ThinkBinary

Setting up SDKMAN! with Fish and Homebrew

Sun, 07 Jan 2024 10:00:00 +0000

Assuming you are a macOS user, managing your installed software with HomeBrew and using Fish as your shell of choice, these are the steps to allow you to use SDKMAN to manage your Java sdks for your projects

Install SDKMAN with Homebrew

SDKMAN has it’s own HomeBrew Tap which you can use to install the software.

brew tap SDKMAN/tap
brew install SDKMAN-cli

This will add the SDKMAN tap to your Homebrew configuration and then use it to install the SDKMAN CLI.

Install Fisher

If you do not already have it installed, you will need to install Fisher, this is a plug-in manager for the Fish shell.

Full installation instructions are available in the Readme on the Fisher project, but the crux of the installation is:

curl -sL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jorgebucaran/fisher/main/functions/fisher.fish | source && fisher install jorgebucaran/fisher

Install SDKMAN for Fish extension

You will need to install the SDKMAN! for Fish extension. This extension makes command sdk from SDKMAN! usable from fish, including auto-completion. Also adds binaries from installed SDKs to the PATH.

fisher install reitzig/[email protected]

Configure it all

At this point all the moving parts are installed, but some configuration still needs to be done to tie it all together.

Find out where SDKMAN! has been installed

echo $(brew --prefix SDKMAN-cli)/libexec

In my case, this told me that SDKMAN was installed to /opt/homebrew/opt/SDKMAN-cli/libexec Keep a note of the result of that command as you will need it later.

You will need to configure the SDKMAN for Fish plugin to use SDKMAN from the custom location that Homebrew installed it into.

Create a configuration file for the SDKMAN plugin for fish.

touch ~/.config/fish/conf.d/config_sdk.fish

In that file, add the following command to tell the plugin where it can find SDKMAN

set -g __sdkman_custom_dir /opt/homebrew/opt/sdkman-cli/libexec

You should now have SDKMAN working and set up in the Fish shell.

Fire up a new shell so that you have a fresh instance of Fish with all of it’s plug-ins set up, and use the following command to see if SDKMAN is now working

sdk help

Change the type of an AWS Parameter Store value

Fri, 02 Apr 2021 18:00:00 +0000

AWS Parameter Store is a great resource for storing configuation information for your applications. It can store plain text settings as a String, as well as confidential information like passwords and connection strings as SecureString. SecureString is encrypted by AWS when it is stored.

When setting these up, some people can go overboard and make things secure that do not need to be secure. Normally, this is not a problem, but it is a little more inconvenient than it needs to be.

The AWS Management Console does not offer a easy way to change the type of a parameter store value once it has been created. To do this as a one off operation, it it possible to use powershell to help you out and very quickly replace the existing parameter with a new one with the same name, but a different type.

This approach is not perfect and there will be a small window of time where the parameter does not exist at all.

Install AWS PowerShell tools

Firstly, you will need to install the AWS PowerShell tools. Documentation for how to install the PowerShell tools for Windows, macOS and Linux ia available on the AWS Documentation website.

Approach

Using PowerShell, we will be able to read the value of the existing secure string, delete the original value, and then create a new parameter with the same name in it’s place with the same value, but stored as a string.

Downloading Videos from Public-i.tv

Sun, 19 Nov 2017 23:00:00 +0000

Local Government webcasting is dominated by Public-i. According to their website, 85% of local government bodies that stream their meetings use Public-i to do so. They provide a good service, but one of the limitations with them is that they don’t keep the videos online for too long.

If you want to watch an old video, you will need to make your own backup copy of it. They have taken steps to ensure that it is possible to easily embed their videos onto other sites, and this work means that it is also easy to download the video itself for a given meeting.

To do this, you will need to carry out a few steps.

Download the source to the video page
Parse the source for the URI of the video file
Extract the title from the page
Download the video and rename the file

This is all very easily achieved with a few lines of powershell and some regular expressions.

Setting up a Chef Server on Ubuntu

Sat, 22 Apr 2017 19:00:00 +0000

This tutorial will assume that you already have an LTS instance of Ubuntu Server running as a pysical machine or virtual machine. Full instructions for installing Ubuntu Server are available on the Ubuntu website.

