Month: October 2016

nodejs 7 on ubuntu

nodejs 7 was released and nodesource does an excellent job of creating packages of nodejs for use on many operating systems.

I refuse to curl $URL and pipe the results to bash. It scares me (maybe illogically) to trust a script on the internet with access to my local shell.

The commands without the curl pipe to shell are almost as short and run faster*. It is super easy to get nodejs 7.x installed your ubuntu xenial or yackety system.

curl -s https://deb.nodesource.com/gpgkey/nodesource.gpg.key | sudo\ apt-key add -
sudo add-apt-repository -u "deb https://deb.nodesource.com/node_7.x $(lsb_release -c -s) main"
sudo apt install nodejs

* The apt update command is intentionally skipped. The -u option to add-apt-repository optimizes it to only merge available packages with the newly added repository. This is a bit faster, or a lot faster on older machines or slow cloud instances.

 

A Swift for Storage for Dev/Test/QA in 2 Minutes

I was adding swift support to a project and it became apparent that things would be easier if I had a local swift to which I could connect.

I needed to familiarize myself with the API and its behavior and doing this locally rather than over a VPN on some production system with a QA tenant would make things a lot easier.

I could have used Devstack. Devstack is great if you are developing OpenStack. That is for what it is made. It uses the OpenStack source. That seemed overkill to me.

What I ended up with is a cloud-config file which I pass to cloud-init on system start. I use LXD to start a container. In less than 2 minutes later, on my 10 year old home server, I have swift up and running and responding to my commands.

$ lxc launch -e ubuntu:16.04 $(petname) -c user.user-data="$(cat swift.yaml)"
Creating testy-Abril
Starting testy-Abril
$ lxc list
+-----------------+---------+-----------------------+-+-----------+---+
| testy-Abril     | RUNNING | 10.0.5.169 (eth0)     | | EPHEMERAL | 0 |
+-----------------+---------+-----------------------+-+-----------+---+
$ swift --user admin:admin --key
admin -A http://10.0.5.169:8080/auth/v1.0 list
$ swift --user admin:admin --key admin -A http://10.0.5.169:8080/auth/v1.0 list
$ swift --user admin:admin --key admin -A http://10.0.5.169:8080/auth/v1.0 upload t README.md
$ swift --user admin:admin --key admin -A http://10.0.5.169:8080/auth/v1.0 list
t
$ swift --user admin:admin --key admin -A http://10.0.5.169:8080/auth/v1.0 list t
README.md

No need to ssh into the container at all. Just start it, wait a bit for things to install, and a swift API is up and running.

The swift.yaml file is here on github and the only change you should make is either remove the last line or change it to import your key so you can ssh to it.