The ramblings of a computer geek
A simple function that takes a DateTime in the format: 2023-11-29T06:41:20-08:00 and outputs it in a much more pretty: 29/11/2023 06:41:20 -0800. As you can see its switching to the DDMMYY date format, followed by the time and finally the timezone.
More...Read in JSON from a file and convert into a Dictionary For example I was testing getting data from the Slack service status API, so wanted to simulate broken-ness to test my script was working correctly. I did this by creating a file with a sample set of JSON that showed a problem, as I […]
More...There are a number of ways to protect secrets you wish to use in your Playbooks. I’ll show a simple example here of how you can encrypt a string, copy it into your Playbook for use and then run the Playbook, where the string is de-crypted in-line and used without exposing it in plain text […]
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Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is managing infrastructure using a DevOps type methodology. Where the current configuration of your infrastructure is represented in code, any additions, changes or deletions are also made through this code. There are various methods to codify your infrastructure, some proprietary like AWS Cloudformation, others are generic like Ansible or Terraform. The […]
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Containerisation is an increasingly popular method to deploy and run applications on both your computer but also for enterprise applications. Containerisation essentially bundles an application’s code with all the files and libraries it needs to run. Having a layer of abstraction like this means that as long as you are running the same Operating System, […]
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To install Docker on Ubuntu 22.04.2 LTS you can use these simple instructions, these are based on a standard Ubuntu 22.04.2 LTS installation and using a user called “ubuntu”. Once downloaded make sure it is executable with: Now run the installation with the following, the script has sudo commands added so you may need to […]
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A simple HTML based status page tool that allows you as a system administrator to just edit a CSV file and have the tool generate you a pre-formatted HTML status page that you can upload to your favourite website. The tool uses Python to read the CSV files for the status (of services) and any […]
More...A very quick overview of how you can use Python virtual environments. https://packaging.python.org/en/latest/guides/installing-using-pip-and-virtual-environments/ Install the Virtual Environment First install the virtual environment. Create the Virtual Environment Let’s say I have a project called “python-static-site”, so we’ll create the virtual environment within this project directory along with all the source files. The second argument is the […]
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Assuming you’ve read and followed part 1, now on part 2 we’ll get our SSH keys created, and the gitlab-runner registered with gitlab as a “runner” so we can create our pipeline. Configuring the SSH Keys for Gitlab-Runner To make the local gitlab-runner on your machine have the correct keys, you need to generate them […]
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Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is a useful way to maintain the configuration of your infrastructure components. It provides a way that you can store your infrastructure or application’s configuration in a versioned location and then coupled with CI/CD brings you the benefits of being able to enforce gatekeeping on any changes to the configuration, automate […]
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