Text Editor or IDE?

Published at February 22, 2019 ·  3 min read

A short Friday’s holy war about IDEs, text editors and vim:). I don’t really like bikeshedding about text editors, but I was asked about my favorite one too much to not drop a note here.

I spent most of the time in editors with Python code, a bit less with JavaScript/TypeScript. Of course, a lot of json and yaml, sometimes bash scripts and Ansible playbooks are opened by me too. I strongly believe that for each task there is the best tool somewhere. All-in-one tools are line swiss knife: they are useful to by by the hand, but it’s not so comfortable to work with day by day.

Right Way to Setup Jenkins in Docker

Published at February 21, 2019 ·  1 min read

I was for this solution for months. Almost any guide I’ve found was about using an official Docker image with few plugins installed. It works pretty well if you agree with a manual initial configuration like configure admin user and password. It doesn’t work at all if you deploy Jenkins in an automated way.

Here is a Dockerfile to get installed and ready to use Jenkins:

FROM jenkins/jenkins:lts

# https://github.com/jenkinsci/docker/blob/master/README.md

# Jenkins configuration
ENV JAVA_OPTS="-Djenkins.install.runSetupWizard=false"
COPY security.groovy /usr/share/jenkins/ref/init.groovy.d/security.groovy

# Jenkins plugins
COPY plugins.txt /usr/share/jenkins/ref/plugins.txt
RUN /usr/local/bin/install-plugins.sh < /usr/share/jenkins/ref/plugins.txt

security.groovy content:

Deploy Hugo Sites With Jenkins

Published at February 17, 2019 ·  2 min read

I’ll describe how I do my Hugo-based blog updates with Jenkins, but it’s pretty similar to any other static site generator.

Pre-requirements

Jenkins installation is out of the scope of this post. Also, you need to have installed and configured Publish Over SSH plugin.

Also, I use Jenkins Job Builder (JJB) to configure Jenkins jobs from yaml file.

I’ll describe my blog-jobs.yaml config for my blog below.

Jenkins configuration

Views

If you have a lot of jobs or just want to group them by project, it makes sense to create a view:

Choosing CI server for local needs

Published at February 15, 2019 ·  2 min read

Implementing everything-as-a-code initiative, I need some CI server up and running on my desktop. I don’t want to use cron directly or implement something myself because of I don’t have enough time for it.

That’s mean, I can’t use Drone, Circle CI, or Travis CI because of pricing. I tried Buildbot and GoCD and they look pretty good but not mature enough.

I really like GitLab CI but it requires a lot of resources and looks like too powerful for my simple tasks. I can say the same about TeamCity. It’s one of the best CI servers I ever used.

Not a DNS Server for Libvirt

Published at January 18, 2019 ·  2 min read

Sometimes I’m too lazy to repeat the same task so I do some automation to make my life easier. Unfortunately, I don’t have enough time to do it well each time. That’s why I prefer ‘good enough’ way. I implement something good enough for me and refactor it once I have time.

I use virtual machines on my desktop a lot. Usually, I have several of them up and running. I don’t like to remember an IP address for each of them, that’s why I prefer to use hostnames. Based on this, I’ve googled to some lightweight solution to have something like DNS server for my KVM instances and it must work inside corporate network. That’s why I can’t use dnsmasq or something else.

Diskimage-builder in Docker

Published at January 17, 2019 ·  1 min read

diskimage-builder is a tool for automatically building customized operating-system images for use in clouds and other environments.

Unfortunately, I can’t do everything in Docker so I have to use VMs a lot. diskimage-builder helps me a lot to build basic VM images with pre-installed packages, my SSH key, etc.

Since I try to have my development environment as clean, as possible I do not install additional packages on my desktop. Any Python package I install in the virtualenv. For system-level packages (deb/rpm) I try to use Docker and Virtual Machines.

Everything as a Code

Published at January 16, 2019 ·  2 min read

Infrastructure as a code… I hear about it during at least last 5-7 years. There are a lot of activities in each company (I hope) to introduce configuration management like Ansible, Puppet, Chef, etc to achieve Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment(Delivery) aka CI/CD.

I saw a lot of successful implementations for CI/CD for small and mid-size projects. It’s harder to introduce full automation on big projects but it’s absolutely doable.