Opening Pull Request links from Terminal
Recently I changed roles which meant leaving GitHub behind and using Bitbucket. There’s many reason why the Git provider switch made me sad but one of main ones was how reliant my workflow had become on the gh CLI.
Dynamic GitHub Templates
Templates are useful way to bootstrap a repository, once I see a pattern in repositories, I will create a template version of the repository locally and use rysnc to copy files across to a newly created repository. This works when you’re the only one producing the repositories, but that’s almost never the case. I wanted to share my template with others. I started by creating a template repository in GitHub, this works great for a simple template that contains dotfiles and GitHub workflows.
Global pre-commit
I made a mistake when committing to repo recently I was using terraform plan -generate-config-out=generate.tf to bring some infrastructure under management of a repo. And managed to commit some secrets in the process by adding generate.tf by accident. I ended up nuking the repo because it was new enough that this was the easiest option. But this got me thinking I should use gitleaks as pre-commit hook. And I wondered if I could do this globally.
Rise of the (GitHub) Bots
As an engineer I attempt to automate as much as possible. This is normally done locally first, and then naturally migrates to a pipeline. When a pipeline makes changes to the repo the challenge is giving it the required access. Some examples of pipelines that require access to GitHub are: Commenting on PR based on the build output Labeling a PR based on the build output Keeping documentation up to date with terraform-docs Keeping versions up to date with updatecli (for when dependabot doesn’t cut it) Automatically Backporting PRs based on labels using tibdex/backport Pipeline access can be solved in three ways:
Fixing Automating Terraform with GitHub Actions
I am involved in evaluating GitHub Actions as a part of migration activity, one of the technologies that is used in our CI/CD pipeline is Terraform. Hashicorp provides a tutorial as a start for Automating Terraform with GitHub Actions. Its a good start but in my opinion it is unusable for production environments as there is no Interactive Approval of Plans and instead it uses Auto-Approval of Plans something thats discouraged in the Terraform documentation for production environments.
Joining in Jolt
I stumbled across a question on stackoverflow that was asking how to perform lookup based on ids in a JSON document. After some initial thought and trial and error (because thats the only way you can develop JOLT), I came up with a solution that is repeatable allowing you to perform multiple joins. Firstly lets look at the input and outputs: Input JSON Contains a data array and relationships array.
Docker Shell Command
After adding docker to my utility belt, I haven’t looked back. One thing i often find myself needing to do is execute a bash session against my container.