Gustavo Siqueira

Sharing dotfiles between computers

2020-08-21T10:42:00+02:00

Some years ago while I was digging inside Github’s gigantic repositories base, I found Kenneth’s dotfiles and at the time he did something really interesting. He put his dotfiles inside the iCloud folder, so the folder would automatically be updated in every MacOS device connected to that iCloud account.

At the time I was using two macbooks(personal/work), so I was eager to try that and see how it does. So here’s what I did to manage that setup.

Link dotfiles folder to iCloud

First we have to create a symbolic link between the dotfiles folder and the iCloud folder.

ln -S ~/dotfiles '~/Library/Mobile Documents/com~apple~CloudDocs'

Now the dotfiles will begin to upload and be shared with every computer using the same iCloud account. But now how to keep every config always updated? Every alias setted? It’s simple, we just have to add some more symbolic links and then we’ll be all set.

Create the config files symbolic links

ln -S ~/dotfiles/my.conf ~/path/to/conf/.my.conf
# do this for every config you use(zsh, bash, envs, vim, git...)

After these steps you shall have your configs properly setted, and after changing some config in one of the computers it will automatically update the other ones.

Hope this can be helpfull and maybe give some insights in how we can automate small things to improve our productivity or just for the fun of it, you can also find my dotfiles here.

Tmux Spotify Plugin

2020-08-19T16:40:00+02:00

It’s been about 5 years since I’ve started to use Tmux and I really recommend it to everyone, it’s been a great addition to my set of tools, and it does an amazing job. I’ll not focus this post on tmux itself, but on how I managed to create a plugin to show my spotify track info in it.

A while back I was searching a way to tweak my tmux status bar for it to show the spotify info, and since I used Mac I discover that the easiest way to do that would be using osascript(AppleScript). So I endup with something like this:

#!/usr/bin/env osascript

tell application "Spotify"
  if it is running then
    if player state is playing then
      set track_name to name of current track
      set artist_name to artist of current track

      artist_name & " - " & track_name
    end if
  end if
end tell

As use can see it’s a simple Apple Script code that tells the Spotify Application what it wants and prints it at the end.

Creating the plugin

With the track info, now I could go on to the next step, that was create a plugin to set it in tmux statusbar automatically.

Taking a look at some projects like tmux-simple-git-status, I was able to identify how to achieve what I wanted. Since it was very similar I ended using some parts of the tmux-simple-git-status code.

I’ll breakup the plugin in three main parts:

1. Retrieve tmux status bar value

tmux show-option -gqv "status-right"

2. Replace substring with spotify info

${string/$placeholder/$spotify_info}

string: tmux status-right value.
placelholder: value setted in .tmux.conf to be setted with the script automatically.
spotify_info: spotify track info retrieved with osascript.

3. Set tmux new status bar value

tmux set-option -gq "status-right" "$value"

value: string generated in step 2 to be setted as new value for the status bar.

Final Result

Fig 1. Spotify info in tmux status bar.

With this three steps I was able to succeed in creating the plugin, and now in a very easy way it is possible to show the user’s spotify info on tmux, unfortnatelly it’s only for MacOS by now.

If you are interested in this project you can find it here: gugsrs/tmux-spotify-mac

Using localstack to test SQS and SNS locally

2017-10-22T17:27:00+02:00

Summary:

Sometimes it’s hard to test locally a microservice architecture with messages flying around. I’ve found some alternatives to that, GoAWS and Localstack, and in this post I’ll cover how I manage to run localstack to mock my infrastructure.

Setup:

Before going into action, make sure you have installed python (I’m currently using Python 3.6.1), pip and aws-cli.

To set up localstack it’s pretty easy:

pip install localstack

Before we start make sure you have set fake aws credentials to not mess with production enviroment.

~/.aws/credentials

AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=foo
AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=bar

Starting Localstack:

Since localstack mocks all kind of services from aws, it’s possible to choose which one we would like to run.

$ export SERVICES=sqs,sns

To start localstack just :

$ localstack start

It’s possible to use with docker too:

$ localstack start --docker

Using aws-cli:

Create Topic:

$ aws --endpoint-url=http://localhost:4575 sns create-topic --name my_topic

List Topic:

$ aws --endpoint-url=http://localhost:4575 sns list-topics

Create Queue:

$ aws --endpoint-url=http://localhost:4576 sqs create-queue --queue-name my_queue

List Queue:

$ aws --endpoint-url=http://localhost:4576 sqs list-queues

$ aws --endpoint-url=http://localhost:4575 sns subscribe --topic-arn arn:aws:sns:us-east-1:123456789012:my_topic --protocol sqs --notification-endpoint arn:aws:sns:us-east-1:123456789012:my_queue

List subscriptions:

$ aws --endpoint-url=http://localhost:4575 sns list-subscriptions

After creating our infra we need to start sending messages so that our service can receive and use them. For that we are going to publish the message to the topic as followed:

$ aws --endpoint-url=http://localhost:4575 sns publish --topic-arn arn:aws:sns:us-east-1:123456789012:my_topic --message "Hi"

If you want it’s possible to send the content of a file too:

$ aws --endpoint-url=http://localhost:4575 sns publish --topic-arn arn:aws:sns:us-east-1:123456789012:my_topic --message file://file.json

Creating Topics and Queues automatically:

Since it’s a lot of hardwork to create all of those queues and topics by hand, and Localstack does not have an option to start with a config file(GoAws let you use a .yaml to set things up), I’ve managed to create a Python script to create them from a .yaml file. You can see the example from the config file here.

And then just:

$ ./create_sqs_sns.py my-queues-and-topics.yaml