Schulung / Training / Kurs / Seminar – 2 Tage remote
Das sich mit Docker auf sehr effiziente Weise Arbeitsumgebungen für Entwickler bereitstellen lassen hat sich bereits herumgesprochen. Wie eine solche Arbeitsumgebung aber auf dem eigenen Entwicklungsrechner effizient und zeitsparend aufgebaut und betrieben wird, lernen sie in diesem Kurs von Grund auf.
Das Praxisbeispiel führt Sie Schritt für Schritt hin zu einer vollwertigen Programmierumgebung für PHP Webprojekte, einem sogenannten LAMP Stack. Während Sie die Dienste Apache 2 HTTP Webserver mit PHP und einer MySQL Datenbank, sowie dem Administrationswerkzeug PhpMyAdmin über Docker Container erstellen, lernen Sie nebenher alle wichtigen Grundlagen zu Docker, um künftig auch anders gestaltete Entwicklungsumgebungen erstellen zu können.
Profitieren sie von den vielen Vorteilen die Ihnen Docker auch in den Entwickleralltag bringt. Gekapselte parallele Installationen die sich leicht aktualisieren lassen und zudem noch wetvolle Systemressourcen schonen. Nutzen Sie die eingesparte Zeit um sich mit den wirklich wichtigen Dingen beschäftigen zu können, dem programmieren.
Durchführungs-Garantie: der Kurs wird auch bei nur einem Teilenmenden durchgeführt
Sollten Sie zu den angebotenen Terminen nicht können, beziehungsweise für Ihr Team einen individuellen Termin wünschen, um beispielsweise in einer geschlossenen Runde auf konkrete Problemstellungen eingehen zu können, besteht die Möglichkeit zusätzliche außerplanmäßige Termine zu vereinbaren. Nutzen Sie bitte hierzu mein Kontaktformular unter der Angabe welchen Kurs Sie wünschen, mit Terminvorschlägen und der zu erwartenden Teilnehmerzahl.
Schulung / Training / Kurs / Seminar – 3 Tage remote
Wenn ein Unternehmen sich entscheidet, Software nach der DevOps-Philosophie zu entwickeln, bietet sich eine große Chance, den Kunden robustere Software in kürzeren Entwicklungszyklen bereit zu stellen. Gemeinsam müssen alle Beteiligten die Unternehmenskultur so verändern, dass Konzeption, Entwicklung, Test und Betrieb von Software Hand in Hand gehen.
Für Entwickler bedeutet dies meist eine deutliche Erweiterung von Anforderungen und Verantwortung: Themen wie Containerisierung, Integrationstests, Monitoring und Logging sollten bedacht und beherrscht werden. In diesem Praxisseminar machen Sie sich anhand ‘echter’ Softwareprojekte mit vielen unterschiedlichen Technologien und Methoden vertraut.
Durchführungs-Garantie: der Kurs wird auch bei nur einem Teilenmenden durchgeführt
Sollten Sie zu den angebotenen Terminen nicht können, beziehungsweise für Ihr Team einen individuellen Termin wünschen, um beispielsweise in einer geschlossenen Runde auf konkrete Problemstellungen eingehen zu können, besteht die Möglichkeit zusätzliche außerplanmäßige Termine zu vereinbaren. Nutzen Sie bitte hierzu mein Kontaktformular unter der Angabe welchen Kurs Sie wünschen, mit Terminvorschlägen und der zu erwartenden Teilnehmerzahl.
Heimnetz ohne Werbung mit AdGuard auf dem RaspberryPI
Leider ist von Minute 1:00 bis 2:10 kein Tonmitschnitt vorhanden 🙁 – einfach überspringen
Es gibt viele Projekte die sich für einen Raspberry PI eignen. Aus eigener Anwendung zeige ich wie man im Heimnetzwerk das Tool AdGuard in einem Docker Container zum laufen bringt, um damit die Werbung für alle im Netwerk verbundenen Geräte abstellt.
In diesem kleinen Workshop geht es darum auf einem Raspberry PI 4 mit einem Ubuntu Server Docker zum Laufen zu bekommen. Das ist aber der einfachste Schritt, denn dann geht es ans Eingemachte und wir fühlen den Netzwerkmöglichkeiten von Docker ein wenig auf den Zahn. Ein bischen SSH und Shell, ganiert mit Routerkonfiguration und vielen kleine praktischen Tipps runden den Talk ab.
