Shipping Rust CLIs with Docker

I recently found a nice and clean way of building and distributing Rust CLI apps using docker. For my work I created a Rust app that wraps some AWS SDK functions to make my day-to-day work with AWS easier. This CLI is very focused on the way we work at Synoa and therefore unfortunately not open source. The tech does not matter much, as we can just create a tiny example “app” for this blog post.

Deno 1.0 released

Deno made its first stable release with the release of v1! I’ve heard of Deno in the past but I never really cared for it. My work with JavaScript has always been in the browser and I’m not too much of a NodeJS fan - mainly because of the security and sandbox aspects of the runtime (or more, the lack of them). Deno aims to do better and fix some (or all?

Docker Apache Proxy Setup

In this post I’d like to detail how I am managing docker containers behind an apache2 proxy on a Ubuntu 18.04. server. I’m using one Apache server to route traffic from multiple sub-domains to docker containers all running with docker-compose. This setup is not automated and the containers do not need to interact with each other; It’s just how I run software for my private usage. Overview Let’s start with an overview image, because this can be quite confusing.

Terrasave

I just released a tiny tool function I’ve been using for some time called terrasave. It’s a Bash / Fish function that prevents you from running terraform without the -target option. Why does this exist? In terraform it is incredibly easy to destroy things with terraform apply. If you run apply terraform shows a huge output and sometimes you may overlook a thing being “replaced” instead of updated. Once upon a time I destroyed a MongoDB Atlas Cluster this way and lost all its data, because the “must be replaced” was hidden in a lot of terraform output and I simply didn’t see it.

Random Theme

I’ve decided to add some randomness to this website! You may noticed that the two main colors change on every page reload - there’s a fixed number of “themes” available and they change at random. To accomplish this I used the following JavaScript. (function(window, document, undefined) { let theme = window.localStorage.getItem("kgde_theme"); console.log(theme); if (theme) { var [colorMain, colorSecondary] = JSON.parse(theme).colors; document.body.style = `--color-main:${colorMain};--color-secondary:${colorSecondary}`; } else { // [dark-color, light-color] // Color combinations taken from https://botsin.

No Tracking

I don’t track you. That’s a promise and a statement, this website works without Tracking. Inspired by Laura Kalbag, who was inspired by the footer text on Karolina Szczur’s website. Why The reason I do not use tracking is an idealistic one. I no longer want to collect data for Google, and I do not want to support trackable users across websites. Data sharing on the web is absolutely crazy, as this example of USAToday shows - GDPR is saving us Europeans again tho.

Auto SSL With apache2

How Apache 2.4.30 and later can be used to automate SSL certificate setup and renewal

Apache 2.4.30 and later supports an experimental module called mod_md which allows automatic SSL certificate management with Let’s Encrypt as standard provider. This greatly simplifies the management of SSL certificates. Instead of setting up certbot and cronjobs to automatically renew certs server administrators now only need to add a few lines to their virtual host files. This guide assumes the operating system is Ubuntu! If you use a different distro some commands may be different.

Using Archetypes in Hugo

For the longest time I completely ignored archetypes in hugo. I’d always copy over the front-matter from the last blog post I wrote and then fill in the things I needed - leading to some mistakes (e.g. using category instead of categories) over time. Archetypes are easy to use, for example to create this post I ran the following command $ hugo new blog/2020-01-07-using-archetypes-in-hugo.md This copied over the archetype file from archetypes/blog.

Hugo aliases and redirects

Using aliases to prevent 404 when restructuring your Hugo site

With the recent redesign and re-structuring of my website I decided to include year and month in URLs. I previously only used the post title as URL key, so a post with title Hello world would be available at kevingimbel.de/hello-world. With the new format this includes the section, year, and month, so for example kevingimbel.de/blog/2020/01/hello-world. To prevent all old URLs from failing with a 404 I added aliases to all old posts.

Hugo: ignore _index.md in list templates

How I ignore _index.md files in my list templates

While creating my new website I also added more sections, namely a blog, photography, and art section. All of these use list templates and render “article”-like content previews. I wanted to add some content to these lists and Hugo has a special file named _index.md for that. This file can be used to create index pages for lists. When I did that I somehow also included the index files in the post listings which was not what I wanted, so I added a if statement to my article-preview.

Hugo: compare dates to flag old content

How I use Math and Date functions to flag old posts in Hugo

With the recent redesign of my website I also wanted to add a note to old articles. The IT world is changing fast and information can quickly be outdated, so I decided to add an automatically generated note to every post that is older than 4 years. Using the Hugo Math function and Date values it can be accomplished in automated-enough fashion. Partial First I created a new partial named single-header.

Safe calc usage in CSS

Using CSS calc function reasonable and with fallbacks

calc is a great CSS function to calculate values, e.g. margins or widths. What makes it especially great is that it can combine different values, for example calc(100% - 4rem - 1px) is valid and works in modern browsers - in simpler words: Calc works with different units like em, %, px, etc. The problem with calc is that if it doesn’t work you may get a unexpected result. Take the following code for example: