Recommended Reading

Overview

This is a quick post on resources that I’ve come across this (or prior) year or that has been recommended to me. Noting them here for my future self and possibly others.

I’ll add more as the year goes on.

Books

• Terraform Up and Running
• The Software Engineer’s Guidebook
• The Staff Engineer’s Path
• Becoming an Agile Software Architect
• The Manager’s Path

Blogs

• https://www.ybrikman.com/
• https://blog.gruntwork.io/
• https://www.martinfowler.com/
• https://paulhammant.com/
• https://www.kitchensoap.com/
• https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/
• https://www.etsy.com/codeascraft
• http://highscalability.com/

Kubernetes on DigitalOcean

Overview

Recently, I’ve been working on a project, a part of which is to deploy a Kubernetes cluster. I was hoping to document the process so that it could save some time for my future self and maybe others.

This post is the first in a series of posts which will document the process I went through to get a Kubernetes cluster up and running. In addition to documenting the process, I’ll be creating a repository which will contain the code I used to create the cluster. The repository is available here.

TLDR;

I’m using:

• DigitalOcean to host my Kubernetes cluster
• Terraform to manage the infrastructure
• Spaces for object storage
• tfenv to manage terraform versions
• tgenv to manage terragrunt versions

Hosting Platform

Based on the cost estimates for what I was looking to do, I decided to go with DigitalOcean. I’ve used DigitalOcean in the past and have been happy with the service. I also like the simplicity of the platform and the user interface. More importantly, I like that they have a managed Kubernetes offering.

If you’d like to read more about the cost estimates for my project, you can read more about it here.

Kubernetes Cluster

Building up a kubernetes cluster is documented pretty thoroughly in the tutorials on DigitalOcean’s site¹. After working through some of the setup steps, I realized that there could be a quicker way to get a cluster up and running using Terraform, by deferring the control plane setup to DigitalOcean. This would allow me to get a cluster up and running quickly, and then if it made sense I could work on automating the setup of the control plane later. It helps that they don’t charge for the control plane.

Infrastructure Management

Terraform is my go-to tool for infrastructure management. I’ve used it in the past to manage infrastructure on AWS, GCP, and DigitalOcean. Given my familiarity with the tool, I decided to use it to manage the infrastructure for my Kubernetes cluster.

Though there’s a kerfuffle with Hashicorp’s open source licencing², I still decided to use Terraform, at least to start. I assume that there will be a migration path eventually to OpenToFu, but again I’d like to get up and running as fast as reasonable.

Spaces

One of the requirements to using terraform is that there needs to be a way to manage state of the remote objects. Keeping the state locally is not a good idea, as it can be lost or corrupted. Keeping the state in the cloud is a better.

Terraform keeps track of the state of the infrastructure it manages in a file, usualy named terraform.tfstate. This file is used to determine what changes need to be made to the infrastructure to bring it in line with the desired state.

Some resources already exist which walks through the setup³⁴ of Spaces.

Spaces Setup

Digital Ocean has a pretty good tutorial on how to setup Spaces. I’ll walk through the steps I took to get it setup but if you’re new to DigitalOcean I’d recommend following their tutorial.⁵

As a quick overview, the steps are:

1. Create a Space bucket in the console. This is typically a one time step depending on how you want to scale your projects. It’s as straighforward as setting the region and name of the space. I chose to use the default region of nyc3.

2. Create a new Spaces Access Key and Secret. This is also a one time step assuming you back up your key. The access key is used to authenticate with the space.

Configuring Terraform to use Spaces

Once the space is set up, you’ll need to configure Terraform to use it. This is done by adding a backend configuration to the provider.tf file. The backend configuration tells Terraform where to store the state file. In this case, we’re telling Terraform to store the state file in the space we created earlier. A simple version of the configuration looks like this:

terraform {
  required_version = "~> v1.6.0"

  required_providers {
    digitalocean = {
      source = "digitalocean/digitalocean"
      version = "2.32.0"
    }
  }
}

variable "do_token" {}

provider "digitalocean" {
  token = var.do_token
  spaces_access_id  = "<access key>"
  spaces_secret_key = "<access key secret>"
}

