Fabian Lee : Software Engineer

Terraform: terraform_remote_state to pass values to other configurations

August 6, 2023
Categories: DevOps, Kubernetes

It would be uncommon to have one monolithic Terraform configuration for all the infrastructure in your organization. More than likely, there are multiple groups and each has responsibility and ownership of certain components (e.g. networking, storage, authorization, Kubernetes). As an example, let’s say your responsibility is the Kubernetes cluster build. You may need the following … Terraform: terraform_remote_state to pass values to other configurations

Bash: testing if a file exists, has content, and is recently modified

May 10, 2023
Categories: Linux

If you need to test for a file’s existence, content size, and whether it was recently modified, the ‘find‘ utility can provide this functionality in a single call. One scenario for this usage might be the cached results from a remote service call (database, REST service, etc). If fetching these results was a relatively costly … Bash: testing if a file exists, has content, and is recently modified

Terraform: migrate state from local to remote Google Cloud Storage bucket and back

March 27, 2023
Categories: DevOps, Hyperscaler

In this article I will demonstrate how to take a Terraform configuration that is using a local state file and migrate its persistent state to a remote Google Cloud Storage bucket (GCS). We will then perform the migration again, but this time to bring the remote state back to a local file. We will illustrate … Terraform: migrate state from local to remote Google Cloud Storage bucket and back

Ansible: find module to create glob of remote files

July 27, 2021
Categories: Automation

Unfortunately, with_fileglob only works on files local to the Ansible orchestrator host. It will not build a list of files from the remote directory, even if you use something like the copy module that has ‘remote_source: true’. In these situation, you can use the find module to generate a list of files on the remote … Ansible: find module to create glob of remote files

Ansible: creating a variable from a remote or local file content

May 25, 2021
Categories: Automation

With Ansible, it is possible to have a variable populated with either the content of a remote or local file. For a file on a remote host, you can use the ‘slurp‘ module to put the content into a register, but then you must base64 decode the content. – name: get content of remote file … Ansible: creating a variable from a remote or local file content

KVM: Testing cloud-init locally using KVM for a RHEL cloud image

March 22, 2020
Categories: Linux

The ability to quickly stand up a guest OS with cloud-init is most often associated with deployment of virtual machines in an IaaS like EC2 or Azure. But cloud-init is not just for remote cloud providers, and using cloud-init for local images that can be quickly deployed in KVM works great for local development and … KVM: Testing cloud-init locally using KVM for a RHEL cloud image

KVM: Testing cloud-init locally using KVM for a CentOS cloud image

March 14, 2020
Categories: Linux, Virtualization

KVM: Testing cloud-init locally using KVM for an Ubuntu cloud image

February 23, 2020
Categories: Linux, Virtualization

Docker: Working with local volumes and tmpfs mounts

January 24, 2020
Categories: Containers, Linux

Volumes are the preferred method for persisting data for Docker containers. In this article, I will show how to create and use volumes for persistence, as well as tmpfs for temporary storage. At its absolute simplest, creating and mounting a volume backed by a local directory looks like: # make host directory mkdir -p /data … Docker: Working with local volumes and tmpfs mounts

WordPress: Cloning your WordPress site locally using Docker Compose

March 17, 2019
Categories: Containers

If you are going to implement major changes to your publicly hosted WordPress site, it can be beneficial to create a local sandbox where those changes can be tested ahead of time. In this article, I will show how to use Docker Compose to create a local instance of WordPress, and the “All-in-One WP Migration” … WordPress: Cloning your WordPress site locally using Docker Compose

iptables: Running service as non-root, iptables to forward from privileged port

September 17, 2018
Categories: Linux

There are multiple approaches to allowing a process to run as a non-root user but still provide access to privileged ports (<1024). There are applications like Apache that handle this by starting the master process as root, and then worker processes as a less privileged user. Another way is setting the privilege on a binary … iptables: Running service as non-root, iptables to forward from privileged port

Git: Uploading an existing local project to GitHub from the console

February 4, 2018
Categories: Linux

Getting a local project into a public repository on GitHub only takes a few steps. This is well documented on a GitHub help page. In this article, I’ll go through getting a local project called “myproject1” into a public GitHub repository.

CloudFoundry: PCF Dev 0.28 for local development on Ubuntu

November 13, 2017
Categories: Containers

Update Jan 2019: The latest PCF Dev 2.x releases only support Windows/Mac and not Linux. This article describes the older v0.28 PCF Dev is a distribution of Cloud Foundry that has a minimal footprint and is designed to run locally on a developer’s machine. Using this lightweight distribution of Cloud Foundry, a developer can debug … CloudFoundry: PCF Dev 0.28 for local development on Ubuntu

Maven: Installing a private Maven repository on Ubuntu using Artifactory

February 20, 2017
Categories: DevOps, Java

An essential part of the standard build process for Java applications is having a set of repositories where project artifacts are stored. Artifact curation provides the ability to manage dependencies, quickly rollback releases, support compatibility of downstream projects, do QA promotion from test to production, support a continuous build pipeline, and provides auditability. JFrog puts … Maven: Installing a private Maven repository on Ubuntu using Artifactory