Tag Archives: Linux
Setting up a native Git server on Linux
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If you want to use your Git repository for collaborative editing of source code, you need a Git server. The Git server enables multiple developers to collaborate on the same code base. Installing the Git client on a Linux server is a first step towards your own server solution, but it is far from sufficient. In order to allow multiple people to access a code repository, we need access authorization. After all, the repository should be publicly accessible via the Internet. We want to use user management to prevent unauthorized people from reading and changing the contents of the repositories.
There are many excellent and convenient solutions for operating a Git server that should be preferred to a native server solution. The administration of a native Git server requires Linux knowledge and is carried out exclusively via the command line. Solutions such as the SCM-Manager have a graphical user interface and come with many useful tools for administering the server. These tools are not available with a native installation.
Why should you install Git as a native server? This question is quite easy to answer. The reason is when the server on which the code repository is to be made available has only a few hardware resources. RAM in particular is always a bit of a problem in this context. This is often the case with rented virtual private servers (VPS) or a small RaspberryPI. So we can see that it can make sense to want to run a native Git server.
As a prerequisite, we need a Linux server on which we can install the Git server. This can be a Debian or Ubuntu server. If you use CentOs or other Linux distributions, you must use your distribution’s package manager instead of APT to install the software.
In the first step, we start by updating the packages and installing the Git client.
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get install gitAs a second step, we create a new user named git and create a home directory for it and activate SSH access there.
sudo useradd --create-home --shell /bin/bash git
sudo su - git
cd /home/git/
mkdir .ssh/ && chmod 700 .ssh/
touch .ssh/authorized_keys
chmod 600 .ssh/authorized_keysNow, in the third step, we can create our Git repositories in the newly created home directory of the git user. These differ from the local workspace in that they do not have the source code checked out.
mkdir /home/git/repos/project.git
cd /home/git/repos/project.git
git init --bareUnfortunately, we are not quite finished with our project yet. In the fourth step, we have to set the user authorization for the created repository. This is done by storing the public key on the Git server for SSH access. To do this, we copy the contents of our private key file into the /home/git/.ssh/authorized_keys file in a separate line. If you now want to deny existing users access, simply comment out the private key number with a #.
If everything has been done correctly, you can access the repository using the following command line command: git clone ssh://git@<IP>/~/<repo>
Replace with the actual server IP. For our example, the correct path for is project.git, so it is the directory we created for the Git repository.
Multiple repositories can be created on the native Git server. It is important to note that all authorized users have read and write access to all repositories created in this way. This can only be restricted by creating multiple users on the operating system of the Linux server that provides our Git repositories, to whom the repositories are then assigned.
We see that a native Git server installation can be implemented quickly, but it is not sufficient for commercial software development. If you like to experiment, you can create a virtual machine and try out this workshop in it.
Configuration files in software applications
Why do we even need the option to save application configurations in text files? Isn’t a database sufficient for this purpose? The answer to this question is quite trivial. The information on how an application can connect to a database is difficult to save in the database itself.
Now you could certainly argue that you can achieve such things with an embedded database such as SQLite. That may be correct in principle. Unfortunately, this solution is not really practical for highly scalable applications. And you don’t always have to use a sledgehammer to crack a nut. Saving important configuration parameters in text files has a long tradition in software development. However, various text formats such as INI, XML, JSON and YAML have now become established for this use case. For this reason, the question arises as to which format is best to use for your own project.
INI Files
One of the oldest formats are the well-known INI files. They store information according to the key = value principle. If a key appears multiple times in such an INI file, the final value is always overwritten by the last entry that appears in the file.
; Example of an INI File
[Section-name]
key=value ; inline
text="text configuration with spaces and \' quotas"
string='can be also like this'
char=passwort
# numbers & digets
number=123
hexa=0x123
octa=0123
binary=0b1111
float=123.12
# boolean values
value-1=true
value-0=falseAs we can see in the small example, the syntax in INI files is kept very simple. The [section] name is used primarily to group individual parameters and improves readability. Comments can be marked with either ; or #. Otherwise, there is the option of defining various text and number formats, as well as Boolean values.
Web developers know INI files primarily from the PHP configuration, the php.ini, in which important properties such as the size of the file upload can be specified. INI files are also still common under Windows, although the registry was introduced for this purpose in Windows 95.