In addition to the backend configuration, we also need to configure the DigitalOcean backend. The spaces access key and secret are used to authenticate with the space.

terraform {
    backend "s3" {
      key      = "<SPACES KEY>"
      bucket   = "<SPACES BUCKET>"
      region   = "nyc3"
      endpoints = { s3 = "https://nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com" }

      encrypt                     = true

      # The following are currently required for Spaces
      # See: hashicorp/terraform#33983 and hashicorp/terraform#34086
      skip_region_validation      = true
      skip_credentials_validation = true
      skip_metadata_api_check     = true
      skip_requesting_account_id  = true
      skip_s3_checksum            = true
  }
}

Creating the cluster

Once the backend is configured, we can create the cluster. The cluster is created using the digitalocean_kubernetes_cluster resource. You’ll note that I’m glossing over some of the details in the configuration. I’ll go into more detail in a later post.

If you’re looking for a working example, you can find one in the terraform-digitalocean-kubernetes repository.

resource "digitalocean_kubernetes_cluster" "cluster" {
  name    = "<NAME>"
  region  = "<REGION>"
  version = "<VERSION>"

  # fixed node size
  node_pool {
    name       = "<POOL NAME>"
    size       = "<INSTANCE SIZE>"
    node_count = "<NODE COUNT>"
  }
}

Kuberentes Hosting Services

Overview

When looking for a hosting platform for Kubernetes, I wanted to find a platform which was easy to use, had a good developer experience, and that was cost-effective. Easy to use is somewhat subjective and certainly depends on familiarity with the platform, domain knowledge, and other factors. Therefor, I’ll try to be as objective as possible when evaluating the platforms looking at Developer Experience and Cost Effectiveness.

For others, there could be other dimensions which are more important. For example, if you’re looking to meet certain compliance requirements, you might want to look at the security and compliance features of the platform and rate them accordingly.

For me and my project, these are not yet significant concerns.

Hosting Platform Options

An AI Assisted search via OpenAI’s ChatGPT¹ for Kubernetes hosting platforms yields the following results:

Query:

create a markdown table which includes the following hosting providers:
AWS
Google Cloud
DigitalOcean
Azure

use the following columns so that each option could be evaluated:
- developer experience
- cost effectiveness

developer experience should include productivity, impact, satisfaction
cost effectiveness should include components and pricing for those components

Validating the Findings

Cost Effectiveness

The following are specifications for a development environment. The goal is to have a non-high availablilty Kubernetes cluster with 2 worker nodes intended for a development environment. The cluster should have a managed control plane and managed worker nodes, and should have object storage and load balancing. The cluster should also have a managed Kafka instance.

Pricing has been calculated generally using two worker nodes, and the cheapest option for the managed control plane.

Monthly Pricing (as of November 2023²):

Developer Experience

GitHub mentions Developer Experience (DevEx)⁷ as productivity, impact, and satisfaction. My thought is to document my experience so that other’s can evaluate the platforms for themselves.

Given the pricing schedule above, it’s not currently feasible for me to fully evaluate all the platforms at the same time. Instead, I’ll focus on the most cost-effective one, DigitalOcean. If given the opportunity and necessity, I’ll evaluate the other platforms in the future.

In a follow-up article, I’ll report my observations and experience. For now, I’ll leave this as a placeholder.

Thanks for reading!

Git Hooks with Pre-Commit Framework

Overview

Pre-commit is a framework for managing and maintaining multi-language pre-commit hooks. It is a great tool for ensuring consistency across a set of projects or a team. Not only can it help with consistency, but it can also help with formatting by automatically formatting files before they are committed.

What is a git hook?

Git hooks are scripts¹² that run before or after certain git commands. They are stored in the .git/hooks directory of your repository. Git hooks are not stored in the repository itself, so they are not version controlled. This means that if you want to share a git hook with your team, you will need to share the script itself.

What is pre-commit?

Pre-commit solves the problem of sharing git hooks with your team and storing configurations with a project repository. This framework allows for management of git hooks commonly across any project.

Setting up pre-commit

Pre-commit is a python package that can be installed with pip. If you’re using macOS, you can install it with brew.

