Tools 🧰

All my posts about varous tools

Learn how to install the ELK stack on CentOS 7 for centralized logging: Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana, step-by-step guide with configuration.

Installing an ELK Stack on CentOS 7

I haven’t installed an ELK stack since CentOS 7 came out, all of the components which go to make up the stack have been updated quite bit since then so I decided to have a go at installing the stack on a clean CentOS 7 installation. ELK? ELK is a term used for a combination of three Open Source products from Elastic↗ ; Elasticsearch↗ — Search & Analyze Data in Real Time Logstash↗ — Collect, Parse, & Enrich Data Kibana↗ — Explore & Visualize Your Data All three products can be used independently, but when they are used together you find yourself with both a powerful and scaleable central logging service. ...

Streamline your Git workflow with Russ Mckendrick's tips! Learn how to fork, add remotes, and rebase for maximum efficiency.

Git + Rebase

As you may have noticed, the blog looks different (again). This is because I have moved from Wordpress↗ back to Ghost↗ using their GhostPro↗ offering. One of the things I like about Ghost is the default theme, Casper↗ . While I wanted to keep it there were a few things I wanted to tweak, such as removing the full page header image on main index. When I have previously used Ghost I have forked the theme on GitHub and then manually messed about getting any updates from the original code in. ...

Discover my must-have desktop & command-line apps, services, and utilities I use daily on my macOS machine.

Day To Day Tools

I am currently using most of these tools day to day … Desktop Apps SublimeText↗ — Still the best text editor around Dashline↗ — Cross device password manager Desk↗ — Great editor for writting blog posts Photoshop↗ — For ermmmmm Photos OmniGraffle↗ — For diagrams and stuff Reeder 2↗ — For reading all the feeds GitHub Mac Client↗ — The Mac GitHub client Commandline Apps Home Brew↗ — Install “missing” stuff on macs Cask↗ — Install Mac Apps using the command line using Brew StormSSH↗ — Key & hosts management known_hosts↗ — A simple cli known hosts manager Packer↗ — Build machine images Z↗ — Jump around the CLI Vagrant↗ — Run machines built with Packer Services Digital Ocean↗ — Server Hosting AWS↗ — Server Hosting CloudFlare↗ — CDN & Stuff Github↗ — Code Hosting Pinboard↗ — Bookmarks Evernote↗ — Note taking RememberTheMilk↗ — Task management Feedly↗ — For managing all the newsfeeds Pocket↗ — For reading articles later Toggl↗ — Time tracking Authy↗ — A nice Two Factor Authentication tool Plex↗ — An impressive cross device media centre … so not much in the way of changes since I last wrote about the tools I use. ...

Migrate DigitalOcean instance for cost efficiency. Enable swap space to prevent oomkiller issues. Optimize performance with tuned settings.

Migration of Server & Swap Space

I noticed yesterday that my DigitalOcean monthly spend was a little more than I was expecting, turns out I have launched the wrong instance size when I last rebuilt my machine, so to save myself a few dollars a month I migrated the instance to a fresh server with a lower spec. By default DigitalOcean servers do not come with swap↗ enabled, because of this you run the risk of oomkiller↗ killing processes to try and keep the server accessible. Luckily as all DigitalOcean servers are SSD backed and come with a decent amount of disk space so enabling swap isn’t an issue; ...

Streamlined my Grunt configuration by combining tasks, now I can concatenate JS files, compress them with Uglify, and minify CSS files in one go!

More Grunt & Jekyll

At the end of my last post about Grunt I mentioned that I will be adding code to concatenate the javascript, compress the images and also tidy the code up abit. I have now done this …. Javascript I moved all of the javascript to a folder called _js and then set up the following …. More Grunt & Jekyll 1/7 js: { src: [ ‘_js/jquery.min.js’, ‘_js/jquery.plugin.min.js’, ‘js/bootstrap.min.js’, ‘_js/jquery.flexslider-min.js’, ‘_js/smooth-scroll.min.js’,’ _js/skrollr.min.js’, ‘_js/twitterFetcher_v10_min.js’, ‘_js/spectragram.min.js’, ‘_js/scrollReveal.min.js’, ‘_js/isotope.min.js’, ‘_js/lightbox.min.js’, ‘_js/jquery.countdown.min.js’, ‘_js/scripts.js’ ], dest: ‘js/main.js’ } As you can see I am having to merge the javascript in a certain order, I tried using src: [‘_js/*’] but this broke a lot of the site. ...

Revamped my website with a new design, integrating LESS with Jekyll via Grunt for a more efficient and automated workflow.

Grunt + Jekyll + LESS

As you may have noticed, the website looks different to how it was previously. I decided it was time for a refresh and I wanted to make the design a little more interesting. While Jekyll↗ & Github↗ pages use SASS↗ the Bootstrap theme I settled for uses LESS↗ . This meant that I needed to compile all of my CSS outside of Jekyll. Most of the articles I found say use either Gulp↗ or Grunt↗ , looking at the syntax of the two I preferred Grunt as it didn’t look like code. ...

Experimented with Docker and HHVM for our Drupal7 site at work, achieving a seamless transition and saving significant setup time.

An Experiment with Docker & HHVM

Now the dev team at work↗ have moved over to using Docker we decided to have some fun. An internal system we use is based on Drupal7↗ , the development version of the site has a NGINX / PHP 5.4 container↗ running in front of it. We have been hearing alot about HHVM↗ so why not try building a container and seeing if it our codebase works? ...

Solved a perplexing issue where static files weren't updating in Vagrant due to a long-standing VirtualBox bug with 'sendfile'.

Annoying Virtual Box bug

I am in the process of building a Vagrant↗ Box for work↗ . All was going great until I ended up having to spend the best part of two days trying to figure out why static files (css, javascript etc) were not being served after being updated on the host file system. Turns out that VirtualBox↗ has had a “bug” for around three years where if “sendfile↗ ” is enabled in the web server you are running it won’t serve a file after it has been changed on the file system mounted from the host machine. ...