Properties
Another very tried and tested solution is so-called property files. This solution is particularly common in Java programs, as Java already has a simple class that can handle properties. The key=value format is borrowed from INI files. Comments are also introduced with #.
# PostgreSQL
hibernate.dialect.database = org.hibernate.dialect.PostgreSQLDialect
jdbc.driverClassName = org.postgresql.Driver
jdbc.url = jdbc:postgresql://127.0.0.1:5432/together-testIn order to ensure type safety when reading .properties in Java programs, the TP-CORE library has an extended implementation. Despite the fact that the properties are read in as strings, the values can be accessed using typing. A detailed description of how the PropertyReader class can be used can be found in the documentation.
.property files can also be used as filters for substitutions in the Maven build process. Of course, properties are not just limited to Maven and Java. This concept can also be used in languages such as Dart, nodeJS, Python and Ruby. To ensure the greatest possible compatibility of the files between the different languages, exotic notation options should be avoided.
XML
XML has also been a widely used option for many years to store configurations in an application in a changeable manner. Compared to INI and property files, XML offers more flexibility in defining data. A very important aspect is the ability to define fixed structures using a grammar. This allows validation even for very complex data. Thanks to the two checking mechanisms of well-formedness and data validation against a grammar, possible configuration errors can be significantly reduced.
Well-known application scenarios for XML can be found, for example, in Java Enterprise projects (J EE) with web.xml or the Spring Framework and Hibernate configuration. The power of XML even allows it to be used as a Domain Specific Language (DSL), as is used in the Apache Maven build tool.
Thanks to many freely available libraries, there is an implementation for almost every programming language to read XML files and access specific data. For example, PHP, a language popular with web developers, has a very simple and intuitive solution for dealing with XML with the Simple XML extension.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<web-app version="3.1"
xmlns="http://xmlns.jcp.org/xml/ns/javaee"
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xsi:schemaLocation="http://xmlns.jcp.org/xml/ns/javaee
http://xmlns.jcp.org/xml/ns/javaee/web-app_3_1.xsd">
<context-param>
<param-name>contextConfigLocation</param-name>
<param-value>/WEB-INF/assembly/ApplicationContext.xml</param-value>
</context-param>
<context-param>
<param-name>javax.faces.PROJECT_STAGE</param-name>
<param-value>${jsf.project.stage}</param-value>
</context-param>
<listener>
<listener-class>org.springframework.web.context.ContextLoaderListener</listener-class>
</listener>
<listener>
<listener-class>org.springframework.web.context.request.RequestContextListener</listener-class>
</listener>
<servlet>
<servlet-name>Faces Servlet</servlet-name>
<servlet-class>javax.faces.webapp.FacesServlet</servlet-class>
<load-on-startup>1</load-on-startup>
</servlet>
<servlet-mapping>
<servlet-name>Faces Servlet</servlet-name>
<url-pattern>*.xhtml</url-pattern>
</servlet-mapping>
<welcome-file-list>
<welcome-file>index.xhtml</welcome-file>
</welcome-file-list>
</web-app>
JSON
JavaScript Object Notation, or JSON for short, is a relatively new technology, although it has been around for several years. JSON also has a corresponding implementation for almost every programming language. The most common use case for JSON is data exchange in microservices. The reason for this is the compactness of JSON. Compared to XML, the data stream to be transferred in web services such as XML RPC or SOAP with JSON is much smaller due to the notation.
There is also a significant difference between JSON and XML in the area of validation. Basically, there is no way to define a grammar like in XML with DTD or schema on the official JSON homepage [1]. There is a proposal for a JSON grammar on GitHub [2], but there are no corresponding implementations to be able to use this technology in projects.
A further development of JSON is JSON5 [3], which was started in 2012 and has been officially published as a specification in version 1.0.0 [4] since 2018. The purpose of this development was to significantly improve the readability of JSON for people. Important functions such as the ability to write comments were added here. JSON5 is fully compatible with JSON as an extension. To get a brief impression of JSON5, here is a small example:
{
// comments
unquoted: 'and you can quote me on that',
singleQuotes: 'I can use "double quotes" here',
lineBreaks: "Look, Mom! \
No \\n's!",
hexadecimal: 0xdecaf,
leadingDecimalPoint: .8675309, andTrailing: 8675309.,
positiveSign: +1,
trailingComma: 'in objects', andIn: ['arrays',],
"backwardsCompatible": "with JSON",
}YAML
Many modern applications such as the open source metrics tool Prometheus use YAML for configuration. The very compact notation is very reminiscent of the Python programming language. YAML version 1.2 is currently published.