Install Configuration

Pre-commit uses a configuration file to determine which hooks to run and how to run them. This configuration file is stored in the root of your project and is named .pre-commit-config.yaml. This file is used to configure the hooks that will be run and the order in which they will be run.

To generate an initial version of the file, you can run pre-commit sample-config > .pre-commit-config.yaml. This will generate a sample configuration file with a few available hooks.

Once pre-commit is installed, you can run pre-commit install to install the git hooks. Now, when you run git commit, the hooks will run before the commit is created. If any of the hooks fail, the commit will be aborted.

Prescriptive Hook Choices

Pre-commit has a large number of hooks available. Some are more useful than others, most being language specific. Here’s a list of the hooks I like to use for every project.

repos:
  - repo: https://github.com/pre-commit/pre-commit-hooks
    rev: v2.3.0
    hooks:
# file
      - id: end-of-file-fixer
        description: Fixes missing end-of-file newline in files.
      - id: mixed-line-ending
        args: ['--fix=lf']
        description: Forces to replace line ending by the UNIX 'lf' character.
      - id: trailing-whitespace
        description: Trims trailing whitespace.
      - id: check-added-large-files
        args: ['--maxkb=100']
        description: Checks for large files being added to git.
# format
      - id: check-yaml
        description: Checks that all yaml files are valid.
      - id: check-json
        description: Checks that all json files are valid.
      - id: check-toml
        description: Checks that all toml files are valid.

End of File Fixer

This hook ensures that all files have a newline at the end of the file. This is a common issue when working with multiple operating systems. Windows uses \r\n for newlines, while Linux and macOS use \n. This hook will ensure that all files have a newline at the end of the file.

Not having a newline isn’t just bad style, it can break some tools. ³ For example, if you have a file that contains the following (without end of file character):

first line
second line

now if you run wc -l file, you will get the following output, indicating only one line in the file.

% cat file
first line
second line
% wc -l file
       1 file

This is because of how POSIX defines a line. POSIX defines a line as a sequence of zero or more non-<newline>. ⁴⁵

Mixed Line Ending

If you’re working in a mixed environment where developers are using different operating systems, this hook will ensure that all files have the same line endings. This hook will convert all line endings to the specified type. In the configuration above, I have it set to lf for Linux/Unix line endings as most (all?) of my software is intended to run on Linux or some Linux variant.

Trailing Whitespace

Whitespace differences can be picked up by source control systems and flagged as diffs, causing frustration for developers. This hook will remove all trailing whitespace from files making for a more consistent experience.

Check Added Large Files

Git is notorious for not handling large files well. There’s a bunch of information out there supporting this. This hook will check for large files being added to the repository.

Check YAML, JSON, TOML

Errant commas, missing quotes, and other syntax errors can be difficult to find in configuration files. These hooks will check for syntax errors in the specified file types.

Conclusion

Pre-commit is a great tool for ensuring consistency across a set of projects or a team. It can also help with formatting by automatically formatting files before they are committed. This can be especially useful when working with a team that has different preferences for formatting. Pre-commit can be used to ensure that all files are formatted consistently.

5x15 Weekly Update and Coachee Checklist

Overview

After reading One Bold Move a Day I decided to create a checklist for my coaching interactions. This includes being coached as well as a template for those I plan to coach. This checklist is a work in progress and will be updated as I learn more about coaching and leadership.

The 5x15 Weekly Update ¹²

Something I’ve been doing for a while now has been to provide a weekly update to my manager. This update includes a list of wins and accolades. I’ve found this to be a great way to keep track of my accomplishments and to help me remember them when it comes time for my annual review. The gist is that you create an update to manage up which takes no longer than 15 minutes to create and no longer than 5 minutes to read.

You might find that you cover all this in your 1:1s with your manager. It may be that this is good enough for you or your manager. For other’s in organizations where there’s a lot of competition, writing this out on a weeky basis is a great way to advocate for yourself week over week and make writing your yearly review easier.

To build this out, I’ve decided to use the 5x15 format. Here’s an example template:

Name: <Your Name>
Week Ending: <Date>

## Are you planning to work next week, from <day> to </day>?

Yes. If no, why not?

