Owendavies.net

How to Standardize Dev Environments with DevContainers

Thu, 20 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Learn how to standardize dev environments using DevContainers in GitHub Codespaces. Improve team workflows, reduce onboarding time, and boost productivity!

Introduction

Every developer has faced the “works on my machine” issue at some point—whether due to missing dependencies, conflicting versions, or onboarding delays. DevContainers solve this problem by providing a pre-configured, reproducible, and standardized environment that works seamlessly with GitHub Codespaces and VS Code.

In this guide, we’ll explore how you can:

How to Create an Azure Virtual Machine with PowerShell

Sun, 15 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Creating Azure virtual machines through the portal is straightforward, but automation with PowerShell gives you repeatability, consistency, and the ability to integrate VM creation into your broader infrastructure workflows. In this guide, I’ll walk you through creating a Windows VM using PowerShell, explaining each step so you can adapt the script for your own needs.

Prerequisites

Before starting, ensure you have:

Azure PowerShell module installed
An active Azure subscription
Sufficient permissions to create resources in your subscription

Getting Started

First, fire up a PowerShell console and login to your subscription:

How to Create an Azure NAT Gateway (Portal, CLI & Terraform)

Mon, 17 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Network Address Translation (NAT) Gateway in Azure is a fully managed service that provides outbound connectivity for virtual networks. It simplifies outbound-only internet connectivity for virtual networks while ensuring high availability and scalability.

What is Azure NAT Gateway?

Azure NAT Gateway is a fully managed Network Address Translation (NAT) service that allows virtual machines and other resources within a virtual network to connect to the internet without requiring public IP addresses directly assigned to them. NAT Gateway manages outbound connections by translating the private IP addresses of resources in a virtual network to the public IP address(es) of the NAT Gateway itself.

Create an Azure Virtual Machine with the Azure CLI

Mon, 10 Apr 2023 12:38:55 +0000

To round off things nicely, I thought I would follow on from two previous posts about creating Azure Virtual Machines. First we went through how to create an Azure Virtual Machine using PowerShell, then we went through with ARM templates. Now we’re going to use the Azure CLI for the third try.

Create an Azure Virtual Machine with PowerShell

Create an Azure Virtual Machine with an ARM template

Create an Azure Virtual Machine with Terraform

Create an Azure VM with Bicep: A Step-by-Step Guide

Wed, 01 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

In this guide, we’ll walk through deploying an Azure Virtual Machine (VM) using Bicep, Microsoft’s domain-specific language (DSL) for Azure Resource Manager (ARM) templates.

Bicep provides a more readable and concise syntax compared to raw ARM JSON templates while retaining the same functionality. If you’re working with Infrastructure as Code (IaC) in Azure, Bicep is the recommended alternative to ARM.

We’ll cover how to create a fully functional Azure VM, including:
✔ Resource Group creation
✔ Virtual Network (VNet) and Subnet setup
✔ Network Security Group (NSG) for security
✔ Public and Private IP configuration
✔ Network Interface (NIC) association
✔ Deploying a Windows Server VM

Migrate Terraform State with AzCopy in Azure Containers

Thu, 05 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Migrating Terraform State between Azure Containers with AzCopy

Introduction

Have you ever needed to migrate your Terraform state files from one Azure storage container to another? Perhaps you’re consolidating storage accounts, upgrading to a more secure configuration, or simply reorganizing your infrastructure. Moving Terraform state safely is critical to avoid disrupting your infrastructure management.

In this comprehensive guide, I’ll walk you through the exact process of reliably transferring Terraform state files between Azure Blob Storage containers using Microsoft’s AzCopy tool and PowerShell. Follow these steps to ensure your state migration goes smoothly without risking your infrastructure integrity.

Specify a Different SSH Key per Git Repository

Tue, 15 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000

If you have more than one GitHub account, you’ll want different repositories to authenticate with different SSH keys — even though they’re all on the same host (github.com). You can do that with a Host alias in your SSH config.

Nant error: [exec] svn: Error resolving case of '>'

Tue, 01 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Receiving this following error when doing an exec statement in nant, had me scratching my head for a while and took an age to track down.

1[exec] svn: Error resolving case of '>'

Resolved it by using the output parameter within the exec element, you can’t use the > character for output from within Nant annoyingly.