Maybe you have bought you like me an Raspberry Pi4 with 4GB RAM and think about what nice things you could do with it. Since the beginning I got the idea to use it as an lightweight home server. Of course you can easily use a mini computer with more power and obviously more energy consumption too. Not a nice idea for a device is running 24/7. As long you don’t plan to mine your own bitcoins or host a high frequented shop system, a PI device should be sufficient.
I was wanted to increase the network security for my network. For this reason I found the application AdGuard which blocks many spy software from internet services you use on every device is connected to the network where AdGuard is running. Sounds great and is not so difficult to do. Let me share with you my experience.
As first let’s have a look to the overall system and perquisites. After the Router from my Internet Service Provider I connected direct by wire my own Network router an Archer C50. On my Rapsbery PI4 with 4GB RAM run as operation system Ubuntu Linux Server x64 (ARM Architecture). The memory card is a 64 GB ScanDisk Ultra. In the case you need a lot of storage you can connect an external SSD or HDD with an USB 3 – SATA adapter. Be aware that you use a storage is made for permanent usage. Western Digital for example have an label called NAS, which is made for this purpose. If you use standard desktop versions they could get broken quite soon. The PI is connected with the router direct by LAN cable.
The first step you need to do is to install on the Ubuntu the Docker service. this is a simple command: apt-get install docker. if you want to get rid of the sudo you need to add the user to the docker group and restart the docker service. If you want to get a bit more familiar with Docker you can check my video Docker basics in less than 10 minutes.
Before you just copy and past the listing above, you need to change the IP addresses to the ones your network is using. for all the installation, this is the most difficult part. As first the network type we create is macvlan bounded to the network card eth0. eth0 is for the PI4 standard. The name of the network we gonna to create is lan. To get the correct values for subnet, ip-range and gateway you need to connect to your router administration.
To understand the settings, we need a bit of theory. But don’t worry is not much and not that complicated. Mostly your router is reachable by an IP address similar to 192.168.0.1 – this is a static address and something equal we want to have for AdGuard on the PI. The PI itself is in my case reachable by 192.168.0.12, but this IP we can not use for AdGuard. The plan is to make the AdGuard web interface accessible by the IP 192.168.0.2. OK let’s do it. First we have to switch on our router administration to the point DHCP settings. In the Screenshot you can see my configuration. After you changed your adaptions don’t forget to reboot the router to take affect of the changes.
I configured the dynamic IP range between 192.168.0.5 to 192.168.0.199. This means the first 4 numbers before 192.168.0.5 can be used to connect devices with a static IP. Here we see also the entry for our default gateway. Whit this information we are able to return to our network configuration. the subnet IP is like the gateway just the digits in the last IP segment have to change to a zero. The IP range we had limited to the 192.168.0.4 because is one number less than where we configured where the dynamic IP range started. That’s all we need to know to create our network in Docker on the PI.
Now we need to create in the home directory of our PI the places were AdGuard can store the configuration and the data. This you can do with a simple command in the ssh shell.
The container we create is called adguard and we connect this image to our own created network lan with the IP address 192.168.0.2. Then we have to open a lot of ports AdGuard need to do the job. And finally we connect the two volumes for the configuration and data directory inside of the container. As restart policy we set the container to always, this secure that the service is up again after the server or docker was rebooted.
After the execution of the docker run command you can reach the AdGuard configuration page with your browser under: http://192.168.0.2:3000. Here you can create the primary setup to create a login user and so on. After the first setup you can reach the web interface by http://192.168.0.2.
The IP address 192.168.0.2 you need now to past into the field DNS Server for the DHCP settings. Save the entries and restart your router to get all changes working. When the router is up open on your browser any web page from the internet to see that everything is working fine. After this you can login into the AdGuard web console to see if there appearing data on the dashboard. If this is happened then you are don e and your home or office network is protected.
If you think this article was helpful and you like it, you can support my work by sharing this post or leave a like. If you have some suggestions feel free to drop a comment.
For business it’s sometime important to have a central place where employees and clients are able to interact together. NextCloud is a simple and extendable PHP solution with a huge set of features you can host by yourself, to keep full control of your data. A classical Groupware ready for your own cloud.
If you want to install NextCloud on your own server you need as first a well working PHP installation with a HTTP Server like Apache. Also a Database Management System is mandatory. You can chose between MySQL, MariaDB and PostgreSQL servers. The classical way to install and configure all those components takes a lot of time and the maintenance is very difficult. To overcome all this we use a modern approach with the virtualization tool docker.
