DevOps - Blog of Christopher Vachon

Canvas

Image Generator Module

an Exploration on using JavaScript and its Canvas to generate a dataurl image.

DevOps

From REST to GraphQL - How To Build a GraphQL Server

Exploring the Development of Refactoring a RESTful api to GraphQL

DevOps

How to get GitLab Runner to push a Git Tag

Some thoughts on getting a Gitlab Runner to deploy tags back to a remote.

DevOps

How to configure Nginx to load balance between multiple Docker containers

A brief exploration of using Nginx as a load balancer for multiple docker containers.

DevOps

Next Version

I created a Node.js based Command Line Interface tool for creating and updating a Node Projects Version.

DevOps

How to make GIT ignore future changes to a committed file.

A quick command to tell Git to ignore future changes to a tracked file.

DevOps

Script to Close a Port on MacOS

A very handy Bash alias for web developers to close an open port on macOS.

DevOps

Ping Redis without CURL or NC

I found this little snippet on Stack Overflow which allowed me to check the Redis connection from inside my container.

DevOps

High Availability Redis Session with Express

Recently we have needed update our session solution with Redis to use Redis as a cluster, increasing the availability of our sites in the event that we have to cycle our Redis servers.

DevOps

How to make macOS remember my ssh password

You can follow these steps to mimic the older functionality of macOS remembering your password between sessions and restarts.

DevOps

Helpful Docker Scripts

I am doing a lot of docker experiments today and needed a few scripts for cleaning up.

DevOps

Giving a Presentation with Git Commits

recently I have been creating and giving presentations on how to use certain technologies. Event expanding some to be more like workshops. I decided that rather than writing all my code on the fly while giving the presentation, which would undoubtedly lead to a number of errors as I go,

DevOps

What's my IP Address

I have recently been giving a new 15inch MacBook Pro by the office, and have spent a fair bit of time moving things over from a MacMini to it to be my new primary console. Although there are several tools available to transition from one mac to another, I have

Web Development

Human Readable Code

I have recently spent a great deal of time reviewing code from external developers. Some of it is good, some of it is rough, some of it makes my head hurt. Ultimately, if the code produces the expected result, I tend to let things slide to be included as part

DevOps

Cherry-Pick with Git

Sometimes things don't quite work out as planned. Okies, lets be honest, Most of the time things don't work out as planned from the start. But with a proper workflow, this is not always detrimental. For one of my office projects, I had a transition over to DoubleClick for Publishers

DevOps

Some Thoughts on Setting Up a Workflow

A key component to DevOps is setting up and maintaining a workflow for developers. It's not all about automation and statistics. Having a development background comes in nice and handy, but system operations is valuable too. If you don't have that experience behind you, find an experienced developer and/or

Web Development

As a general rule when programming...

Today I received a request to production to resolve a but where a form would break if an invalid country code was passed in as part of an address. The solution that was proposed was to modify the validation scripts to accept the improper values as valid in order to

DevOps

I am learning to love VI

I will admit that in my early developer days, that I was extremely resistant to doing anything command line. My thought was that we lived in an age where we could easily make GUI so why wouldn't we create and use them. Now will tools like GIT, LESS, SASS, Grunt,

DevOps

Step by Step Install of Graphite with Carbon and StatsD on CentOS 7.1.x

Recently, we started to build our own Graphite StatsD Server. We tried following a couple of step by step guides, but all them were seeming out of date. And we encountered several errors, many of which did not have defined documentation.

DevOps

The Power of Statistics

Over the past couple of weeks I have been exploring Application Monitoring tools which has resulting in me playing with StatsD and Graphite. I quickly found a Docker Container, and plugged in an NPM library called node-statsd into an Express RESTful api to see what kind of data I could

DevOps

NGINX Location Rewrite

with my change over to the Ghost Blogging platform from my own custom engine, I had one major problem. The URL's from my old blog did not directly match the URL's of the new blog Specifically, the blog path. In my custom built blog, I had entered all the blog

Web Development

Testing Middleware

Recently I wrote a small custom piece of middleware for an express application to consume on its requests. It takes a query parameter and reworks it for later use in the event loop. Nothing too fancy or overly complicated. But as is the good practice, and because this was for

DevOps

What is DevOps

Several Months ago, I attended a conference in Toronto called DevOpsDays. The purpose is like any other technical conference, a means to get like minded individuals together and to share new ideas. In this case, DevOps. I have long counted myself as the DevOps Engineer of the company I work