this is particularly accessible to those with visual or motor impairments… I hope so, but I don’t know how I’d check!)

As you progress through each module, in the sidebar to the left, a circle outline is slowly turned from grey to purple, and when you finish a module the outline is replaced by a filled circle with a white tick in it. At the bottom of each module is a link to the next module.

The content

You have a series of 3 sections:

  • “Introduction to Gitlab” (aka, “Corporate Propaganda” 😉) which includes the history of the GitLab project and product, how many contributors it has, what it’s primary objective is, and so on. There’s even an “Infotainment” QVC-like advert about how amazing GitLab is in this section, which is quite cute. At the end of this first section, you get a “Hands On” section, where you’re encouraged to use GitLab to create a new Project. I’ll come back to the Hands on sections after this.
  • “Using Git and Gitlab”, which you’d expect to be more hands-on but is largely more flashcards and presentation cards, each with a hands on section at the end.
  • “Certification Assessments” has two modules to explain what needs to happen (one before, one after) and then two parts to the “assessment” – a multiple-choice section which has to be answered 100% correctly to proceed, and a “hands on” exam, which is basically a collection of “perform this task” questions, which you are expected to perform in the demo environment.

Hands-on sections focus on a specific task – “create a project”, “commit code”, “create an issue”, “create a merge request” and so-on. There are no tasks which will stretch even the freshest Git user, and seeing the sorts of things that the “Auto DevOps” function can enable might interest someone who wants to use GitLab. I was somewhat disappointed that there was barely any focus on the fact that GitLab can be self-hosted, and what it takes to set something like that up.

We also get to witness the entire power (apparently) of upgrading to the “Premium” and “Ultimate” packages of GitLab’s proprietary add-ons… Epics. I jest of course, I’ve looked and there’s loads more to that upgrade!

The final exams (No Spoilers)

This is in two parts, a multiple-choice selection on a fixed set of 14 questions, with 100% accuracy required to move on to the next stage that can be retaken indefinitely, and a hands-on set of… from memory… 14ish tasks which must be completed on a project you create.

The exam is generally things about GitLab which you’ve covered in the course, but included two questions about using Git that were not covered in any of the modules. For this reason, I’d suggest when you get to those questions, open a git environment, and try each of the commands offered given the specific scenario.

Once you’ve finished the hands-on section, using the credentials you were given, you’re asked to complete a Google Forms page which includes the URL of the GitLab Project you’ve performed your work in, and the username for your GitLab Demo Environment. You submit this form, and in 7 days (apparently, although, given the take-up of the course, I’m not convinced this is an accurate number) you’ll get your result. If you fail, apparently, you’ll be invited to re-try your hands-on exam again.

At least some of the hands-on section tasks are a bit ambiguous, suggesting you should make this change on the first question, and then “merge that change into this branch” (again, from memory) in the next task.

My final thoughts

So, was it worth $650 to take this course? No, absolutely not. I realise that people have put time and effort into the content and there will be people within GitLab Inc checking the results at the end… but at most it’s worth maybe $200, and even that is probably a stretch.

If this course was listed at any price (other than free) would I have taken it? …. Probably not. It’s useful to show you can drive a GitLab environment, but if I were going for a job that needed to use Git, I’d probably point them at a project I’ve created on GitHub or GitLab, as the basics of Git are more likely to be what I’d need to show capabilities in.

Does this course teach you anything new about Git or GitLab that just using the products wouldn’t have done? Tentatively, yes. I didn’t know anything about the “Auto DevOps” feature of GitLab, I’d never used the “Quick Actions” in either issues or merge requests, and there were a couple of git command lines that were new to me… but on the whole, the course is about using a web based version control system, which I’ve been doing for >10 years.

Would this course have taught you anything about Git and GitLab if you were new to both? Yes! But I wouldn’t have considered paying $650… or even $65 for this, when YouTube has this sort of content for free!

What changes would you make to this course? For me, I’d probably introduce more content about the CI/CD elements of GitLab, I might introduce a couple of questions or a module about self-hosting and differences about the tiers (to explain why it would be worth paying $99/user/month for the additional features in the software). I’d probably also split the course up into several pieces, where each of those pieces goes towards a larger target… so perhaps there might be a “basic user” track, which is just “GitLab inc history”, “using git” and “using Gitlab for issues and changes”, then an advanced user, covering “GitLab tiers”, “GitLab CI/CD”, “Auto DevOps”, running “Git Runners”, and perhaps a Self Hosting course which adds running the service yourself, integrating GitLab with other services, and so on. You might also (as GitLab are a very open company) have a “marketing GitLab” course (for TAMs, Pre-Sales and Sales) which could also be consumed externally.