The system setup is as the following: Ubuntu x64 Server, PostgreSQL Database, pgAdmin DBMS Management and NextCloud.
If you have any question feel free to leave a comment. May you need help to install and operate your own NextCloud installation secure, don’t hesitate to contact us by the contact form. In the case you like the video level a thumbs up and share it.
After some years the virtualization tool Docker proofed it’s importance for the software industry. Usually when you hear something about virtualization you may could think this is something for administrators and will not effect me as a developer as much. But wait. You’re might not right. Because having some basic knowledge about Docker as a developer will helps you in your daily business.
The network step is important, because it defines a permanent connection, how applications need to establish a connect with the PostgreSQL DBMS. If you don’t do this Docker manage the IP address and when you run multiple containers on your machine the IP addresses could changed after a system reboot. This depends mostly on the order how the containers got started.
Step 1: create the container and initialize the database
If you wish that your PostgreSQL is always up after you restart your system, you should change the restart policy form no to always. The second line configure the network connection we had define in step 0. After you created the instance pg-dbms of your PostgreSQL 11 Docker image, you need to cheek if it was success. This you can do by the
dockerps-a
Bash
command. When your container is after around 30 seconds still running you did everything right.
Step 2: copy the initialized database directory to a local directory on your host system
The biggest problem with the current container is, that all data will got lost, when you erase the container. This means wen need to find a way how to save this data permanently. The easiest way is to copy the data directory from your container to an directory to your host system. The copy command needs tow parameters source and destination. for the source you need to specify the container were you want to grab the files. in our case the container is named pg-dbms. The destination is a PostgreSQL folder in the home directory of the user ed. If you use Windows instead of Linux it works the same. Just adapt the directory path and try to avoid white-spaces. When the files appeared in the defined directory you’re done with this step.
Step 3: stop the current container
dockerstoppg-dbms
Bash
In the case you wish to start a container, just replace the word stop for the word start. The container we created to grab the initial files for the PostgreSQL DBMS we don’t need no longer, so we can erase it, but to do that as first the running container have to be stopped.
Step 4: start the current container
dockerstartpg-dbms
Bash
After the container is stopped we are able to erase it.
Step 5: recreate the container with an external volume
Now we can link the directory with the exported initial database to a new created PostgreSQL container. that’s all. The big benefit of this activities is, that now every database we create in PostgreSQL and the data of this database is outside of the docker container on our local machine. This allows a much more simpler backup and prevent losing information when a container has to be updated.
If you have instead of PostgreSQL other images where you need to grab files to reuse them you can use this tutorial too. just adapt to the image and the paths you need. The procedure is almost the same. If you like to get to know more facts about Docker you can watch also my video Docker Basics in less then 10 Minutes. In the case you like this short tutorial share it with your friends and colleagues. To stay informed don’t forget to subscribe to my newsletter.
If you and your team are dealing with tools like Git or Subversion, you may need an administrative layer where you are able to manage user access and repositories in a comfortable way, because source control management systems (SCM) don’t bring this functionality out of the box.
Perhaps you are already familiar with popular management solutions like GitHub, GitBlit or GitLab. The main reason for their success is their huge functionality. And of course, if you plan to create your own build and deploy pipeline with an automation server like Jenkins you will need to host your own repository manager too.
As great as the usage of GitLab and other solutions is, there is also a little bitter taste:
The administration is very complicated and requires some experience.
The minimal requirement of hardware resources to operate those programs with good performance is not that little.
To overcome all these hurdles, I will introduce a new star on the toolmaker’s sky SCM-Manager [1]. Fast, compact, extendable and simple, are the main attributes I would use to describe it.
Kick Starter: Installation
Let’s have a quick look at how easy the installation is. For fast results, you can use the official Docker container [2]. All it takes is a short command:
First, we create a container named scm based on the SCM-Manager image 2.22.0. Then, we tell the container to always restart when the host operating system is rebooted. Also, we open the ports 2222 and 8080 to make the service accessible. The last step is to mount a directory inside the container, where all configuration data and repositories are stored.
Another option to get the SCM-Manager running on a Linux server like Ubuntu is by using apt. The listing below shows how to do the installation.
SCM-Manager can also be installed on systems like Windows or Apple. You can find information about the installations on additional systems on the download page [3]. When you perform an installation, you will find a log entry with a startup token in the console.