The advantage of YAML over other specifications is its extreme compactness. At the same time, version 1.2 has a grammar for validation. Despite its compactness, the focus of YAML 1.2 is on good readability for machines and people alike. I leave it up to each individual to decide whether YAML has achieved this goal. On the official homepage you will find all the resources you need to use it in your own project. This also includes an overview of the existing implementations. The design of the YAML homepage also gives a good foretaste of the clarity of YAML files. Attached is a very compact example of a Prometheus configuration in YAML:
global:
scrape_interval: 15s
evaluation_interval: 15s
rule_files:
# - "first.rules"
# - "second.rules"
#IP: 127.0.0.1
scrape_configs:
- job_name: prometheus
static_configs:
- targets: ['127.0.0.1:8080']
# SPRING BOOT WEB APP
- job_name: spring-boot-sample
scrape_interval: 60s
scrape_timeout: 50s
scheme: "http"
metrics_path: '/actuator/prometheus'
static_configs:
- targets: ['127.0.0.1:8888']
tls_config:
insecure_skip_verify: trueResumee
All of the techniques presented here have been tried and tested in practical use in many projects. Of course, there may be some preferences for special applications such as REST services. For my personal taste, I prefer the XML format for configuration files. This is easy to process in the program, extremely flexible and, with clever modeling, also compact and extremely readable for people.
References
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Working with textfiles on the Linux shell
Linux turns more and more to a popular operating system for IT professional. One of the reasons for this movement are the server solutions. Stability and low resource consuming are some of the important characteristics for this choice. May you already played around with a Microsoft Server you will miss the graphical Desktop in a Linux Server. After a login into a Linux Server you just see the command prompt is waiting for your inputs.
In this short article I introduce you some helpful Linux programs to work with files on the command line. This allows you to gather information, for example from log files. Before I start I’d like to recommend you a simple and powerful editor named joe.
Ctrl + C – Abort the current editing of a file without saving changes
Ctrl + KX – Exit the current editing and save the file
Ctrl + KF – Find text in the current file
Ctrl + V – Paste clipboard into document (CMD + V for Mac)
Ctrl + Y – Delete current line where cursor is
To install joe on an Debian based Linux distribution you just need to type:
sudo apt-get install joe
1. When you need to find content in a huge text file GREP will be your best friend. GREP allows you to search for text pattern in files.
gerp <pattern> file.log
-n : number of lines that matches
-i : case insensitive
-v : invert matches
-E : extended regex
-c : count number of matches
-l : find filenames that matches the pattern2. When you need to analyze network packages NGREP is the tool of your choice.
ngrep -I file.pcap
-d : specify the network interface
-i : case insensitive
-x : print in alternate hexdump
-t : print timestamp
-I : read a pcap file3. When you need to see the changes between two versions of a file, DIFF will do the job.
diff version1.txt version2.txt
-a : add
-c : change
-d : delete
# : line numbers
< : file 1
> : file 24. Sometimes it is necessary to give an order to the entries in a file. SORT is gonna to help you with this task.
sort file.log
-o : write the result to a file
-r : reverse order
-n : numerical sort
-k : sort by column
-c : check if orderd
-u : sort and remove
-f : ignore case
-h : human sort5. If you have to replace Strings inside of a huge text, like find and replace you can do that with SED, the stream editor.
sed s/regex/replace/g
-s : search
-g : replace
-d : delete
-w : append to file
-e : execute command
-n : suppress output6. Parsing fields using delimiters in text files can done by using CUT.
cut -d ":" -f 2 file.log
-d : use the field delimiter
-f : field numbers
-c : specific characters position7. The extraction of substrings who occurred just once in a text file you will reach with UNIQ.
uniq file.txt
-c : count the numbers of duplicates
-d : print duplicates
-i : case insesitive8. AWK is a programming language consider to manipulate data.
awk {print $2} file.log 
How to reduce the size of a PDF document
When you own a big collection of PDF files the used storage space can increasing quite high. Sometimes I own PDF documents with more than 100 MB. Well nowadays this storage capacities are not a big issue. But if you want to backup those files to other mediums like USB pen drives or a DVD it would be great to reduce the file size of you PDF collection.