Download and Install Chef Server

From the Chef Server Downloads page, download the latest stable version of Chef for your operating system. You can use either Wget or Curl for this.

wget https://packages.chef.io/files/stable/chef-server/12.14.0/ubuntu/16.04/chef-server-core_12.14.0-1_amd64.deb

Then use DPKG to install the package file into Ubuntu.

sudo dpkg -i chef-server-core_12.14.0-1_amd64.deb

Once Chef has been installed, you can verify it by running the command chef-server-ctl.

Reconfiguring Chef

So far you have installed the basic commands for Chef, but you will not have a working Chef server yet. To get that you will need to reconfigure chef with the following command:

sudo chef-server-ctl reconfigure

This will take a number of minutes and set up Chef on your server, and will use Chef to install the various dependencies such as PostgreSql, RabbitMQ, etc.

At this point you can browse to the Chef server on port 80, but will see a page informating you that until you install the management console, there will not be much for you to see.

Set up your admin users and organisations

You will now need to create a an administrative user with the Chef user-create command. You will need to provide your username, forename, surname, email address, password and a location for it to store the generated certificate.

sudo chef-server-ctl user-create pervezchoudhury Pervez Choudhury [email protected] p@ssw0rd --filename /home/pervezchoudhury/chef-certs/pervezchoudhury.pem

Next you will need to create an application and add your user to this new application.

sudo chef-server-ctl org-create chefdemo "Chef Demo" --association_user pervezchoudhury --filename /home/pervezchoudhury/chef-certs/chefdemo.pem

Install the management console

sudo chef-server-ctl install chef-manage
sudo chef-server-ctl reconfigure
sudo chef-manage-ctl reconfigure

You will now be able to log into the Chef manageent console using your username and password you created earlier.

Install the reporting add-on

Finally you will need to install the reporting add on to give you more information about your Chef infrastucture.

sudo chef-server-ctl install opscode-reporting
sudo chef-manage-ctl reconfigure
sudo opscode-reporting-ctl reconfigure

Set up a Development ASP.Net web site in your local IIS

Sat, 14 Jan 2017 15:50:00 +0000

When developing an ASP.net application, it can be very useful to be able to quickly set up the project in your local IIS server so you can build it and start using it.

I have a couple of scripts that I like to drop into the root of my ASP.net repositories which will quickly set up IIS for your project.

These scripts depend upon the Carbon PowerShell module being available locally.

Install Website

This script will set up IIS, application pools, binding and local host file entries for your website.

Uninstall Website

This script will undo all of the good work carried out by the install script.

Set TeamCity's build number a todays date

Fri, 13 Jan 2017 17:00:00 +0000

When using TeamCity to run daily builds for things like unit test coverage, duplicate code, security auditing, which can be time consuming running as part of every commit, it is handy to be able to see which date they were run.

This can be easily achived by setting the TeamCity build number as the date the build was started.

Add a Powershell build step to the build with the following code definition

Essential tools when setting up a new development environment

Sun, 04 Sep 2016 18:50:00 +0000

A list of essentials tools when setting up a new machine for software development.

Terminals

ConEmu
choco install conemu
PowerShell 5
choco install powershell

IDE

Visual Studio Community
choco install visualstudio2015community
Visual Studio Code
choco install visualstudiocode

IDE Extensions

Visual Studio

Resharper
DotTrace
Web Essentials

Visual Studo Code

PowerShell
C#

Languages

Node (via NVM)
Go
choco install golang
.NET Core
.Net Framework 4.6.2
choco install dotnet4.6.2

.NET development tools

DotPeek
Decompile .NET assemblies to C# using JetBrains Resharper build in decompiler.
choco install dotpeek
NuGet Package Explorer
NuGet Package Explorer is a ClickOnce application which allows creating and exploring NuGet packages easily. After installing it, you can double click on a .nupkg file to view the package content. You can also load packages directly from the official NuGet feed.
choco install nugetpackageexplorer
FxCop
FxCop is an application that analyzes managed code assemblies (code that targets the .NET Framework common language runtime) and reports information about the assemblies, such as possible design, localization, performance, and security improvements.
choco install fxcop

HTTP Development

Fiddler
choco install fiddler
Postman
choco install postman

Browsers

Firefox Developer Edition
Chrome
choco install googlechrome

Installers

Chocolatey
@powershell -NoProfile -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -Command "iex ((New-Object System.Net.WebClient).DownloadString('https://chocolatey.org/install.ps1'))" && SET "PATH=%PATH%;%ALLUSERSPROFILE%\chocolatey\bin"

Source Control

SourceTree
choco install sourcetree
TortoiseGit
choco install tortoisegit
PoSH Git
choco install poshgit
Git Command Line
choco install git
Git Credential Manager for Windows
choco install git-credential-manager-for-windows

Merge

KDiff3
Very good open source 3 way merge and diff tool.
choco install kdiff3

Virtual Machines

Docker
An open platform for developers and sysadmins to build, ship, and run distributed applications.
choco install docker

Data

LinqPad
choco install linqpad
Redis for Windows
choco install redis-64
SQL Server Management Studio
choco install mssqlservermanagementstudio2014express
Redis Desktop Manager
A fast open source Redis database management application.
choco install redis-desktop-manager

Misc

Baretail
A free real-time log file monitoring tool.
choco install baretail
Slack
choco install slack

Bootstrapping Psake for your windows builds

Sun, 05 Jun 2016 15:05:00 +0000

Psake is a great build system for automating your .Net builds on Windows. To save time when using it and to make it a simple command to run the build, I like to place a batch file in the root of the code repository to allow you to download and execute Psake without having to check in any binaries.

It also avoids the hassle of importing the Psake module and calling Invoke-Psake

Auto reconnecting Margiebot to Slack

Sun, 05 Jun 2016 12:30:00 +0000

MargieBot is a simple to use .Net framework for making your own bots for Slack. To start up a bot and connect it to Slack, all it takes is:

Bot myBot = new Bot();
myBot.Connect("<your bot's slack API token>");

This makes the happy path work very well, but out of the box this will not handle dropped connections or attempting to reconnect to the server - so if the connection is interrupted for any reason, you bot will no longer try to connect to Slack.

Fortunately MargieBot offers an extensibility point that we can use to add this functionality in.

MargieBot emits a ConnectionStatusChanged event when the bot connects or disconnects from Slack. it also exposes a public property called IsConnected.

We can wire up an event handler to the ConnectionStatusChanged event like so:

_bot = new Bot();
_bot.ConnectionStatusChanged += ConnectToSlackIfDisconnected;

Our event handler can then try to establish a connection to Slack and retry until it is able to do so.

We can also re-ue this code when making the initial connection to Slack. Instead of calling

_bot.Connect("<Slack API Token>") // do not do this anymore

you can call the event handler explicitly with:

ConnectToSlackIfDisconnected(false); // do this instead!

Castle Windsor ASP.Net HTTP Handler Factory

Sat, 26 Mar 2016 15:30:00 +0000

When writing a simple HTTP handler in .Net, the framework provides support for replacing the default HTTP Handler Factory with your own factory which provides support for dependency injection.

The framework exposes an interface called IHttpHandlerFactory which you will need to implement with the code for your custom factory.

The HTTP Handler Factory

Here’s one I prepared earlier that will return HTTP handlers based on the name the classed were registered with in Castle Windsor.

It makes the assumption that your HttpApplication class in Global.asax.cs exposes the container, via the IContainerAccessor interface.

Wiring it in

You will need to add an entry in your web.config file that tells the framework to use your factory to satisfy HTTP requests.

<configuration>
	<system.webServer>
		<handlers>
			<add
				verb="GET,POST"
				path="*.sample"
				name="HandlerFactory"
				type="CastleWindsorHttpHandlerFactory"/>
		</handlers>
  </system.webServer>
</configuration>

This will register the extension .sample to have it’s requests satisfied by the class that Castle Windsor believes is appropriate to handle that request based on the logic in your handler factory.

More details for how to do this can be found on the MSDN article on creating and registering HTTP handler factories