Have you passed? Yep

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"pharmacy" by "Tim Evanson" on Flickr

AWX – The Gateway Drug to Ansible Tower

JonTheNiceGuy Leave a comment

A love letter to Ansible Tower

I love Ansible… I mean, I really love Ansible. You can ask anyone, and they’ll tell you my first love is my wife, then my children… and then it’s Ansible.

OK, maybe it’s Open Source and then Ansible, but either way, Ansible is REALLY high up there.

But, while I love Ansible, I love what Ansible Tower brings to an environment. See, while you get to easily and quickly manage a fleet of machines with Ansible, Ansible Tower gives you the fine grained control over what you need to expose to your developers, your ops team, or even, in a fit of “what-did-you-just-do”-ness, your manager. (I should probably mention that Ansible Tower is actually part of a much larger portfolio of products, called Ansible Automation Platform, and there’s some hosted SaaS stuff that goes with it… but the bit I really want to talk about is Tower, so I’ll be talking about Tower and not Ansible Automation Platform. Sorry!)

Ansible Tower has a scheduling engine, so you can have a “Go” button, for deploying the latest software to your fleet, or just for the 11PM patching cycle. It has a credential store, so your teams can’t just quickly go and perform an undocumented quick fix on that “flaky” box – they need to do their changes via Ansible. And lastly, it has an inventory, so you can see that the last 5 jobs failed to deploy on that host, so maybe you’ve got a problem with it.

One thing that people don’t so much love to do, is to get a license to deploy Tower, particularly if they just want to quickly spin up a demonstration for some colleagues to show how much THEY love Ansible. And for those people, I present AWX.

The first hit is free

One of the glorious and beautiful things that RedHat did, when they bought Ansible, was to make the same assertion about the Ansible products that they make to the rest of their product line, which is… while they may sell a commercial product, underneath it will be an Open Source version of that product, and you can be part of developing and improving that version, to help improve the commercial product. Thus was released AWX.

Now, I hear the nay-sayers commenting, “but what if you have an issue with AWX at 2AM, how do you get support on that”… and to those people, I reply: “If you need support at 2AM for your box, AWX is not the tool for you – what you need is Tower.”… Um, I mean Ansible Automation Platform. However, Tower takes a bit more setting up than what I’d want to do for a quick demo, and it has a few more pre-requisites. ANYWAY, enough about dealing with the nay-sayers.

AWX is an application inside Docker containers. It’s split into three parts, the AWX Web container, which has the REST API. There’s also a PostgreSQL database inside there too, and one “Engine”, which is the separate container which gets playbooks from your version control system, asks for any dynamic inventories, and then runs those playbooks on your inventories.

I like running demos of Tower, using AWX, because it’s reasonably easy to get stood up, and it’s reasonably close to what Tower looks and behaves like (except for the logos)… and, well, it’s a good gateway to getting people interested in what Tower can do for them, without them having to pay (or spend time signing up for evaluation licenses) for the environment in the first place.

And what’s more, it can all be automated

Yes, folks, because AWX is just a set of docker containers (and an install script), and Ansible knows how to start Docker containers (and run an install script), I can add an Ansible playbook to my cloud-init script, Vagrantfile or, let’s face it, when things go really wrong, put it in a bash script for some poor keyboard jockey to install for you.

If you’re running a demo, and you don’t want to get a POC (proof of concept) or evaluation license for Ansible Tower, then the chances are you’re probably not running this on RedHat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) either. That’s OK, once you’ve sold the room on using Tower (by using AWX), you can sell them on using RHEL too. So, I’ll be focusing on using CentOS 8 instead. Partially because there’s a Vagrant box for CentOS 8, but also because I can also use CentOS 8 on AWS, where I can prove that the Ansible Script I’m putting into my Vagrantfile will also deploy nicely via Cloud-Init too. With a very small number of changes, this is likely to work on anything that runs Docker, so everything from Arch to Ubuntu… probably 😁

“OK then. How can you work this magic, eh?” I hear from the back of the room. OK, pipe down, nay-sayers.

