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235 Trick-or-Treaters 3 Nov 2024 3:00 PM (2 months ago)

This year we had 235 trick-or-treaters. That’s a big increase from previous years.

Halloween was on a Thursday and it was raining on-and-off. However, there was no school on Friday, so kids were out and prepped for staying up late on a sugar high.

We technically started handing out candy at 5:30 because the number of kids this year starting early was overwhelming. I’ve grouped the 5:30p to 6:00p kids (24) in with the 6:00p - 6:30p kids (22) to total 46 in the 6:00p - 6:30p time block. It throws the curve off a little but we’ll have to live with it.

We didn’t hand out in 2022 (we were remodeling and not home) or 2023 (COVID). It was good to be back in the swing of things. I did throw out my back a few days before, so I tallied the kids while Jenn handed out candy, but we showed up!

Cumulative data:

Our costumes this year:

• Me: Newt Scamander from Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them
• Jenn: Sally Slater, the tightrope walker from the Disney Haunted Mansion
• Phoenix: Ursula from The Little Mermaid

I made the coat and the vest for this one. I bought the wand, pants, and shirt. I’m pretty pleased with how it turned out. The coat is really warm and is fully lined - it’s not a costume pattern, it’s a historic reproduction pattern. I wore it to our usual Halloween party but couldn’t wear it all night. It was just too hot.

About halfway through making the coat I tried to push too much fabric through the serger so I broke it. It’s at the shop now. I think I threw off the timing. I also recently acquired a cover stitch machine, but I didn’t see any good places to use it on this costume. I’m excited to try it for a future project.

Using the az CLI Behind Zscaler 5 Jun 2024 4:00 PM (7 months ago)

At work I use the az CLI behind a VPN/proxy package called Zscaler. I’m not a big fan of these TLS-intercepting-man-in-the-middle-attack sort of “security” products, but it is what it is.

The problem for me is that, if I move to a new machine, or if someone else is setting up a machine, I always forget how to make the az CLI trust Zscaler so it can function properly and not get a TLS certificate error. I’ve re-figured this out countless times, so this time I’m writing it down. It does seem to be slightly different on Mac and Windows and I’m not sure why. Perhaps it has to do with the different ways the network stack works or something.

The az CLI is Python-based so this will ostensibly work to generally solve Python issues, but I always encounter it as part of az, so I’m blogging it as such.

Zscaler does have some help for enabling trust but you sometimes have to fudge the steps, like with this.

On Mac

• Make sure you have the Zscaler certificate in your system keychain as a trusted CA. Likely if you have Zscaler running this is already set up.
• Install the latest ca-certificates package or get the content from here.
• Set the REQUESTS_CA_BUNDLE environment variable to point at the cert.pem that has all the CA certs in it.

This works because the Homebrew package for ca-certificates automatically includes all the certificates from your system keychain so you don’t have to manually append your custom/company CA info.

On Windows

• Go get the latest ca-certificates bundle from here.
• Open that cert.pem file in your favorite text editor. Just make sure you keep the file with LF line endings.
• Get your Zscaler CA certificate in PEM format. Open that up in the text editor, too.
• At the bottom of the cert.pem main file, paste in the Zscaler CA certificate contents, thereby adding it to the list of CAs.
• Set the REQUESTS_CA_BUNDLE environment variable to point at the cert.pem that has all the CA certs in it.

Again, not sure why on Windows you need to have the Zscaler cert added to the main cert bundle but on Mac you don’t. This also could just be something environmental - like there’s something on my work machines that somehow auto-trusts Zscaler but does so to the exclusion of all else.

Regardless, this is what worked for me.

NDepend 2023.2 - This Time On Mac! 17 Dec 2023 3:00 PM (last year)

It’s been a few years since I’ve posted a look at NDepend and a lot has changed for me since then. I’ve switched my primary development machine to a Mac. I don’t use Visual Studio at all - I’m a VS Code person now because I do a lot of things in a lot of different languages and switching IDEs all day is painful (not to mention VS Code starts up far faster and feels far slimmer than full VS). Most of my day-to-day is in microservices now rather than larger monolith projects.