## Accomplishments for the week:

- Project 1
   - Company's Culture
       - Organization's Culture: Culture Item 1
         - Team's Culture: Culture Item 1
            - My weekly contribution 1
            - My weekly contribution 2
            - My weekly contribution 3
         - B1: Culture Item 2
             - My weekly contribution 1
             - My weekly contribution 2
             - My weekly contribution 3
         - B1: Culture Item 3
       - Organization's Culture: Culture Item 2
         - Team's: Culture Item 1
         - My weekly contribution 1

## Priorities for next week:

- Priority 1
- Priority 2
- Priority 3

## Stats:
 - Energy level: low, medium, high + direction of change
 - QOL: low, medium, high + direction of change
 - Credibility: low, medium, high + direction of change

## Planned PTO:
  - <Date> - <Date>
  ...

## Examples, screenshots, etc..
  - example 1
  - example 2

By Section

Are you planning to work next week, from to ?

This helps your manager know if you’re planning to take time off. If you are, it shouldn’t be a surprise to them. As a manager, a gentle reminder about who will be unavailable can be helpful when you’re reflecting on the past week or looking forward to the next.

Accomplishments for the week

This is where you list your wins and accolades as organized by your company’s culture, your organization’s culture, and your team’s culture. Sometimes these items may not have alignment. This could be an opportunity to discuss this with your manager and see how better alignment could be achieved.

Not everyone’s comfortable with self-promotion. This is a great way to practice.

Priorities for next week

Keep this simple. List your top 3 priorities for the next week. This is a great way to keep your manager informed of what you’re working on and to help you stay focused on what’s important. If you’re not sure what your priorities are, this is a great opportunity to discuss this with your manager.

Stats

This is a great way to keep track vital stats of your work persona.

Energy level

“Different people are engergized or exhausted by different things.”³ This is a way to keep your manager informed of what’s going on in your work and/or your life. Good managers will use this information to help you be successful, perhaps providing the opportunity to coast during low energy times or to take on more challenging work during periods of high energy.

Quality of Life

How is the work/life balance? Are you feeling overwhelmed? Are you feeling bored? How are you enjoying your projects and the people you’re working with? Not everything is going to be perfect all the time. Often times we can’t change the situation, but we can change our perspective. Answers to how your mental or physical health could also be inputs here. Good managers often can help with challenging situations or provide perspective to get through them. Looking for the positive in a situation can help us get through times when QOL is lower.

Credibility

“You can build credibility by solving hard problems, being visibly competent and consistently showing good technical judgment.”⁴

The approach I take here is to determine how much trust others have in what I share for technical solutions. Some resources might also consider this to be part of Social Capital, but my feeling is that Credibility and Social Capital are so integral that these are parts of the same thing.

Checklist⁵

• Keep a list of wins and accolades to help you remember your accomplishments. Do this daily.
• Provide your manager with a 5x15 update every week. Include wins and accolades. This is a weekly practice.
• Focus on what you can control and let go of what you can’t. This is a daily practice.
• Use data to support your work and decisions. This is a daily practice.
• Change your perspective. Look at the situation from a different angle. This is a daily practice.
• Offer compassion to yourself and others. You don’t know what’s going in someone else’s life so give them some space for grace. This is a daily practice.
• Measure your stats. This is a weekly practice.

Prompts³

• What compliments do you hear frequently?
• What projects bring you energy? When do you feel most fulfilled at work?
• Do you feel like you have enough time to do your work at a level of quality that you’re proud of?
• Are you finding that you have enough time for things outside of work that are important to you?
• How are your peers receiving your work? Do you feel like you’re making a positive impact?

References

Scaling with GitHub Action Workflows

Overview

Platform engineering has become increasingly more popular in recent years. The idea of a platform team is to provide a set of tools and services that enable other teams to build and deploy their applications, ideally at scale. This allows teams to focus on their core competencies and not have to worry about the underlying infrastructure.

There’s plenty of great resources out there that go into detail about what a platform team is and how to build one.

At the core of any platform team is most likely an IDP, or internal developer portal. This is a place where developers can go to find documentation, guides, and other resources that will help them build and deploy their applications.

For a single developer, an internal developer portal is probably overkill. That said, there’s still concepts which can be applied to help scale development, if desired.

Scaling with GitHub Action Workflows.

In this post, I’ll be going over how I’ve used GitHub Actions to scale my development efforts, something I’ve become accustomed to for workflow standardization. I’m sure there’s optimizations that can be made, but this is what I’ve found to work for me right now.

The Problem

I’ve been working on a few projects recently that I’d like to have similar workflows, templates, and linting. After the third project, I realized that I was copying and pasting a lot of the same code over and over again. This is not ideal for a few reasons, but mainly if I want to make a change to the workflow, I would have to make the change in multiple places.

A Solution

There’s probably a few different solutions to this sort of problem. I decided to use GitHub Actions Workflows to solve it. I created a repository called template-repository and added a few workflows to it, like linting. I then created a new repository called workflow-templates and added a workflow which

1) check out the source repository, "template-repository"
2) check out the target repository
3) copy the workflows from the source repository to the target repository
4) commit and push the changes to the target repository
5) open a pull request for the changes

Here’s a version of the repository copy workflow:

name: Add linter to repository

permissions:
  pull-requests: write
  contents: write

on:
  workflow_dispatch:
    inputs:
      source_namespace:
        required: true
        type: string
        description: The namespace to copy the templates from.
        default: "johncosta"
      source_repository:
        required: true
        type: string
        description: The repository to copy the templates from.
        default: "template-repository"
      source_tag:
        required: true
        type: string
        description: The version tag to checkout for templates.
        default: v0.0.1
      target_namespace:
        required: true
        type: string
        description: The namespace to copy the templates to.
        default: "johncosta"
      target_repository:
        required: true
        type: choice
        description: The repository to copy the templates from.
        options:
          - johnmcostaiii.com
          - johnmcostaiii.net
          - smart-oil-api-python
          - U6143-ssd1306-golang
          - documentation
      target_tag:
        required: true
        type: string
        description: The version tag to checkout for templates.
        default: main
      committer_name:
        required: true
        type: string
        description: The users name to use for the commit.
        default: "John Costa"
      committer_email:
        required: true
        type: string
        description: The users email to use for the commit.
        default: "john.costa@gmail.com"

jobs:
  build:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
        with:
          repository: ${{ github.event.inputs.source_namespace }}/${{ github.event.inputs.source_repository }}
          ref: ${{ github.event.inputs.source_tag }}
          path: ./src/${{ github.event.inputs.source_namespace }}/${{ github.event.inputs.source_repository }}

      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
        with:
          repository: ${{github.event.inputs.target_namespace}}/${{ github.event.inputs.target_repository }}
          ref: ${{ github.event.inputs.target_tag }}
          path: ${{github.workspace}}/src/${{github.event.inputs.target_namespace}}/${{ github.event.inputs.target_repository }}

      - name: Modify files
        run: |
          SOURCE_FOLDER=${{github.workspace}}/src/${{github.event.inputs.source_namespace}}/${{ github.event.inputs.source_repository }}
          TARGET_FOLDER=${{github.workspace}}/src/${{github.event.inputs.target_namespace}}/${{ github.event.inputs.target_repository }}
          TARGET_BRANCH="update-templates-${{ github.event.inputs.source_tag }}"

          # Copy the files from the source to the target
          cd ${TARGET_FOLDER}
          mkdir -p ${TARGET_FOLDER}/.github/linters
          mkdir -p ${TARGET_FOLDER}/.github/workflows
          cp -r ${SOURCE_FOLDER}/.github/linters ${TARGET_FOLDER}/.github/linters
          cp -r ${SOURCE_FOLDER}/.github/workflows/linter.yml ${TARGET_FOLDER}/.github/workflows/linter.yml          

      - name: Create Pull Request
        uses: peter-evans/create-pull-request@v5
        with:
          token: ${{ secrets.ACCESS_TOKEN }}
          path: ${{github.workspace}}/src/${{github.event.inputs.target_namespace}}/${{ github.event.inputs.target_repository }}
          title: "chore: update linter workflow to ${{ github.event.inputs.source_tag }}"
          commit-message: "chore: linter workflow to ${{ github.event.inputs.source_tag }}"
          base: "main"
          branch: "update-linter-workflows-${{ github.event.inputs.source_tag }}"

You’ll notice that I’m using the peter-evans/create-pull-request action to create the pull request. This is a great action which helps both commit the changes and open a pull request for them.