Startup token in the command line.
After this you can open your browser and type localhost:8080, where you can finish the installation by creating the initial administration account. In this form, you need to paste the startup token from the command line, as it is shown in image 2. After you submitted the initialization form, you get redirected to the login. That’s all and done in less than 5 minutes.
Initialization screen.
For full scripted untouched installations, there is also a way to bypass the Initialization form by using the system property scm.initalPassword. This creates a user named scmadmin with the given password.
In older versions of the SCM-Manager, the default login account was scmadmin with the password scmadmin. This old way is quite helpful but if the administrator doesn’t disable this account after the installation, there is a high-security risk. This security improvement is new since version 2.21.
Before we discover more together about the administration, let’s first get to some details about the SCM-Manager in general. SCM-Manager is open source under MIT license. This allows commercial usage. The Code is available on GitHub. The project started as research work. Since Version 2 the company Cloudogu took ownership of the codebase and manages the future development. This construct allows the offering of professional enterprise support for companies. Another nice detail is that the SCM-Manager is made in Germany.
Pimp Me Up: Plugins
One of the most exciting details of using the SCM-Manager is, that there is a simple possibility to extend the minimal installation with plugins to add more useful functions. But be careful, because the more plugins are installed, the more resources the SCM-Manager needs to be allocated. Every development team has different priorities and necessities, for this reason, I’m always a fan of customizing applications to my needs.
Installed Plugins.
The plugin installation section is reachable by the Administration tab. If you can’t see this entry you don’t have administration privileges. In the menu on the right side, you find the entry Plugins. The plugin menu is divided into two sections: installed and available. For a better overview, the plugins are organized by categories like Administration, Authorization, or Workflow. The short description for each plugin is very precise and gives a good impression of what they do.
Some of the preinstalled plugins like in the category Source Code Management for supported repository types Git, Subversion, and Mercurial can’t be uninstalled.
Some of my favorite plugins are located in the authorization section:
Those features are the most convenient for Build- and Configuration Managers. The usage is also as simple as the installation. Let’s have a look at how it works and for what it’s necessary.
Gate Keeper: Special Permissions
Imagine, your team deals for example whit a Java/Maven project. Perhaps it exists a rule that only selected people should be allowed to change the content of the pom.xml build logic. This can be achieved with the Path Write Protection Plugin. Once it is installed, navigate to the code repository and select the entry Settings in the menu on the right side. Then click on the option Path Permissions and activate the checkbox.
Configuring Path permissions.
As you can see in image 4, I created a rule that only the user Elmar Dott is able to modify the pom.xml. The opposite permission is exclude (deny) the user. If the file or a path expression doesn’t exist, the rule cannot be created. Another important detail is, that this permission covers all existing branches. For easier administration, existing users can be organized into groups.
In the same way, you are able to protect branches against unwanted changes. A scenario you could need this option is when your team uses massive branches or the git-flow branch model. Also, personal developer branches could have only write permission for the developer who owns the branch or the release branch where the CI /CD pipeline is running has only permissions for the Configuration Management team members.
Let’s move ahead to another interesting feature, the review plugin. This plugin enables pull requests for your repositories. After installing the review plugin, a new bullet point in the menu of your repositories appears, it’s called Pull Requests.
Divide and Conquer: Pull Requests
On the right hand, pull requests [4] are a very powerful workflow. During my career, I often saw the misuse of pull requests, which led to drastically reduced productivity. For this reason, I would like to go deeper into the topic.
Originally, pull requests were designed for open source projects to ensure code quality. Another name for this paradigm is dictatorship workflow [5]. Every developer submits his changes to a repository and the repository owner decides which revision will be integrated into the codebase.
If you host your project sources on GitHub, strangers can’t just collaborate in your project, they first have to fork the repository into their own GitHub space. After they commit some revisions to this forked repository, they can create a pull request to the original repository. As repository owner, you can now decide whether you accept the pull request.
The SCM tool IBM Synergy had a similar strategy almost 20 years ago. The usage got too complicated so that many companies decided to move to other solutions. These days, it looks like history is repeating itself.
The reason why I’m skeptical about using pull requests is very pragmatic. I often observed in projects that the manager doesn’t trust the developers. Then he decides to implement the pull request workflow and makes the lead developer or the architect accept the pull requests. These people are usually too busy and can’t really check all details of each single pull request. Hence, their solution is to simply merge each pull request to the code base and check if the CI pipeline still works. This way, pull requests are just a waste of time.