Full disclosure: Patrick at NDepend gave me the license for testing and showing off NDepend for free. I’m not compensated for the blog post in any way other than the license, but I figured it’d be fair to mention I was given the license.

I’ve loved NDepend from the start. I’ve been using it for years and it’s never been anything but awesome. I still think if you haven’t dived into that, you should just stop here and go do that because it’s worth it.

Get Going on Mac

The main NDepend GUI is Windows-only, so this time around, since I’m focusing solely on Mac support (that’s what I have to work with!) I’m going to wire this thing up and see how it goes.

First thing I need to do is register my license using the cross-platform console app. You’ll see that in the net8.0 folder of the zip package you get when you download NDepend.

dotnet ./net8.0/NDepend.Console.MultiOS.dll --reglic XXXXXXXX

This gives me a message that tells me my computer is now registered to run NDepend console.

Running the command line now, I get a bunch of options.

 pwsh> dotnet ./net8.0/NDepend.Console.MultiOS.dll
//
//  NDepend v2023.2.3.9706
//  https://www.NDepend.com
//  support@NDepend.com
//  Copyright (C) ZEN PROGRAM HLD 2004-2023
//  All Rights Reserved
//
_______________________________________________________________________________
To analyze code and build reports NDepend.Console.MultiOS.dll accepts these arguments.
NDepend.Console.MultiOS.dll can also be used to create projects (see how below after
the list of arguments).

  _____________________________________________________________________________
  The path to the input .ndproj (or .xml) NDepend project file.  MANDATORY

    It must be specified as the first argument. If you need to specify a path
    that contains a space character use double quotes ".. ..". The specified
    path must be either an absolute path (with drive letter C:\ or
    UNC \\Server\Share format on Windows or like /var/dir on Linux or OSX),
    or a path relative to the current directory (obtained with
    System.Environment.CurrentDirectory),
    or a file name in the current directory.


Following arguments are OPTIONAL and can be provided in any order. Any file or
directory path specified in optionals arguments can be:
  - Absolute : with drive letter C:\ or UNC \\Server\Share format on Windows
               or like /var/dir on Linux or OSX.
  - Relative : to the NDepend project file location.
  - Prefixed with an environment variable with the syntax  %ENVVAR%\Dir\
  - Prefixed with a path variable with the syntax   $(Variable)\Dir
  _____________________________________________________________________________
  /ViewReport                 to view the HTML report
  _____________________________________________________________________________
  /Silent                     to disable output on console
  _____________________________________________________________________________
  /HideConsole                to hide the console window
  _____________________________________________________________________________
  /Concurrent                 to parallelize analysis execution
  _____________________________________________________________________________
  /LogTrendMetrics            to force log trend metrics
  _____________________________________________________________________________
  /TrendStoreDir              to override the trend store directory specified
                              in the NDepend project file
  _____________________________________________________________________________
  /PersistHistoricAnalysisResult   to force persist historic analysis result
  _____________________________________________________________________________
  /DontPersistHistoricAnalysisResult   to force not persist historic analysis
                                       result
  _____________________________________________________________________________
  /ForceReturnZeroExitCode    to force return a zero exit code even when
                              one or many quality gate(s) fail
  _____________________________________________________________________________
  /HistoricAnalysisResultsDir to override the historic analysis results
                              directory specified in the NDepend project file.
  _____________________________________________________________________________
  /OutDir dir                 to override the output directory specified
                              in the NDepend project file.

     VisualNDepend.exe won't work on the machine where you used
     NDepend.Console.MultiOS.dll with the option /OutDir because VisualNDepend.exe is
     not aware of the output dir specified and will try to use the output dir
     specified in your NDepend project file.
  _____________________________________________________________________________
  /AnalysisResultId id        to assign an identifier to the analysis result
  _____________________________________________________________________________
  /GitHubPAT pat              to provide a GitHub PAT (Personal Access Token).

     Such PAT is used in case some artifacts (like a baseline analysis result) are
     required during analysis and must be loaded from GitHub.
     Such PAT overrides the PAT registered on the machine (if any).
  _____________________________________________________________________________
  /XslForReport xlsFilePath   to provide your own Xsl file used to build report
  _____________________________________________________________________________
  /KeepXmlFilesUsedToBuildReport  to keep xml files used to build report
  _____________________________________________________________________________
  /InDirs [/KeepProjectInDirs] dir1 [dir2 ...]
                              to override input directories specified in the
                              NDepend project file.

     This option is used to customize the location(s) where assemblies to
     analyze (application assemblies and third-party assemblies) can be found.
     Only assemblies resolved in dirs are concerned, not assemblies resolved
     from a Visual Studio solution.
     The search in dirs is not recursive, it doesn't look into child dirs.
     Directly after the option /InDirs, the option /KeepProjectInDirs can be
     used to avoid ignoring directories specified in the NDepend
     project file.
  _____________________________________________________________________________
  /CoverageFiles [/KeepProjectCoverageFiles] file1 [file2 ...]
                              to override input coverage files specified
                              in the NDepend project file.

     Directly after the option /CoverageFiles, the option
     /KeepProjectCoverageFiles can be used to avoid ignoring coverage files
     specified in the NDepend project file.

  _____________________________________________________________________________
  /CoverageDir dir            to override the directory that contains
                              coverage files specified in the project file.

  _____________________________________________________________________________
  /CoverageExclusionFile file to override the  .runsettings  file specified
                              in the project file. NDepend gathers coverage
                              exclusion data from such file.

  _____________________________________________________________________________
  /RuleFiles [/KeepProjectRuleFiles] file1 [file2 ...]
                              to override input rule files specified
                              in the NDepend project file.

     Directly after the option /RuleFiles, the option
     /KeepProjectRuleFiles can be used to avoid ignoring rule files
     specified in the NDepend project file.
  _____________________________________________________________________________
  /PathVariables Name1 Value1 [Name2 Value2 ...]
                              to override the values of one or several
                              NDepend project path variables, or
                              create new path variables.
  _____________________________________________________________________________
  /AnalysisResultToCompareWith to provide a previous analysis result to
                               compare with.

     Analysis results are stored in files with file name prefix
     {NDependAnalysisResult_} and with extension {.ndar}.
     These files can be found under the NDepend project output directory.
     The preferred option to provide a previous analysis result to
     compare with during an analysis is to use:
     NDepend > Project Properties > Analysis > Baseline for Comparison
     You can use the option /AnalysisResultToCompareWith in special
     scenarios where using Project Properties doesn't work.

  _____________________________________________________________________________
  /Help   or   /h              to display the current help on console

  _____________________________________________________________________________
  Code queries execution time-out value used through NDepend.Console.MultiOS.dll
  execution.

     If you need to adjust this time-out value, just run VisualNDepend.exe once
     on the machine running NDepend.Console.exe and choose a time-out value in:
        VisualNDepend > Tools > Options > Code Query > Query Execution Time-Out

     This value is persisted in the file VisualNDependOptions.xml that can be
     found in the directory:
        VisualNDepend > Tools > Options > Export / Import / Reset Options >
        Open the folder containing the Options File

_______________________________________________________________________________
NDepend.Console.MultiOS.dll can be used to create an NDepend project file.
This is useful to create NDepend project(s) on-the-fly from a script.

To do so the first argument must be  /CreateProject  or  /cp  (case-insensitive)

The second argument must be the project file path to create. The file name must
have the extension .ndproj. If you need to specify a path that contains a space
character use double quotes "...". The specified path must be either an
absolute path (with drive letter C:\ or UNC \\Server\Share format on Windows
or like /var/dir on Linux or OSX), or a path relative to the current directory
(obtained with System.Environment.CurrentDirectory),
or a file name in the current directory.


