As said before, we are still happy with Docusaurus as our blogging platform. However, Docusaurus being a static page generator, it comes with a few challenges in regard to scheduling and publishing blog posts.
Last week, I attended the World Intelligent Process Automation Summit 2023 in Berlin with our partner Plant An App.
Earlier this year we decided to test Renovate to manage automated dependency updates in our self-hosted GitLab environment. Being able to run Renovate in our own environment and configure it to our needs made a lot of sense. Since we run our internal tooling on a Nomad cluster, we had to configure a Nomad job for Renovate.
For a client, we also handle the vulnerability management of the projects. This also involves manual checks after a new project is launched, to ensure that no critical security problem is caused by misconfiguration.
I recently covered our Vagrant setup. As mentioned in the blog post we mostly use the Vagrant shared folders setup which unfortunately is rather slow. When searching for alternatives I came across the vagrant-gatling-rsync plugin which seems to work better compared to the built-in rsync support of Vagrant. As it seems the built-in rsync support uses a lot of CPU and disk I/O especially when working with very large rsynced directories. The vagrant-gatling-rsync plugin is designed to work well with such large rsynced folders and performs a lot better. In addition to that you are able to fine-tune the rsync latency via your Vagrantfile which is also a huge win. To install the plugin simply run the following command:
There's one plugin for Vagrant which I love to promote in my talks and this is the Cachier plugin. When giving my talks and mentioning the plugin I realized that not many people are aware of the plugin. That's the main reason I write the following lines. The downside of Vagrant is what whenever you destroy a virtual machine and build it again all packages (eg. .deb packages for the OS or Composer packages for the application) need to be downloaded again. Downloading and installing a lot of packages can be quite time consuming which in turn means developers try to avoid it. Which in turn means no one regularly checks if provisioning of the virtual machine still works as it should. The Cachier plugin is the solution for that problem. As the name implies the plugin will cache the downloaded packages and re-use them when possible. To achieve that the plugin will link several folders of the virtual machine back to the host, so that the packages are actually stored on the host, not the vm. Very clever.
Every now and then when provisioning a virtual machine with Vagrant I got an error during the provisioning process. Everything seemed to work fine but the error confused me and my developers so I was looking for the source of the error. I came a across a Vagrant bug report where Mitchell Hashimoto explained that "the reason this error message even appears is due to a bug in Ubuntu not checking whether stdin is a TTY, and just assuming it is". One of the comments in the discussion of this "bug" proposed a "bugfix" by adding the following line to the VagrantFile. Up to now this fix works fine for us and you might use it as well:
Forced Motivated by Robert Reiz and his blog post about how to set-up a Vagrant environment I thought that it`ll be a good idea to quickly outline how we typically configure Vagrant in our projects. The bare minmium VagrantFile looks like this: