levlaz

One of the most frustrating things to deal with in Continuous Integration is flakey commands. Whether it’s flakey tests, or intermittent networking issues, when your build fails for issues outside of your control not only does it cause frustration, it reduces the trust in your CI process.

One strategy for dealing with this type of issue is to introduce some retry logic into your commands. This can easily be accomplished with good old bash.

For example, pretend that I have $FLAKEY_COMMAND and I want to retry it three times before finally failing my build. I could wrap the whole thing up in a bash loop like this.

counter=1
max=3
$FLAKEY_COMMAND

while [[ $? -ne 0 && $counter -lt $max ]]; do
    counter=$((counter+1))
    $FLAKEY_COMMAND
done

This script will run my command, if the exit code (the output of $?) is non zero (i.e something went wrong) and my counter is less than three, then it will retry the command. You can increase or decrease the number of attempts by adjusting the max variable.

This is not a foolproof strategy, but is one approach to handle flakey commands in your CI pipeline.

I’ve been reading Hacker News obsessively lately. In the past I would skip the top posts every couple of days, lately I have been reading every new and top article. In order to achieve this I would go to the main website, and click on every single link on the front pages.

After doing this for a few days I realized that I should probably write some Javascript to automate this entire process. So this afternoon I whipped up the hanopener chrome extension.

Initially I made it a python CLI script, but then realized that this would probably make more sense as a chrome extension.

Be warned: This extension is super obnoxious and will open up 60 chrome tabs every time you click on the icon, which is not always a good time depending on your computer.

It’s available on the chrome webstore and as a Firefox Add-On now.

UPDATE @ 5/28
Added link to Firefox Add On

Netlify is an excellent platform for building, deploying, and managing web applications. It supports automated deployment using GitHub webhooks and also provides some advanced features such as custom domains and HTTPS all for free. Deploying a Static Site to Netlify is a breeze. Although it does support running Angular JS applications, there are a couple gotchas in the deployment process that I had to wrangle together from various blog posts in order to get things to work.

Enable Redirects

The first issue that I ran into was after I deployed my site to Netlify, whenever I would click on an Angular link, I would get a 404 page.

Getting this to work is pretty simple. Ultimately you just need a file called _redirects in the root of your web project. In order to get angular to create this you need to do the following things. This file will send all URL’s to the root of your application which allows the Angular router to kick in and do its thing.

1. Create a _redirects file in the src directory of your angular project.

   For most basic sites it should look something like this.

   # src/_redirects
   
   /*  /index.html 200
   

2. Add this file to your angular.json file.

   Your angular.json file serves as a configuration for many different aspects of the angular CLI. In order to get this file into the root of your output directory you must define the file here. A snippet of my file is shown below. Update this configuration file and push all of your changes back up to GitHub.

   {
   "$schema": "./node_modules/@angular/cli/lib/config/schema.json",
   "version": 1,
   "newProjectRoot": "projects",
   "projects": {
       "flagviz": {
       "root": "",
       "sourceRoot": "src",
       "projectType": "application",
       "prefix": "app",
       "schematics": {},
       "architect": {
           "build": {
           "builder": "@angular-devkit/build-angular:browser",
           "options": {
               "outputPath": "dist/flagviz",
               "index": "src/index.html",
               "main": "src/main.ts",
               "polyfills": "src/polyfills.ts",
               "tsConfig": "src/tsconfig.app.json",
               "assets": [
               "src/favicon.ico",
               "src/assets",
               "src/_redirects"
   
   ... rest of file 
   

Configure your Netlify Project

Now that you have the redirects file in place. You can set up your project for automatic deployment with GitHub and Netlify.

Once you have logged into Netlify, click on New Site From Git and find the name of your project.

Configure Build Settings

The last step is to configure your build settings.

For Build command you should enter ng build --prod.

For Publish directory you should enter dist/$NAME_OF_YOUR_PROJECT.

Be sure to replace $NAME_OF_YOUR_PROJECT with the actual name of your project.

Now you can click on Deploy site and once the initial deployment has completed you should see your new angular application running on Netflify with a working routing system.

I jumped down another rabbit hole trying to figure out how to get started with java ee without using an ide. Although IDE’s are very handy when it comes to Java development, they also are sometimes a crutch. For instance, if you want to transition to CI, do you actually know what commands the IDE runs when you right click and run tests?

First, I have no idea what Java EE actually is. There is something called GlassFish, which is an open source Java EE “reference implementation”. It also the same thing that is installed when you go to the main Java EE website.

Java EE does not support the latest Java JDK 1.9. On my Mac I had a tough time trying to get two versions of Java to run at the same time.

I think 99.9% of all tutorials about getting started with Java EE include using Netbeans or Eclipse. I wanted to write one that used the CLI. This involves using maven.

Maven has a concept called “archetypes” which creates the necessary directory structure for a new Java project. The main problem is that I could not find a bare bones archetype definition.

At the end of the day, I dug deep into the rabbit hole and came up empty. I will figure this out at some point and write a blog post about it.