To make this workflow work, I had to create a personal access token with the pull-requests: write and contents: write permissions. I then added the token as a secret to the repository.

Lastly, this is a workflow dispatch workflow, which means that it can be triggered manually. This is great because it allows me to trigger the workflow whenever I want to update the workflows in a repository. To ensure that I don’t point to the wrong repository, I’ve added a few input parameters to the workflow. This allows me to specify the source and target repositories, as well as the source and target tags. This is useful because I can point to a specific version of the source repository, and then update the target repository to use that version.

Conclusion

This is just one example of how I’ve used GitHub Actions to scale my development efforts. I’m sure there’s other ways to do this, but this is what I’ve found to work for me right now. I’m sure there’s optimizations that can be made, and I’m always looking for feedback. Feel free to reach out to me on Twitter or in the comments below. Thanks for reading!

Book Review: One Bold Move a Day - Meaningful Actions Women can take to Fulfill their leadership and career potential - Shanna A. Hocking

Summary

Hocking’s introduction starts with “Who do you want to become?”¹. She reflects on where her journey started and how she got to where she is today. What really resonated to me was that she looked for someone to show her how to advance in her career, develop as a leader, and grow as a person.

She goes on to explain how mindsets shifts will play a role in the process of showing up for yourself and others. She lists 4 types of mindsets and how they can be used to help you grow.² To build on these mindsets, she provides “Bold Moves to Make Now”, a series of actionable items and prompts to help you get started.

Chapters one through three set the stage for the latter chapters. There’s a number of actionable self-reflection items and a series of prompts Hocking walks the reader through to get them thinking about the bold moves they can take.

Chapters four through six are where the book starts to channel the self reflection into career advice. Hocking provides advice how to lift others up and how to invest in yourself. She talks about Bold move performance patterns and how one can advance their career faster if they understand the patterns and apply them to learning, hobbies, physical activity, and rest.

The rest of the chapters coalesce and frame the previous chapters into what Hocking calls “The Bold Move Mindset”.

Recommendation

At a glance Hocking’s book is a short read with immersive, experience driven, and actionable content. I recommend this book to individuals who do not yet have a framework for career advancement or are looking to augment their existing frameworks with a new perspective. Don’t let the books gender-specific title fool you, the content is applicable to all individuals.

Click here to see the book on Amazon.com

How do I setup multi-domain GitHub pages?

Credit goes to this Stack Overflow answer, but note, not the accepted answer it’s the one currently below.

1. Create an extra repository for your domain. I used the name of the domain as the repository name. See https://GitHub.com/johncosta/johnmcostaiii.net.

2. Create an index.html file in the root of the project.

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
  <head>
    <meta charset="utf-8">
    <title>Redirecting to https://johnmcostaiii.com</title>
    <meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0; URL=https://johnmcostaiii.com">
  </head>

  <link rel="canonical" href="https://johnmcostaiii.com">
</html>

3. Create a CNAME file in the root of the project.

johnmcostaiii.com

4. Setup the DNS for the domain to point to the GitHub pages servers. See this write up for how it should look: https://johnmcostaiii.com/posts/2023-11-10-new-blog-hosting/

New Blog Hosting

It was recently suggested by a mentor that I get back into blogging. I’ll create an entry dedicated on this topic, but the byproduct of this discussion inspired me to resurface and re-host the blog I had started over 10 years ago.

Choosing the Static Site Generator

Given I already had some content formatted in Markdown and the old site which used a version of Hugo, I didn’t really spend a significant amount of time re-considering a static site to drive it.

I did take a few moments to see what was out there and found this list of Awesome Static Generators. I also peeked at reddit to see if there was any consensus out there, but as expected there was little and it was mostly opinion based.

Gitlab has a write-up suggesting an approach static site generator which was a little closer to what I was hoping to read through, but they didn’t draw any conclusions. This was also not unexpected as they probably can’t really back one vs another as they could host any of them.