First, install Ansible on your host. You just need to run dnf install -y ansible.

Next, you need to install Docker. This is a marked difference between AWX and Ansible Tower, as AWX is based on Docker, but Ansible Tower uses other magic to make it work. When you’re selling the benefits of Tower, note that it’s not a 1-for-1 match at this point, but it’s not a big issue. Fortunately, CentOS can install Docker Community edition quite easily. At this point, I’m swapping to using Ansible playbooks. At the end, I’ll drop a link to where you can get all this in one big blob… In fact, we’re likely to use it with our Cloud-Init deployment.

Aw yehr, here’s the good stuff

tasks:
- name: Update all packages
  dnf:
    name: "*"
    state: latest

- name: Add dependency for "yum config-manager"
  dnf:
    name: yum-utils
    state: present

- name: Add the Docker Repo
  shell: yum config-manager --add-repo https://download.docker.com/linux/centos/docker-ce.repo
  args:
    creates: /etc/yum.repos.d/docker-ce.repo
    warn: false

- name: Install Docker
  dnf:
    name:
    - docker-ce
    - docker-ce-cli
    - containerd.io
    state: present
  notify: Start Docker

That first stanza – update all packages? Well, that’s because containerd.io relies on a newer version of libseccomp, which hasn’t been built in the CentOS 8 Vagrantbox I’m using.

The next one? That ensures I can run yum config-manager to add a repo. I could use the copy module in Ansible to create the repo files so yum and/or dnf could use that instead, but… meh, this is a single line shell command.

And then we install the repo, and the docker-ce packages we require. We use the “notify” statement to trigger a handler call to start Docker, like this:

handlers:
- name: Start Docker
  systemd:
    name: docker
    state: started

Fab. We’ve got Docker. Now, let’s clone the AWX repo to our machine. Again, we’re doing this with Ansible, naturally :)

tasks:
- name: Clone AWX repo to local path
  git:
    repo: https://github.com/ansible/awx.git
    dest: /opt/awx

- name: Get latest AWX tag
  shell: |
    if [ $(git status -s | wc -l) -gt 0 ]
    then
      git stash >/dev/null 2>&1
    fi
    git fetch --tags && git describe --tags $(git rev-list --tags --max-count=1)
    if [ $(git stash list | wc -l) -gt 0 ]
    then
      git stash pop >/dev/null 2>&1
    fi
  args:
    chdir: /opt/awx
  register: latest_tag
  changed_when: false

- name: Use latest released version of AWX
  git:
    repo: https://github.com/ansible/awx.git
    dest: /opt/awx
    version: "{{ latest_tag.stdout }}"

OK, there’s a fair bit to get from this, but essentially, we clone the repo from Github, then ask (using a collection of git commands) for the latest released version (yes, I’ve been bitten by just using the head of “devel” before), and then we check out that released version.

Fab, now we can configure it.

tasks:
- name: Set or Read admin password
  set_fact:
    admin_password_was_generated: "{{ (admin_password is defined or lookup('env', 'admin_password') != '') | ternary(false, true) }}"
    admin_password: "{{ admin_password | default (lookup('env', 'admin_password') | default(lookup('password', 'pw.admin_password chars=ascii_letters,digits length=20'), true) ) }}"

- name: Configure AWX installer
  lineinfile:
    path: /opt/awx/installer/inventory
    regexp: "^#?{{ item.key }}="
    line: "{{ item.key }}={{ item.value }}"
  loop:
  - key: "awx_web_hostname"
    value: "{{ ansible_fqdn }}"
  - key: "pg_password"
    value: "{{ lookup('password', 'pw.pg_password chars=ascii_letters,digits length=20') }}"
  - key: "rabbitmq_password"
    value: "{{ lookup('password', 'pw.rabbitmq_password chars=ascii_letters,digits length=20') }}"
  - key: "rabbitmq_erlang_cookie"
    value: "{{ lookup('password', 'pw.rabbitmq_erlang_cookie chars=ascii_letters,digits length=20') }}"
  - key: "admin_password"
    value: "{{ admin_password }}"
  - key: "secret_key"
    value: "{{ lookup('password', 'pw.secret_key chars=ascii_letters,digits length=64') }}"
  - key: "create_preload_data"
    value: "False"
  loop_control:
    label: "{{ item.key }}"

If we don’t already have a password defined, then create one. We register the fact we’ve had to create one, as we’ll need to tell ourselves it once the build is finished.

