command line

If you haven't already, check out my full video on the Raspberry Pi 5, which inspired this post.

Raspberry Pi OS 12 'Bookworm' is coming alongside the release of the Raspberry Pi 5, and with it comes a fairly drastic change from using wpa_supplicant for WiFi interface management to everything network-related running through nmcli, or NetworkManager.

nmcli is widely adopted in Linux these days, and it makes managing WiFi, LAN, and other network connections much simpler.

I recently needed to do a quick audit on all my Ansible roles, and the easiest way (since almost every one is on GitHub, and that's the main source of truth I use) was to grab a list of all my GitHub repositories. However, it can be a little tricky if you have hundreds of repos. I'm guessing most people don't have this problem, but whether you do or not, the easiest way to get all of any given user's repositories using the GitHub v3 API is to run the following command:

Example output:

Testing out the new Umami demo profile in Drupal 8.6.x.

I wanted to post a quick guide here for the benefit of anyone else just wanting to test out how Lando works or how it integrates with a Drupal project, since the official documentation kind of jumps you around different places and doesn't have any instructions for "Help! I don't already have a working Drupal codebase!":

I recently needed to hack together a setup where Docker containers are spawned by an automated process, then later, a garbage collector runs and kills off all spawned containers. This is on a system where there could be anywhere from tens to hundreds of containers running at any given moment, and I needed traceability of different containers while they're running.

One of the easiest ways to have at-a-glance traceability is to have named containers, e.g. spawned-worker-1, spawned-worker-2, etc.

So if I do a docker ps --format '{{.Names}}', I can get a full list of all running containers by name. And then if I want to filter that list to only show me spawned-worker- prefixed container names, I can pipe the output through grep, awk, and xargs to use the container names in a Docker command, like so:

docker ps --format '{{.Names}}' | grep "^spawned-worker-" | awk '{print $1}' | xargs -I {} docker stop {}

In this case, I'm stopping all containers with spawned-worker- as the start of the name.

Dockerfiles have been able to use ARGs to allow passing in parameters during a docker build using the CLI argument --build-arg for some time. But until recently (Docker's 17.05 release, to be precise), you weren't able to use an ARG to specify all or part of your Dockerfile's mandatory FROM command.

But since the pull request Allow ARG in FROM was merged, you can now specify an image / repository to use at runtime. This is great for flexibility, and as a concrete example, I used this feature to allow me to pull from a private Docker registry when building a Dockerfile in production, or to build from a local Docker image that was created as part of a CI/testing process inside Travis CI.

To use an ARG in your Dockerfile's FROM:

Ever since I heard about the new 'Beta' Windows Subsystem for Linux, which basically installs an Ubuntu LTS release inside of Windows 10 (currently 14.04), I've been meaning to give it a spin, and see if it can be a worthy replacement for Cygwin, Git shell, Cmder, etc. And what I was most interested in was whether I could finally point people to a more stable and friendly way of using Ansible on a Windows workstation.

In the past, there was the option of running Ansible inside Cygwin (and this is still the best way to try getting Ansible working in an older Windows environment), but this always felt kludgy to me, and I hated having to recommend either that or forcing Windows users to do a full Linux VM installation just to run Ansible commands. I finally updated my PC laptop to the latest Windows 10 Anniversary Update, and installed the Windows Subsystem for Linux, and lo and behold, Ansible works!

For most log and text files, simply opening them up in $editor_of_your_choice works fine. If the file is less than a few hundred megabytes, most modern editors (and even some IDEs) shouldn't choke on them too badly.

But what if you have a 1, 2, or 10 GB logfile or giant text file you need to search through? Finding a line with a bit of text is simple enough (and not too slow) if you're using grep. But if you want to grab a chunk of the file and edit that chunk, or split the file into smaller files, there's a simple process that I use, based on this Stack Overflow answer:

For all the sites I maintain, I have at least a local and production environment. Some projects warrant a dev, qa, etc. as well, but for the purposes of this post, let's just assume you often run drush commands on local or development environments during development, and eventually run a similar command on production during a deployment.

What happens if, at some point, you are churning through some Drush commands, using aliases (e.g. drush @site.local break-all-the-things to break things for testing), and you accidentally enter @site.prod instead of @site.local? Or what if you were doing something potentially disastrous, like deleting a database table locally so you can test a module install file, using drush sqlq to run a query?