Then at least one or several sources of code to analyze must be precised.
A source of code to analyze can be:

- A path to a Visual Studio solution file.
  The solution file extension must be .sln.
  The vertical line character '|' can follow the path to declare a filter on
  project names. If no filter is precised the default filter "-test"
  is defined. If you need to specify a path or a filter that contains a space
  character use double quotes "...".
  Example: "..\My File\MySolution.sln|filterIn -filterOut".

- A path to a Visual Studio project file. The project file extension must
  be within: .csproj .vbproj .proj

- A path to a compiled assembly file. The compiled assembly file extension must
  be within: .dll .exe .winmd

Notice that source of code paths can be absolute or relative to the project file
location. If you need to specify a path or a filter that contains a space
character use double quotes.

_______________________________________________________________________________
NDepend.Console.MultiOS.dll can be used to register a license on a machine,
or to start evaluation. Here are console arguments to use (case insensitive):

  /RegEval      Start the NDepend 14 days evaluation on the current machine.

  _____________________________________________________________________________
  /RegLic XYZ   Register a seat of the license key XYZ on the current machine.

  _____________________________________________________________________________
  /UnregLic     Unregister a seat of the license key already registered
                on the current machine.
  _____________________________________________________________________________
  /RefreshLic   Refresh the license data already registered on the current
                machine. This is useful when the license changes upon renewal.

Each of these operation requires internet access to do a roundtrip with the
NDepend server. If the current machine doesn't have internet access
a procedure is proposed to complete the operation by accessing manually the
NDepend server from a connected machine.

_______________________________________________________________________________
Register a GitHub PAT with NDepend.Console.MultiOS.dll

A GitHub PAT (Personal Access Token) can be registered on a machine.
This way when NDepend needs to access GitHub, it can use such PAT.
Here are console arguments to use (case insensitive):

  /RegGitHubPAT XYZ  Register the GitHub PAT XYZ on the current machine.

  _____________________________________________________________________________
  /UnregGitHubPAT    Unregister the GitHub PAT actually registered on the
                     current machine.

As explained above, when using NDepend.Console.MultiOS.dll to run an analysis,
a PAT can be provided with the switch GitHubPAT.
In such case, during analysis the PAT provided overrides the PAT
registered on the machine (if any).

As usual, a great amount of help and docs right there to help me get going.

Create a Project

I created the project for one of my microservices by pointing at the microservice solution file. (Despite not using Visual Studio myself, some of our devs do, so we maintain compatibility with both VS and VS Code. Plus, the C# Dev Kit really likes it when you have a solution.)

dotnet ~/ndepend/net8.0/NDepend.Console.MultiOS.dll --cp ./DemoProject.ndproj ~/path/to/my/Microservice.sln

This created a default NDepend project for analysis of my microservice solution. This is a pretty big file (513 lines of XML) so I won’t paste it here.

As noted in the online docs, right now if you want to modify this project, you can do so by hand; you can work with the NDepend API; or you can use the currently-Windows-only GUI. I’m not going to modify the project because I’m curious what I will get with the default. Obviously this won’t include various custom queries and metrics I may normally run for my specific projects, but that’s OK for this.

Run the Analysis

Let’s see this thing go!

dotnet ~/ndepend/net8.0/NDepend.Console.MultiOS.dll ./DemoProject.ndproj

This kicks off the analysis (like you might see on a build server) and generates a nice HTML report.

I didn’t include coverage data in this particular run because I wanted to focus mostly on the code analysis side of things.

Since my service code broke some rules, the command line exited non-zero. This is great for build integration where I want to fail if rules get violated.

Dig Deeper

From that main report page, it looks like the code in the service I analyzed failed some of the default quality gates. Let’s go to the Quality Gates tab to see what happened.

Yow! Four critical rules violated. I’ll click on that to see what they were.