To summarize the article, see the following table:

Setup

I’m a little embarassed to admit this, but I’ve been late to the party in using GitHub pages. Instead, I had a container running the site on a droplet on DigitalOcean. One of the best parts of the move is that I’ll be able to save a little on hosting costs. And by save a little, I mean can start another project for a similar cost :)

Here’s some of the steps I needed to take to move it over:

1. Create a new GitHub repository. So that I can find it easier later on, I used the domain as the repository name. See the repository here: https://github.com/johncosta/johnmcostaiii.com

2. I looked through the Hugo theme site for a theme that I wanted: https://themes.gohugo.io/

3. Following the hugo guide posted here I then created a new hugo site with the following command:

   hugo new site quickstart
   cd quickstart
   git checkout <the theme> themes/<theme name>
   echo "theme = '<theme name'" >> hugo.toml
   hugo server
   

   NOTE: The guide uses the ananke theme, but I wanted something different.

4. Move the generated content out of quickstart and into the root.

   NOTE: I did this to avoid the complexity of a directory. Now everything can run from the root.

5. Copy all my content into the content directory

6. Test the site with hugo server.

NOTE: I created a Makefile to start encapsulating the raw commands.

GitHub Actions Workflows

1. Copy and paste the action workflow into the project

.github/workflows/hugo.yml

# Sample workflow for building and deploying a Hugo site to GitHub Pages
name: Deploy Hugo site to Pages

on:
  # Runs on pushes targeting the default branch
  push:
    branches:
      - main

  # Allows you to run this workflow manually from the Actions tab
  workflow_dispatch:

# Sets permissions of the GITHUB_TOKEN to allow deployment to GitHub Pages
permissions:
  contents: read
  pages: write
  id-token: write

# Allow only one concurrent deployment, skipping runs queued between the run in-progress and latest queued.
# However, do NOT cancel in-progress runs as we want to allow these production deployments to complete.
concurrency:
  group: "pages"
  cancel-in-progress: false

# Default to bash
defaults:
  run:
    shell: bash

jobs:
  # Build job
  build:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    env:
      HUGO_VERSION: 0.120.2
    steps:
      - name: Install Hugo CLI
        run: |
          wget -O ${{ runner.temp }}/hugo.deb https://github.com/gohugoio/hugo/releases/download/v${HUGO_VERSION}/hugo_extended_${HUGO_VERSION}_linux-amd64.deb \
          && sudo dpkg -i ${{ runner.temp }}/hugo.deb          
      - name: Install Dart Sass
        run: sudo snap install dart-sass
      - name: Checkout
        uses: actions/checkout@v4
        with:
          submodules: recursive
          fetch-depth: 0
      - name: Setup Pages
        id: pages
        uses: actions/configure-pages@v3
      - name: Install Node.js dependencies
        run: "[[ -f package-lock.json || -f npm-shrinkwrap.json ]] && npm ci || true"
      - name: Build with Hugo
        env:
          # For maximum backward compatibility with Hugo modules
          HUGO_ENVIRONMENT: production
          HUGO_ENV: production
        run: |
          hugo \
            --gc \
            --minify \
            --baseURL "${{ steps.pages.outputs.base_url }}/"          
      - name: Upload artifact
        uses: actions/upload-pages-artifact@v2
        with:
          path: ./public

  # Deployment job
  deploy:
    environment:
      name: github-pages
      url: ${{ steps.deployment.outputs.page_url }}
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    needs: build
    steps:
      - name: Deploy to GitHub Pages
        id: deployment
        uses: actions/deploy-pages@v2

Deployment

GitHub has a guide for setting up static sites which can be found here: https://docs.github.com/en/pages/configuring-a-custom-domain-for-your-github-pages-site/managing-a-custom-domain-for-your-github-pages-site

1. Set up your domain registrar. Here it points to Digital Ocean as I manage projects through them.

2. Get the ip values for your GitHub pages. Mine is johncosta.github.io

% dig johncosta.github.io

; <<>> DiG 9.10.6 <<>> johncosta.github.io
;; global options: +cmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 12535
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 4, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 1

;; OPT PSEUDOSECTION:
; EDNS: version: 0, flags:; udp: 512
;; QUESTION SECTION:
;johncosta.github.io.		IN	A

;; ANSWER SECTION:
johncosta.github.io.	3600	IN	A	185.199.111.153
johncosta.github.io.	3600	IN	A	185.199.108.153
johncosta.github.io.	3600	IN	A	185.199.110.153
johncosta.github.io.	3600	IN	A	185.199.109.153

;; Query time: 40 msec
;; SERVER: 192.168.87.16#53(192.168.87.16)
;; WHEN: Fri Nov 10 18:50:54 EST 2023
;; MSG SIZE  rcvd: 112

3. Setup Digital Ocean to point to GitHub

4. Set the custom domain in the GitHub Pages Settings section of the repository:

Installing New Relic Server Monitoring within Docker Containers

The inspiration for this post is from a recent Stack Overflow question that I had answered when I had found the selected answer could be improved upon. You can find it here.

I ran into a problem recently when working with Docker and New Relic Server Monitoring together. Using the directions found in the New Relic docs for Ubuntu/Debian, the Dockerfile additions I first came up with looked as follows:

FROM stackbrew/ubuntu:12.04
MAINTAINER John Costa (john.costa@gmail.com)

RUN apt-get update
RUN apt-get -y install wget

# install new relic server monitoring
RUN echo deb http://apt.newrelic.com/debian/ newrelic non-free >> /etc/apt/sources.list.d/newrelic.list
RUN wget -O- https://download.newrelic.com/548C16BF.gpg | apt-key add -
RUN apt-get update
RUN apt-get install newrelic-sysmond
RUN nrsysmond-config --set license_key=YOUR_LICENSE_KEY

CMD ["/etc/init.d/newrelic-sysmond", "start"]

This results in an error when trying to wget from download.newrelic.com:

--2014-02-21 23:19:33--  https://download.newrelic.com/548C16BF.gpg
Resolving download.newrelic.com (download.newrelic.com)... 50.31.164.159
Connecting to download.newrelic.com (download.newrelic.com)|50.31.164.159|:443... connected.
ERROR: cannot verify download.newrelic.com's certificate, issued by `/C=US/O=GeoTrust, Inc./CN=GeoTrust SSL CA':
  Unable to locally verify the issuer's authority.
To connect to download.newrelic.com insecurely, use `--no-check-certificate'.
gpg: no valid OpenPGP data found.

The error seems to present a solution that is tempting, especially because it works. This would be adding --no-check-certificate to your wget command. This workaround does avoid the error, but also works around the protection that ssl is providing.

The fix is really straight forward, but not obvious if you’re not familiar with apt. With the installation of the ca-certificates package as part of your dockerfile, you can use wget and still validate the certificate.

The following is a working sample:

FROM stackbrew/ubuntu:12.04
MAINTAINER John Costa (john.costa@gmail.com)

RUN apt-get update
RUN apt-get -y install ca-certificates wget  # <-- updated line

# install new relic server monitoring
RUN echo deb http://apt.newrelic.com/debian/ newrelic non-free >> /etc/apt/sources.list.d/newrelic.list
RUN wget -O- https://download.newrelic.com/548C16BF.gpg | apt-key add -
RUN apt-get update
RUN apt-get install newrelic-sysmond
RUN nrsysmond-config --set license_key=YOUR_LICENSE_KEY

CMD ["/etc/init.d/newrelic-sysmond", "start"]

Some caveats:

• This container is really short lived and will exit almost immediately. The example is for illustrative use.

• Don’t forget to put your actual license key in place of “YOUR_LICENSE_KEY” or else you’ll get an error of the following: Error: invalid license key - must be 40 characters exactly

• This is a working example, but I realize that most wont want to use the single /etc/init.d/newrelic-sysmond start command to run their container. you’ll most likely have some sort of init.sh script and place this command in the init.sh.

• You might not want to install the server monitoring in your development environments. To work around this, in the same init.sh script above, you could check for an environment variable that you inject when the container is first started. Your init file might look as follows (including the start command):

# Conditionally install our key only in production and staging
if [ "${MY_ENV}" == "production" ] || [ "${MY_ENV}" == "staging" ] ; then
    nrsysmond-config --set license_key=YOUR_LICENSE_KEY
fi

# The New Relic daemon likes to manage itself. Start it here.
/etc/init.d/newrelic-sysmond start