How This Blog Works

2020-05-03T00:00:00+02:00

This blog is created using the Zola static site engine . I use a combination of GitLab CI and cron to automatically upload it to my web server whenever I merge a change to the Git master branch of the home page.

The elektrubadur.se source code is kept here in GitLab [Update 2024-11-05: elektrubadur.se source code since moved to GitHub ]. While writing a post I just run zola serve on my computer and can look at a dynamically updated website on a local web server.

Once ready, I commit on a branch and push it to GitLab, and then make a merge request. This might seem a bit silly for a one-man project, but this way I can disable pushes to the master branch entirely, which can help prevent an accident.

The repository includes the separate repository web-build as a submodule. It contains some scripts used to build and publish the web site.

My website is hosted at HCoop , a hosting cooperative. Because it uses AFS, passwordless login requires the use of Kerberos, so I can’t just push the page using a deploy key.

So, rather than pushing the website there, I’m pulling. I’ve put the script fetch_website.py from web-build on the target host, and makes it run it as a cron job:

*/5 * * * * k5start -qtUf "/etc/keytabs/user.daemon/$USER" -- "$HOME/scripts/fetch_website.py" "https://gitlab.com/bkhl/elektrubadur.se/-/jobs/artifacts/master/download?job=build" "$HOME/www/elektrubadur.se"

The k5start thing is another thing needed because of the use of AFS and Kerberos. The point here is that you give the script a URL to a GitLab artifact, and a target directory, and it will deploy it if there’s been any change.

The entire script is a bit long to post here, but it basically checks if there is a new artifact in GitLab for the website, built from the master branch, and if there is downloads and deploys it. It saves the ETag in a file, so that it can compare to that and skip downloading unless there has been a change.

Credits for tools used making this page, inspirations for the design &c. are also on About This Page .

First Month with Fedora Silverblue

2020-02-08T00:00:00+01:00

I decided during my midwinter vacation that I’d try out Fedora Silverblue on my desktop, and I liked it, so here I am still using it on my work laptop.

Silverblue is a version of Fedora using rpm-ostree to provide a minimal and immutable base OS, providing a platform for running applications in containers.

Previously I was using Ubuntu with a lot of Ansible playbooks for installing things both globally and in my home directory. I used to keep those playbooks in the same directory as my dotfiles , but after the switch to Fedora I removed them. If anyone is curious about what that looked like, they are here .

The benefits I was hoping for was

Make my laptop setup more “out of the box”, to get away from having a big collection of Ansible roles for varied purposes, that all have to work together on my laptop.
Simplifying my base OS by moving development stuff and applications into containers.
Plain Gnome desktop without custom themes.
RPM-based. This is not an advantage in itself, but makes things a bit easier as I mostly deal with RHEL and Centos for work.

Applications

For applications, I’m using mostly Flatpak. I found after a while that applications I had installed from the Fedora Flatpak repository was more buggy than the ones I had from Flathub , so at one point I made a switch to get all my applications from Flathub.

Here’s the entire command line to get rpm-ostree into the current state of my laptop:

rpm-ostree reset

rpm-ostree install \
  fedora-workstation-repositories \
  ffmpeg-libs \
  google-chrome-stable \
  gparted \
  krb5-workstation \
  langpacks-en \
  langpacks-en_GB \
  langpacks-sv \
  langpacks-th \
  libgnome-keyring \
  NetworkManager-fortisslvpn-gnome \
  nextcloud-client \
  qemu \
  thai-arundina-sans-fonts \
  thai-arundina-sans-mono-fonts \
  thai-arundina-serif-fonts \
  vim-enhanced \
  vim-X11 \
  virt-manager \
  wl-clipboard

rpm-ostree install 'https://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-31.noarch.rpm'
rpm-ostree install 'https://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-31.noarch.rpm'

rpm-ostree install fuse-exfat exfat-utils

As you can see, there’s just a few things that has to be added as RPMs. Not a lot, considering that in the default installation, Silverblue just comes with a terminal, a file manager, and Firefox, in terms of applications.

Development environments

The main thing I’ve done so far to make it convenient for me to use as a development system is to create container images for use with Toolbox . I keep these images here in GitLab . I’ll write more about that in a future article.

For now I’ll summarize it by saying I’ve created some Toolbox environments for various languages, configured to keep caches and such in the container, rather than my $HOME, and it’s working quite nicely so far.

Gnome

I used the default Ubuntu desktop before, so this is not a dramatic change, but I like the look and feel of the default Gnome desktop. I also get a somewhat newer version of it, which is nice.

A few weeks after the switch, Tobias Bernard (Gnome developer) posted the article Doing Things That Scale , which resonated with me. While I’ve done some hacking to set up my development environments “just right” as described above, I’m trying to think of how to make that work more usable for others, maybe by contributing back to the Toolbox project, or by making some sort of GUI wrapper to manage a set of development environment toolboxes.

Elektrubadur

How This Blog Works

First Month with Fedora Silverblue

Applications

Development environments

Gnome