Looks like there’s a type that’s too big, some mutually dependent namespaces, a non-readonly static field, and a couple of types that have the same name. Some of this is easy enough to fix; some of it might require some tweaks to the rules, since the microservice has some data transfer objects and API models that look different but have the same data (so the same name in different namespaces is appropriate).

All in all, not bad!

I Still Love It

NDepend is still a great tool, even on Mac, and I still totally recommend it. To get the most out of it right now, you really need to be on Windows so you can get the GUI support, but for folks like me that are primarily Mac right now, it still provides some great value. Honestly, if you haven’t tried it yet, just go do that.

Room for Improvement

I always like providing some ideas on ways to make a good product even better, and this is no exception. I love this thing, and I want to see some cool improvements to make it “more awesomer.”

Installation Mechanism

I’m very used to installing things through Homebrew on Mac, and on Windows as we look at things like Chocolatey, WinGet, and others - it seems like having an installation that would enable me to use these mechanisms instead of going to a download screen on a website would be a big help. I would love to be able to do brew install ndepend and have that just work.

Visual Studio Code Support and Cross-Platform UI

There’s some integration in Visual Studio for setting up projects and running NDepend on the current project. It’d be awesome to see similar integration for VS Code.

At the time of this writing, the NDepend getting started on Mac documentation says that this is coming. I’m looking forward to it.

I’m hoping that whatever comes out, the great GUI experience to view the various graphs and charts will also be coming for cross-platform. That’s a huge job, but it would be awesome, especially since I’m not really on any Windows machines anymore.

Invoking the Command Line

The cross-platform executable is a .dll so running it is a somewhat long command line:

dotnet ~/path/to/net8.0/NDepend.Console.MultiOS.dll

It’d be nice if this was more… single-command, like ndepend-console or something. Perhaps if it was a dotnet global tool it would be easier. That would also take care of the install mechanism - dotnet tool install ndepend-console -g seems like it’d be pretty nifty.

Commands and Sub-Commands

The command line executable gets used to create projects, register licenses, and run analyses. I admit I’ve gotten used to commands taking command/sub-command hierarchies to help disambiguate the calls I’m making rather than having to mix-and-match command line arguments at the top. I think that’d be a nice improvement here.

For example, instead of…

dotnet ./net8.0/NDepend.Console.MultiOS.dll /reglic XXXXXXXX
dotnet ./net8.0/NDepend.Console.MultiOS.dll /unreglic

It could be…

dotnet ./net8.0/NDepend.Console.MultiOS.dll license register --code XXXXXXXX
dotnet ./net8.0/NDepend.Console.MultiOS.dll license unregister

That would mean when I need to create a project, maybe it’s under…

dotnet ./net8.0/NDepend.Console.MultiOS.dll project create [args]

And executing analysis might be under…

dotnet ./net8.0/NDepend.Console.MultiOS.dll analyze [args]

It’d make getting help a little easier, too, since the help could list the commands and sub-commands, with details being down at the sub-command level instead of right at the top.

Graphs in HTML Reports

Without the full GUI you don’t get to see the graphs like the dependency matrix that I love so much. Granted, these are far more useful if you can click on them and interact with them, but still, I miss them in the HTML.

Support for Roslyn Analyzers

NDepend came out long before Roslyn analyzers were a thing, and some of what makes NDepend shine are the great rules based on CQLinq - a much easier way to query for things in your codebase than trying to write a Roslyn analyzer.

It would be so sweet if the rules that could be analyzed at develop/build time - when we see Roslyn analyzer output - could actually be executed as part of the build. Perhaps it’d require pointing at an .ndproj file to get the list of rules. Perhaps not all rules would be something that can be analyzed that early in the build. I’m just thinking about the ability to “shift left” a bit and catch the failing quality gates before running the analysis. That could potentially lead to a new/different licensing model where some developers, who are not authorized to run “full NDepend,” might have cheaper licenses that allow running of CQL-as-Roslyn-analyzer for build purposes.

Maybe an alternative to that would be to have a code generator that “creates a Roslyn analyzer package” based on CQL rules. Someone licensed for full NDepend could build that package and other devs could reference it.