Long a go I worked with a little scrip that allowed me to reduce the file size of a PDF document significantly. This script called a interactive tool called PDF Sam with some command line parameters. Unfortunately many years ago the software PDF Sam become with this option commercial, so I was needed a new solution.
Before I go closer to my approach I will discuss some basic information about what happens in the background. As first, when your PDF blew up to a huge file is the reason because of the included graphics. If you scanned you handwritten notes to save them in one single archive you should be aware that every scan is a image file. By default the PDF processor already optimize those files. This is why the file size almost don’t get reduced when you try to compress them by a tool like zip.
Scanned images can optimized before to include them to a PDF document by a graphic tool like Gimp. Actions you can perform are reduce the image quality and increase the contrast. Specially for scanned handwritten notes are this steps important. If the contrast is very low and maybe you plan to print those documents, it could happens they are not readable. Another problem in this case is that you can’t apply a text search over the document. A solution to this problem is the usage of an OCR tool to transform text in images back to real text.
We resume shortly the previous minds. When we try to reduce the file size of a PDF we need to reduce the quality of the included images. This can be done by reducing the amount of dots per inch (dpi). Be aware that after the compression the image is still readable. As long you do not plan to do a high quality print like a magazine or a book, nothing will get affected.
When we wanna reduce plenty PDF files in a short time we can’t do all those actions by hand. For instance we need an automated solution. To reach the goal it is important that the tool we use support the command line. The we can create a simple batch job to perform the task without any hands on.
We have several options to optimize the images inside a PDF. If it is a great idea to perform all options, depend on the purpose of the usage.
- change the image file to the PNG format
- reduce the graphic dimensions to the real printable area
- reduce the DPI
- change the image color profile to gray-scale
As Ubuntu Linux user I have all of the things I need already together. And now comes the part that I explain you my well working solution.
Ghostscript
GPL Ghostscript is used for PostScript/PDF preview and printing. Usually as a back-end to a program such as ghostview, it can display PostScript and PDF documents in an X11 environment.
If you don’t have Ghostscript installed on you system, you can do this very fast.
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get -y install ghostscriptBefore you execute any script or command be aware you do not overwrite with the output the existing files. In the case something get wrong you loose all originals to try other options. Before you start to try out anything backup your files or generate the compressed PDF in a separate folder.
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The important parameter is r150, which reduce the output resolution to 150 dpi. In the manage you can check for more parameters to compress the result more stronger. The given command you are able to place in a script, were its surrounded by a FOR loop to fetch all PDF files in a directory, to write them reduced in another directory.
The command I used for a original file with 260 MB and 640 pages. After the operation was done the size got reduced to around 36 MB. The shrunken file is almost 7 times smaller than the original. A huge different. As you can see in the screenshot, the quality of the pictures is almost identical.
As alternative, in the case you won’t come closer to the command line there is a online PDF compression tool in German and English language for free use available.
PDF Workbench
Linux Systems have many powerful tools to deal with PDF documents. For example the Libreoffice Suite have a button where you can generate for every document a proper PDF file. But sometimes you wish to create a PDF in the printing dialog of any other application in your system. With the cups PDF print driver you enable this functionality on your system.
sudo apt-get install printer-driver-cups-pdf As I already explained, OCR allows you to extract from graphics text to make a document searchable. When you need to work with this type of software be aware that the result is good, but you cant avoid mistakes. Even when you perform an OCR on a scanned book page, you will find several mistakes. OCRFeeder is a free and very powerful solution for Linux systems.
Another powerful helper is the tool PDF Arranger which allows you to add or remove pages to an existing PDF. You are also able to change the order of the pages.
Resources
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Tooltime: SCM-Manager
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:
docker run --name scm –restart=always \
-p 8080 -p 2222 \
-v /home/<user>/scmManager:/var/lib/scm \
scmmanager/scm-manager:2.22.0First, 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.
echo 'deb [arch=all] https://packages.scm-manager.org/repository/apt-v2-releases/ stable main' | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/scm-manager.list
sudo apt-key adv --recv-keys --keyserver hkps://keys.openpgp.org 0x975922F193B07D6E
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install scm-serverSCM-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.
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.
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.
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:
- Path Write Protection, Branch Write Protection, and,
- Tag Protection.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Resources
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Docker Basics in less than 10 minutes
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.