There is another way how pull requests can really improve the code quality in the project: if they are used as a code review tool. How this is going to work, will fill another article. For now, we leave pull requests and move to the next topic about the creation of repositories.
Treasure Chest: Repository Management
The SCM-Manager combines three different source control management repository types: Git, Subversion (SVN), and Mercurial. You could think that nobody uses Subversion anymore, but keep in mind that many companies have to deal with legacy projects managed with SVN. A migration from those projects to other technologies may be too risky or simply expensive. Therefore, it is great to have a solution that can manage more than one repository type.
If you are Configuration Manager and have to deal with SVN, keep in mind that some things are a bit different. Subversion organizes branches and tags in directories. An SVN repository usually gets initialized with the folders:
trunk — like the master branch in Git.
branches — references to revisions in the trunk were forked code changes can committed.
tags — like branches without new code revisions.
In Git you don’t need this folder structure, because how branches are organized is completely different. Git (and Mercurial) compared to Subversion is a distributed Source Control Management System and branches are lose coupled and can easily be deleted if they are obsolete. As of now, I don’t want to get lost in the basics of Source Control Management and jump to the next interesting SCM-Manager plugins.
Uncover Secrets
If a readme.md file is located in the root folder of your project, you could be interested in the readme plugin. Once this plugin is activated and you navigate into your repository the readme.md file will be rendered in HTML and displayed.
The rendered readme.md of a repository.
If you wish to have a readable visualization of the repository’s activities, the activity plugin could be interesting for you. It creates a navigation entry in the header menu called Activity. There you can see all commit log entries and you can enter into a detailed view of the selected revision.
The activity view.
This view also contains a compare and history browser, just like clients as TortoiseGit does.
The Repository Manager includes many more interesting details for the daily work. There is even a code editor, which allows you to modify files directly in the SCM-Manger user interface.
Next, we will have a short walk through the user management and user roles.
Staffing Office: User and Group Management
Creating new users is like almost every activity of the SCM-Manager a simple thing. Just switch to the Users tab and press the create user button. Once you have filled out the form and saved it, you will be brought back to the Users overview.
Creating a new user.
Here you can already see the newly created user. After this step, you will need to administrate the user’s permissions, because as of now it doesn’t have any privileges. To change that just click on the name of the newly created user. On the user’s detail page, you need to select the menu entry Settings on the right side. Now choose the new entry named Permissions. Here you can select from all available permissions the ones you need for the created account. Once this is done and you saved your changes, you can log out and log in with your new user, to see if your activity was a success.
If you need to manage a massive number of users it’s a good idea to organize them into groups. That means after a new user is created the permissions inside the user settings will not be touched and stay empty. Group permissions can be managed through the Groups menu entry in the header navigation. Create a new group and select Permission from the right menu. This configuration form is the same as the one of the user management. If you wish to add existing users to a group switch to the point General. In the text field Members, you can search for an existing user. If the right one is selected you need to press the Add Member button. After this, you need to submit the form and all changes are saved and the new permissions got applied.
To have full flexibility, it is allowed to add users to several groups (roles). If you plan to manage the SCM-Manager users by group permissions, be aware not to combine too many groups because then users could inherit rights you didn’t intend to give them. Currently, there is no compact overview to see in which groups a user is listed and which permissions are inherited by those groups. I’m quite sure in some of the future versions of the SCM-Manager this detail will be improved.
Besides the internal SCM-Manager user management exist some plugins where you are able to connect the application with LDAP.
Lessons Learned
If you dared to wish for a simpler life in the DevOps world, maybe your wish became true. The SCM-Manager could be your best friend. The application offers a lot of functionality that I briefly described here, but there are even more advanced features that I haven’t even mentioned in this short introduction: There is a possibility to create scripts and execute them with the SCM-Manager API. Also, a plugin for the Jenkins automation server is available. Other infrastructure tools like Jira, Timescale, or Prometheus metrics gathering have an integration to the SCM-Manager.
I hope that with this little article I was able to whet your appetite for this exciting tool and I hope you enjoy trying it out.
This short tutorial covers the most fundamental steps to use docker in your development tool chain. After we introduced the basic theory, we will learn how to install docker on a Linux OS (Ubuntu Mate). When this is done we have a short walk through to download an image and instantiate the container. The example use the official PHP 7.3 image with an Apache 2 HTTP Server.
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