I’m not sure exactly how it would work, I’m kinda brainstorming. But the “shift left” concept along with catching things early does appeal to me.

Another COVID Halloween 5 Nov 2023 3:00 PM (last year)

Back in 2021 we didn’t get to go to the usual Halloween party we attend due to COVID. That meant I didn’t really get to wear my Loki time prisoner costume. I decided I’d bring that one back out for this year so I could actually wear it.

This year we got to go to the party (no symptoms, even tested negative for COVID before walking out the door!) but ended up getting COVID for Halloween. That meant we didn’t hand out candy again, making this the second year in a row.

We did try to put a bowl of candy out with a “take one” sign. That didn’t last very long. While adults with small children were very good about taking one piece of candy per person, tweens and teens got really greedy really fast. We kind of expected that, but I’m always disappointed that people can’t just do the right thing; it’s always a selfish desire for more for me with no regard for you. Maybe that speaks to larger issues in society today? I dunno.

I need to start gathering ideas for next year’s costume. Since I reused a costume this year I didn’t really gather a lot of ideas or make anything, and I definitely missed that. On the other hand, my motivation lately has been a little low so it was also nice to not have to do anything.

Being Productive with Zero Admin on MacOS 27 Sep 2023 4:00 PM (last year)

Here’s the proposition: You just got a new Mac and you need to set it up for development on Azure (or your favorite cloud provider) in multiple different languages and technologies but you don’t have any admin permissions at all. Not even a little bit. How do you get it done? We’re going to give it a shot.

BIGGEST DISCLAIMER YOU HAVE EVER SEEN: THIS IS UNSUPPORTED. Not just “unsupported by me” but, in a lot of cases, unsupported by the community. For example, we’ll be installing Homebrew in a custom location, and they have no end of warnings about how unsupported that is. They won’t even take tickets or PRs to fix it if something isn’t working. When you take this on, you need to be ready to do some troubleshooting, potentially at a level you’ve not had to dig down to before. Don’t post questions, don’t file issues - you are on your own, 100%, no exceptions.

OK, hopefully that was clear. Let’s begin.

The key difference in what I’m doing here is that everything goes into your user folder somewhere.

• You don’t have admin, so you can’t install Homebrew in its default /usr/local/bin style location.
• You don’t have admin, so you can’t use most standard installers that want to put apps in central locations like /Applications or /usr/share.
• You don’t have admin, so you can’t modify /etc/paths.d or anything like that.

Contents:

• Strategies
• Start with Git
• Homebrew
• VS Code
• Homebrew Profile
• Homebrew Formulae
• PowerShell
• Azure CLI and Extensions
• Node.js and Tools
• rbenv
• .NET SDK and Tools
• Java
• Azure DevOps Artifacts Credential Provider
• Issue: Gatekeeper
• Issue: Admin-Only Installers
• Issue: App Permissions
• Issue: Bash Completions
• Issue: Path and Environment Variable Propagation
• Issue: Python Config During Updates
• Conclusion

Strategies

The TL;DR here is a set of strategies:

• Install to your user folder.
  • Instead of /usr/local/bin or anything else under /usr/local, we’re going to create that whole structure under ~/local - ~/local/bin and so on.
  • Applications will go in ~/Applications instead of /Applications.
• Use your user ~/.profile for paths and environment. No need for /etc/paths.d. Also, ~/.profile is pretty cross-shell (e.g., both bash and pwsh obey it) so it’s a good central way to go.
• Use SDK-based tools instead of global installers. Look for tools that you can install with, say, npm install -g or dotnet tool install -g if you can’t find something in Homebrew.

Start with Git

First things first, you need Git. This is the only thing that you may have challenges with. Without admin I was able to install Xcode from the App Store and that got me git. I admit I forgot to even check to see if git just ships with MacOS now. Maybe it does. But you will need Xcode command line tools for some stuff with Homebrew anyway, so I’d say just install Xcode to start. If you can’t… hmmm. You might be stuck. You should at least see what you can do about getting git. You’ll only use this version temporarily until you can install the latest using Homebrew later.

Homebrew

Got Git? Good. Let’s get Homebrew installed.

mkdir -p ~/local/bin
cd ~/local
git clone https://github.com/Homebrew/brew Homebrew
ln -s ~/local/Homebrew/bin/brew ~/local/bin/brew

I’ll reiterate - and you’ll see it if you ever run brew doctor - that this is wildly unsupported. It works, but you’re going to see some things here that you wouldn’t normally see with a standard Homebrew install. For example, things seem to compile a lot more often than I remember with regular Homebrew - and this is something they mention in the docs, too.

Now we need to add some stuff to your ~/.profile so we can get the shell finding your new ~/local tools. We need to do that before we install more stuff via Homebrew. That means we need an editor. I know you could use vi or something, but I’m a VS Code guy, and I need that installed anyway.

VS Code

Let’s get VS Code. Go download it from the download page, unzip it, and drop it in your ~/Applications folder. At a command prompt, link it into your ~/local/bin folder:

ln -s '~/Applications/Visual Studio Code.app/Contents/Resources/app/bin/code' ~/local/bin/code

I was able to download this one with a browser without running into Gatekeeper trouble. If you get Gatekeeper arguing with you about it, use curl to download.

Homebrew Profile

You can now do ~/local/bin/code ~/.profile to edit your base shell profile. Add this line so Homebrew can put itself into the path and set various environment variables:

eval "$($HOME/local/bin/brew shellenv)"

Restart your shell so this will evaluate and you now should be able to do:

brew --version

Your custom Homebrew should be in the path and you should see the version of Homebrew installed. We’re in business!

Homebrew Formulae

We can install more Homebrew tools now that custom Homebrew is set up. Here are the tools I use and the rough order I set them up. Homebrew is really good about managing the dependencies so it doesn’t have to be in this order, but be aware that a long dependency chain can mean a lot of time spent doing some custom builds during the install and this general order keeps it relatively short.

# Foundational utilities
brew install ca-certificates
brew install grep
brew install jq

# Bash and wget updates
brew install gettext
brew install bash
brew install libidn2
brew install wget

# Terraform - I use tfenv to manage installs/versions. This will
# install the latest Terraform.
brew install tfenv
tfenv install

# Terrragrunt - I use tgenv to manage installs/versions. After you do
# `list-remote`, pick a version to install.
brew install tgenv
tgenv list-remote

# Go
brew install go

# Python
brew install python@3.10

# Kubernetes
brew install kubernetes-cli
brew install k9s
brew install krew
brew install Azure/kubelogin/kubelogin
brew install stern
brew install helm
brew install helmsman

# Additional utilities I like
brew install marp-cli
brew install mkcert
brew install pre-commit

If you installed the grep update or python, you’ll need to add them to your path manually via the ~/.profile. We’ll do that just before the Homebrew part, then restart the shell to pick up the changes.

export PATH="$HOME/local/opt/grep/libexec/gnubin:$HOME/local/opt/python@3.10/libexec/bin:$PATH"
eval "$($HOME/local/bin/brew shellenv)"

PowerShell

This one was more challenging because the default installer they provide requires admin permissions so you can’t just download and run it or install via Homebrew. But I’m a PowerShell guy, so here’s how that one worked:

First, find the URL for the the .tar.gz from the releases page for your preferred PowerShell version and Mac architecture. I’m on an M1 so I’ll get the arm64 version.

cd ~/Downloads
curl -fsSL https://github.com/PowerShell/PowerShell/releases/download/v7.3.7/powershell-7.3.7-osx-arm64.tar.gz -o powershell.tar.gz
mkdir -p ~/local/microsoft/powershell/7
tar -xvf ./powershell.tar.gz -C ~/local/microsoft/powershell/7
chmod +x ~/local/microsoft/powershell/7/pwsh
ln -s '~/local/microsoft/powershell/7/pwsh' ~/local/bin/pwsh

Now you have a local copy of PowerShell and it’s linked into your path.

