My Most Popular Command Line Commands

My Most Popular Command Line Commands

Tuesday, Sep 4, 2018
What commands do you use most on command line? As a daily (hourly) linux user, I use command line tools for almost everything that I do. Opening files, copying, moving, making connections (ssh), starting containers (docker). But what ones do I use most? Here is a little command to find out for yourself. Find out your top 10: history | awk '{CMD[$2]++;count++;}END { for (a in CMD)print CMD[a] " " CMD[a]/count*100 "% " a;}' | grep -v ". ...

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Build, Test, Store and Distribute Docker Containers with GitLab

Build, Test, Store and Distribute Docker Containers with GitLab

Friday, Mar 2, 2018
The use of Docker containers has exploded (at least within Web Development) and therefore we have a whole bunch of new tools that can be used to manage the DevOps process. However, there are a massive range of tools that can be used to achieve all of these. Be it Git hosting (GitHub, Bitbucket); Continuous Integration and Delivery and Build Tools (Jenkins, CircleCI, Drone); Docker Registry (Docker EE, Quay.io), or a range of other add-on tools, there sometimes seem as many new, great products in the DevOps area as there are Javascript frameworks(! ...

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What I Learnt from DockerCon Europe in Copenhagen

What I Learnt from DockerCon Europe in Copenhagen

Sunday, Nov 12, 2017
It has been a while since I returned from DockerCon Europe in Copenhagen, and despite doing a presentation 4 days after arriving home for Docker Cambridge meetup group, I haven’t yet done a blog post for it. However, that is about to change. So, here is my review of DockerCon Europe. Overall, what I love to see in software is passion and ideas around everything. I remember feeling how exciting it was to be involved in a massive open-source project like Drupal in 2011 at DrupalCon London and to me it seems that Docker is around the same stage of growth now (in terms of number of attendees), however, its potential as a software solution is far different to Drupal. ...

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Docker DevTools: Docker as part of your development toolset

Docker DevTools: Docker as part of your development toolset

Wednesday, Jul 26, 2017
The use of tools seems to have exploded in the past few years. Simple web applications take 5 tools just to build and more complex setup are even more prevalent. Add to that that we also end up configuring our tools to better suit our needs and you are faced with a big dependency problem. How do you manage those dependencies? My most recent answer is Docker. It’s not easy for developers and users to use tools Tools were invented to make doing tasks easier. ...

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Tidying Docker Containers and Images without Filling Your Disk Space

Tidying Docker Containers and Images without Filling Your Disk Space

Tuesday, Jun 13, 2017
Docker. You know that I love it. I guess maybe sometimes I love it a little too much because on some of my test servers I have been filling up a lot of GB with new images and containers. All of which hang around indefinitely if you don’t clear them. Add to that if you have a continuous integration pipeline that builds a new container every time you do a commit/push and you have an ever growing disk of redundant Docker containers and images. ...

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Digital: The Stack and The Roles

Digital: The Stack and The Roles

Sunday, Jun 4, 2017
The most recent buzz word around is digital, however, it is often used as a catch all term for almost anything that is related to computers. So, what is the scope of digital and where do different roles exist inside the landscape? Generally speaking, I term digital to be anything that uses the wider Internet, however, that does not mean anything that is networked. So, simply accessing a file server is not using digital services, however, using a web application to access a file server is. ...

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Starting Docker: Making Drupal PHPCS Docker Container

Starting Docker: Making Drupal PHPCS Docker Container

Thursday, Dec 29, 2016
Making your own containers can be a super useful way of not only understanding more about docker, but also for understanding more about the systems administration of your applications or docker images. Maybe you want a specific container for running configured services on your machine, or maybe you want to look at packaging your entire system inside a docker container to make it super easy to run. In this quick post, I am going to dover making a Dockerfile and also what to write in it so that you can start making your own containers, today! ...

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Starting Docker: Using tools from inside your containers

Starting Docker: Using tools from inside your containers

Wednesday, Dec 14, 2016
So far we have been discussing using containers, largely from inside the container. However, sometimes you simply want to use tools from inside your docker container rather than having the dependency nightmare of having everything installed locally (or on your server). Attaching/mounting into your Docker container The process of attaching or mounting local files into your container will give you the ability to use those files inside your container. Or store new files created from inside your container to the local file system. ...

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Starting Docker: Installation

Starting Docker: Installation

Thursday, Dec 1, 2016
Unless you have been living under a metaphorical rock you will have heard about Docker. But although lots of people have heard of Docker, far fewer are using it day-to-day and even less in production. In this short post, I am going to go over what Docker (and containers are) and how you can start to get up and running with Docker. What is Docker? Wikipedia describes Docker as: Docker is an open-source project that automates the deployment of Linux applications inside software containers. ...

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Redirecting http to https on nginx

Redirecting http to https on nginx

Monday, Jul 11, 2016
If you have been following the growth of encryption on the web (https) and the fact that you can now get free SSL certificates (much like the one on this site) using Lets Encrypt, there is very little reason for not having your site running https, making your data encrypted between the server and the user, making everyone more secure. If you are doing this in Apache, then most open-source projects will suggest the you use the rewrite engine inside apache. ...

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