So changed this:

1<exec basedir="." program="c:myprogram.exe" commandline=" -L -x > c:xmloutput.xml" />

To this:

Resize Tmux and Vim Panes with Keyboard Shortcuts

Mon, 24 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Resizing split panes in Tmux and Vim with the default key bindings is slow and fiddly. Here are the defaults, and the custom shortcuts I add to make it quick.

How to Change the GPG Key for pass (Password Store)

Thu, 07 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0000

How to change the GPG key used by pass. This re-encrypts your whole password store to the new GPG key.

Change tmux command prefix

Mon, 01 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0000

The default tmux command prefix is Ctrl-b, which is fairly awkward. I NEVER use my right Ctrl key (maybe I should?), so Ctrl-b is quite a big movement for the fingers on my left hand. To truely live the keyboard/terminal/vim/tmux life you want to minimise the times your fingers have to move from the home row.

Storing DevOps documentation in git

Mon, 23 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Often in a large enterprise you will need to submit changes to a CAB (Change Advisory Board) before getting approval to make any changes to your infrastructure. But managing versions of your diagrams and documents / infrastructure code / what has actually been deployed can be difficult.

Documentation is often stored in a seperate document store (like Sharepoint).

I’m using Azure DevOps to manage work items here, but you can insert your own (Jira, Github Issues).

How to install Jupyter Notebook on Ubuntu Linux

Mon, 07 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Our plan today

We’re going to go through the steps to get Jupyter Notebook installed and running from scratch Ubuntu or Debian.

What we’ll cover

Install Python
Create Python Virtual Environment
Install Jupyter
Run Jupyter Notebook
Create Jupyter in application menu in XFCE

I’m using Ubuntu 20.04, but this will be the same steps for Ubuntu 21.10, 20.04, 18.04 and 16.04. Also should work entirely for recent versions of Debian too.

Install a desktop environment GUI on Ubuntu Server in Azure

Mon, 27 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

All the Linux server Virtual Machine images on Azure don’t come with a desktop environment, which is obviously usually the right thing to do with a server. There’s usually no need for a desktop environment as all operations can be done from the CLI via ssh. However, maybe you need a desktop environment for another reason. For example, setting up Azure Lab Services for class rooms, maybe those Virtual Machines need a desktop enviroment for lessons in your lab.

Disable Entity Framework Core Migrations

Tue, 19 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I have a project that I started development with Code First Migrations. Which is great for development and getting things up and running quickly. But I don’t like it as a solution for deploying to production etc. I’ve done it in the past, and it’s not a terrible solution. But not my preferences anymore.

Super lightweight bookmarks manager - dmenu bookmarks with bm

Tue, 12 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Storing my internet bookmarks to disk in a non-proprietry way and making them easily accessible was my main goal in the research for this blog post.

Create, attach and mount a managed disk to an Azure Linux Virtual Machine

Mon, 23 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

We’re going to add a new data disk to an existing Azure Linux Virtual Machine and then mount it. We will be using CentOS 7.7 and will go through creating the Virtual Machine without the data disk, modify the ARM template to add the data disk. Then we will SSH into the VM and mount the new disk.

Chocolatey - Package Management for Windows

Mon, 16 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Between 6 months to a year, I start to feel that my Windows installation is running sluggish. Is there some malware running somewhere? Is Windows just getting slow? Either way, I like a fresh installation.

Chocolatey to the rescue of clicking next a thousand times.

Fixing ARM Template Deployment Validation Errors

Tue, 03 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Today I was trying to deploy an ARM template with Test-AzureRmResourceGroupDeployment and New-AzureRmResourceGroupDeployment and received the following error:

1The template deployment GUID is not valid according to the validation procedure. The tracking id is GUID. See inner errors for details.

Getting the error details

Create an Azure VM with Terraform: A Step-by-Step Guide

Mon, 24 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is essential for managing cloud infrastructure efficiently. Terraform, an open-source IaC tool, allows you to define, deploy, and manage Azure resources in a repeatable and automated way.

In this guide, we’ll walk through deploying an Azure Virtual Machine (VM) using Terraform, covering:

✔ Defining a resource group
✔ Creating a virtual network and subnet
✔ Configuring a public IP and network interface
✔ Deploying a Windows Virtual Machine
✔ Running Terraform commands to provision infrastructure