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Posts in Development
Using mkcert to quickly create certificates for testing and development environments
As a developer, operator, and architect, I am always evaluating technological solutions. A fair number of these solutions use TLS, which requires minting new certificates. I recently came across mkcert, which makes it SUPER easy to provision new certificates for development and testing. To get started with mkcert, you will need to run it with the "-install" option: This will create a new CA certificate in $HOME/.local/share/mkcert, and update your trust stores so curl, Firefox, etc…
$ read more →Using grpcurl to interact with gRPC applications
The past couple of weeks I have been digging into gRPC and HTTP2 in my spare time. I needed a way to review the requests and responses, and an easy way to explore gRPC servers. I also wanted something to dump protocol buffers in a human readable format. It turns out grpcurl was written for just this purpose, and has been super useful for groking gRPC…
$ read more →Verifying your .gitignore is working correctly
I was recently cleaning up an old Git repo, and noticed that some .pyc files got checked in. This got me thinking, and I started reading through the Git documentation to see if there was a way to evaluate .gitignore rules to make sure they were working as expected. Sure enough, Git has the "check-ignore" command. Given the following .gitignore: You can pass a pattern to "check-ignore" to get the list of files in your working directory that match the expression: Super handy…
$ read more →Linting Jenkinsfiles to find syntax errors
As a long time Jenkins user I periodically need to add new steps or Groovy logic to my Jenkinsfiles. The last thing you want to do when updating your pipeline configuration is to make a typo which causes a build to break. To avoid these scenarios, I like to use a git pre-commit hook along with the Jenkins CLI "declarative-linter" option. To use this super useful feature to check for syntax errors, you will first need to download the Jenkins CLI client…
$ read more →A couple of quick and easy ways to display JSON data on the Linux command line
I interact with RESTful services daily and periodically need to review the JSON objects exposed through one or more endpoints. There are several Linux utilities that can take a JSON object and print the object in an easily readable form. The pygmentize utility (available in the python-pygments package) can be fed a JSON object via a file or STDIN: In the output above I'm retrieving a JSON object from the Bind statistics server and feeding it to pygmentize via STDIN. Pygmentize will take the object is given and produce a nightly formatted JSON object on STDOUT…
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