Year: 2016

Terminology – split screen terminal alternative to Terminator

terminology

If you are spending a lot of time in console, and have to manage multiple windows, there are a few options for you – screen, tmux, and, of course, Terminator.  Recently, I’ve come across one more – Terminology.

Terminology is a console with built-in window multiplexing.  It feels a bit more fancy than the options above and I enjoyed using it for about half a day.  From then on, the look, feel, and unfamiliar mouse and keyboard behavior threw me back into the Terminator window.  But f you were looking for an alternative to the well established options, here is one to try.

Robo – Modern Task Runner for PHP

robo

There is a whole lot of ways to build and deploy web applications these days.  I’ve done my own circle of trials and errors and have some very strong opinions on which ones are good, which ones are bad, and which ones are ugly.

My most recent discovery was Robo – a modern task runner for PHP.  I’ve been pushing it to one of those weekends, where I have nothing better to do, to trying it out.  And today I did.  Not just tried it out, but replaced a part of our infrastructure, which was previously running on Laravel Envoy.

Robo is very nice.  On one hand, it’s simple and straight forward and is very easy to get you started with.  On the other hand, it provides quite a bit of functionality to help you with the build and deploy process.  Here are some of the things that I love about it:

  • It’s PHP!  Which makes it perfect for PHP projects, the kind I’m dealing with most of my time.  No need to translate your PHP into XML (hey Phing), or into a weird rake/capistrano like syntax.
  • Instant support for command line arguments and their validation, help screens, ANSI colors, and the like.  Honestly, I don’t know why we are still fighting these things in 2016.
  • Transparency.  You install robo with composer, create your RoboFile.php, and you are done.  All public methods of the class in the RoboFile.php will be available as robo commands.  All parameters of public methods are populated by the command line arguments.  There is no black magic to it.  All that is executed is whatever you write.
  • Extensions (or Tasks and Stacks).  There are a few to utilize already (SSH, git, and more).  And it is trivial to write your own and share them with composer/Packagist.  That’s one of the things that is difficult with our current build setup based on phake (hence our phake-builder).

Things I don’t like (remember I have been using Robo for just about 3 minutes):

  • Logging.  While it’s trivial to add logs into the RoboFiles using your choice of the logging library (monolog is awesome), I haven’t found a way to get all the output after the command execution.  For now, I’ve wrapped the Robo run into a shell script, which collects all outputs and sends it by email into our deployment archives storage.
  • Remote power.  Robo has some very cool tasks and stacks for local work.  But I haven’t found a way to utilize them when using Robo’s SSH task.  This slightly spoils the clean remote commands with sprinkles of bash, which I would love to avoid.

Overall, it looks like a very nice and elegant system and I’ll probably be using it for much more.  Once I get a bit more comfortable with it, I will probably replace our phake-builder setup with Robo.

If you are looking for a good tool to use for your build and deploy needs, give it a try.  You’ll probably like it a lot.

Automate OpenVPN client on CentOS 7

I need to setup OpenVPN client to start automatically on a CentOS 7 server for one of our recent projects at work.  I’m not well versed in VPN technology, but the majority of the time was spent on something that I didn’t expect.

I go the VPN configuration and all the necessary certificates from the client, installed OpenVPN and tried it out.  It seemed to work just fine.  But the setting it up to start automatically and without any human intervention took much longer than I though it would.

The first issue that I came across was the necessary input of username and password for the VPN connection to be established.  The solution to that is simple (thanks to this comment):

  1. Create a new text file (for example, /etc/openvpn/auth) with the username being the first line of the file, and the password being the second.  Don’t forget to limit the permissions to read-only by root.
  2. Add the following line to the VPN configuration file (assuming /etc/openvpn/client.conf): “auth-user-pass auth“.  Here, the second “auth” is the name of the file, relative to the VPN configuration.

With that, the manual startup of the VPN (openvpn client.conf) was working.

Now, how do we start the service automatically?  The old-school knowledge was suggesting “service openvpn start”.  But that fails due to openvpn being an uknown service.  Weird, right?

“rpm -ql openvpn” pointed to the direction of the systemd service (“systemctl start openvpn”).  But that failed too.  The name of the service was strangely looking too:

# rpm -ql openvpn | grep service
/usr/lib/systemd/system/openvpn@.service

A little (well, not that little after all) digging around, revealed something that I didn’t know.  Systemd services can be started with different configuration files.  In this case, you can run “systemctl start openvpn@foobar” to start the OpenVPN service using “foobar” configuration file, which should be in “/etc/openvpn/foobar.conf“.

What’s that config file and where do I get it from?  Well, the OpenVPN configuration sent from our client had a “account@host.ovpn” file, which is exactly what’s needed.  So, renaming “account@host.ovpn” to “client.conf” and moving it together with all the other certificate files into “/etc/openvpn” folder allowed me to do “systemctl start openvpn@client“.  All you need now is to make the service start automatically at boot time and you are done.

Documenter v2

I came across a very handy tool for writing quick and simple documentation – Documenter v2.

documenter

It provides a quick and simple web interface to handle document meta information (titles, subtitles, author, created and updated dates, etc), sections, styles, extra buttons, and more.  You can also download and save the results, as well as continue where you left off later.