After that, we set a collection of values into the installer – the hostname, passwords, secret keys and so on. It loops over a key/value pair, and passes these to a regular expression rewrite command, so at the end, we have the settings we want, without having to change this script between releases.

When this is all done, we execute the installer. I’ve seen this done two ways. In an ideal world, you’d throw this into an Ansible shell module, and get it to execute the install, but the problem with that is that the AWX install takes quite a while, so I’d much rather actually be able to see what’s going on… and so, instead, we exit our prepare script at this point, and drop back to the shell to run the installer. Let’s look at both options, and you can decide which one you want to do. In my script, I’m doing the first, but just because it’s a bit neater to have everything in one place.

- name: Run the AWX install.
  shell: ansible-playbook -i inventory install.yml
  args:
    chdir: /opt/awx/installer
cd /opt/awx/installer
ansible-playbook -i inventory install.yml

When this is done, you get a prepared environment, ready to access using the username admin and the password of … well, whatever you set admin_password to.

AWX takes a little while to stand up, so you might want to run this next Ansible stanza to see when it’s ready to go.

- name: Test access to AWX
  tower_user:
    tower_host: "http://{{ ansible_fqdn }}"
    tower_username: admin
    tower_password: "{{ admin_password }}"
    email: "admin@{{ ansible_fqdn }}"
    first_name: "admin"
    last_name: ""
    password: "{{ admin_password }}"
    username: admin
    superuser: yes
    auditor: no
  register: _result
  until: _result.failed == false
  retries: 240 # retry 240 times
  delay: 5 # pause for 5 sec between each try

The upshot to using that command there is that it sets the email address of the admin account to “admin@your.awx.example.org“, if the fully qualified domain name (FQDN) of your machine is your.awx.example.org.

Moving from the Theoretical to the Practical

Now we’ve got our playbook, let’s wrap this up in both a Vagrant Vagrantfile and a Terraform script, this means you can deploy it locally, to test something internally, and in “the cloud”.

To simplify things, and because the version of Ansible deployed on the Vagrant box isn’t the one I want to use, I am using a single “user-data.sh” script for both Vagrant and Terraform. Here that is:

#!/bin/bash
if [ -e "$(which yum)" ]
then
  yum install git python3-pip -y
  pip3 install ansible docker docker-compose
else
  echo "This script only supports CentOS right now."
  exit 1
fi

git clone https://gist.github.com/JonTheNiceGuy/024d72f970d6a1c6160a6e9c3e642e07 /tmp/Install_AWX
cd /tmp/Install_AWX
/usr/local/bin/ansible-playbook Install_AWX.yml

While they both have their differences, they both can execute a script once the machine has finished booting. Let’s start with Vagrant.

Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|
  config.vm.box = "centos/8"

  config.vm.provider :virtualbox do |v|
    v.memory = 4096
  end

  config.vm.provision "shell", path: "user-data.sh"

  config.vm.network "forwarded_port", guest: 80, host: 8080, auto_correct: true
end

To boot this up, once you’ve got Vagrant and Virtualbox installed, run vagrant up and it’ll tell you that it’s set up a port forward from the HTTP port (TCP/80) to a “high” port – TCP/8080. If there’s a collision (because you’re running something else on TCP/8080), it’ll tell you what port it’s forwarded the HTTP port to instead. Once you’ve finished, run vagrant destroy to shut it down. There are lots more tricks you can play with Vagrant, but this is a relatively quick and easy one. Be aware that you’re not using HTTPS, so traffic to the AWX instance can be inspected, but if you’re running this on your local machine, it’s probably not a big issue.

How about running this on a cloud provider, like AWS? We can use the exact same scripts – both the Ansible script, and the user-data.sh script, using Terraform, however, this is a little more complex, as we need to create a VPC, Internet Gateway, Subnet, Security Group and Elastic IP before we can create the virtual machine. What’s more, the Free Tier (that “first hit is free” thing that Amazon Web Services provide to you) does not have enough horsepower to run AWX, so, if you want to look at how to run up AWX in EC2 (or to tweak it to run on Azure, GCP, Digital Ocean or one of the fine offerings from IBM or RedHat), then click through to the gist I’ve put all my code from this post into. The critical lines in there are to select a “CentOS 8” image, open HTTP and SSH into the machine, and to specify the user-data.sh file to provision the machine. Everything else is cruft to make the virtual machine talk to, and be seen by, hosts on the Internet.

To run this one, you need to run terraform init to load the AWS plugin, then terraform apply. Note that this relies on having an AWS access token defined, so if you don’t have them set up, you’ll need to get that sorted out first. Once you’ve finished with your demo, you should run terraform destroy to remove all the assets created by this terraform script. Again, when you’re running that demo, note that you ONLY have HTTP access set up, not HTTPS, so don’t use important credentials on there!

Once you’ve got your AWX environment running, you’ve got just enough AWX there to demo what Ansible Tower looks like, what it can bring to your organisation… and maybe even convince them that it’s worth investing in a license, rather than running AWX in production. Just in case you have that 2AM call-out that we all dread.

Featured image is “pharmacy” by “Tim Evanson” on Flickr and is released under a CC-BY-SA license.

"presentation structure" by "Sean MacEntee" on Flickr

One to read: “The Art of Slide Design”

JonTheNiceGuy Leave a comment

This is a little different from my usual posts, but I heard about this from the User Error podcast this morning. In 2018 Melinda Seckington gave a talk at DevRelCon Tokyo which she then reposted in full detail on her blog. This set of posts is well worth a read, particularly if you’re someone who enjoys writing and delivering presentations, or if it’s part of your job.

While I don’t adhere to her advice exactly, I can see a lot of benefits to the way that she’s advising to create your decks.

It’s worth mentioning that if you follow the links on the blog posts, post 4 of 5 links to the wrong page for the last page (post 5/5), but there is a “next post” button at the bottom of the page… or just follow the links from this page :)

Featured image is “presentation structure” by “Sean MacEntee” on Flickr and is released under a CC-BY license.

apt update && apt full-upgrade -y && apt autoremove -y && apt autoclean -y

Apt Updates with Ansible

JonTheNiceGuy 1 Comment

I’ve got a small Ansible script that I bundle up on Ubuntu boxes to do apt updates. This was originally a one-statement job, but I’ve added a few lines to it, so I thought I’d explain what I’m doing (more for myself, for later!)

Initally, I just had a task to do apt: upgrade=full update_cache=yes autoremove=yes autoclean-yes but if you’re running the script over and over again, well, this gets slow… So I added a tweak!

Here it is folks, in all it’s glory!

- hosts: all
  tasks:
  - name: Get stat of last run apt
    stat:
      path: /var/cache/apt/pkgcache.bin
    register: apt_run

  - name: "Apt update, Full-upgrade, autoremove, autoclean check"
    debug:
      msg: "Skipping apt-update, etc. actions as apt update was run today"
    when: "'%Y-%m-%d' | strftime(apt_run.stat.mtime) in ansible_date_time.date"

  - name: "Apt update, Full-upgrade, autoremove, autoclean"
    apt:
      upgrade: full
      update_cache: yes
      autoremove: yes
      autoclean: yes
    when: "'%Y-%m-%d' | strftime(apt_run.stat.mtime) not in ansible_date_time.date"

What does this do? Well, according to this AskUbuntu post, the best file to check if an update has been performed is /var/cache/apt/pkgcache.bin, so we check the status of that file. Most file systems available to Linux distributions provide the mtime – or “last modified time”. This is returned in the number of seconds since UTC 00:00:00 on the Unix Epoch (1970-01-01), so we need to convert that to a date., which we return as YYYY-MM-DD (e.g. today is 2020-01-06) and then compare that to what the system thinks today is. If the dates don’t equate (so one string doesn’t match the other – in other words, apt update wasn’t run today), it runs the update. If the dates do match up, we get a statement saying that apt update was already run.

Fun times!

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JonTheNiceGuy Leave a comment

Hello bold traveller! I recently got into a discussion with someone about how I put content into my blog and I realised that people don’t write this stuff down enough!

At the end of this post, I’d expect you to be able to use this information to be able to create your own, similar stack. If you don’t have the technical knowledge to be able to do so, you should at least have the pieces of information to ask someone else to help you build it. While I’d be flattered if you asked me for similar advice, I’m afraid I have limited time for new projects, even consultancy ones, and all I can do is point you back to this blog!

That said, consider this a bit of the “making the sausage” that most people don’t tend to share! 😀

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