An important note here - I used curl instead of my browser to download the .tar.gz file. I did that to avoid Gatekeeper.

Azure CLI and Extensions

You use Homebrew to install the Azure CLI and then use az itself to add extensions. I separated this one out from the other Homebrew tools, though, because there’s a tiny catch: When you install az CLI, it’s going to build openssl from scratch because you’re in a non-standard location. During the tests for that build, it may try to start listening to network traffic. If you don’t have rights to allow that test to run, just hit cancel/deny. It’ll still work.

brew install azure-cli
az extension add --name azure-devops
az extension add --name azure-firewall
az extension add --name fleet
az extension add --name front-door

Node.js and Tools

I use n to manage my Node versions/installs. n requires us to set an environment variable N_PREFIX so it knows where to install things. First install n via Homebrew:

brew install n

Now edit your ~/.profile and add the N_PREFIX variable, then restart your shell.

export N_PREFIX="$HOME/local"
export PATH="$HOME/local/opt/grep/libexec/gnubin:$HOME/local/opt/python@3.10/libexec/bin:$PATH"
eval "$($HOME/local/bin/brew shellenv)"

After that shell restart, you can start installing Node versions. This will install the latest:

n latest

Once you have Node.js installed, you can install Node.js-based tooling.

# These are just tools I use; install the ones you use.
npm install -g @stoplight/spectral-cli `
               gulp-cli `
               tfx-cli `
               typescript

rbenv

I use rbenv to manage my Ruby versions/installs. rbenv requires both an installation and a modification to your ~/.profile. If you use rbenv…

# Install it, and install a Ruby version.
brew install rbenv
rbenv init
rbenv install -l

Update your ~/.profile to include the rbenv shell initialization code. It’ll look like this, put just after the Homebrew bit. Note I have pwsh in there as my shell of choice - put your own shell in there (bash, zsh, etc.). Restart your shell when it’s done.

export N_PREFIX="$HOME/local"
export PATH="$HOME/local/opt/grep/libexec/gnubin:$HOME/local/opt/python@3.10/libexec/bin:$PATH"
eval "$($HOME/local/bin/brew shellenv)"
eval "$($HOME/local/bin/rbenv init - pwsh)"

.NET SDK and Tools

The standard installers for the .NET SDK require admin permissions because they want to go into /usr/local/share/dotnet.

Download the dotnet-install.sh shell script and stick that in your ~/local/bin folder. What’s nice about this script is it will install things to ~/.dotnet by default instead of the central share location.

# Get the install script
curl -fsSL https://dot.net/v1/dotnet-install.sh -o ~/local/bin/dotnet-install.sh
chmod +x ~/local/bin/dotnet-install.sh

We need to get the local .NET into the path and set up variables (DOTNET_INSTALL_DIR and DOTNET_ROOT) so .NET and the install/uninstall processes can find things. We’ll add that all to our ~/.profile and restart the shell.

export DOTNET_INSTALL_DIR="$HOME/.dotnet"
export DOTNET_ROOT="$HOME/.dotnet"
export N_PREFIX="$HOME/local"
export PATH="$HOME/local/opt/grep/libexec/gnubin:$DOTNET_ROOT:$DOTNET_ROOT/tools:$HOME/local/opt/python@3.10/libexec/bin:$PATH"
eval "$($HOME/local/bin/brew shellenv)"
eval "$($HOME/local/bin/rbenv init - pwsh)"

Note we did not grab the .NET uninstall tool. It doesn’t work without admin permissions. When you try to run it doing anything but listing what’s installed, you get:

The current user does not have adequate privileges. See https://aka.ms/dotnet-core-uninstall-docs.

It’s unclear why uninstall would require admin privileges since install did not. I’ve filed an issue about that.

After the shell restart, we can start installing .NET and .NET global tools. In particular, this is how I get the Git Credential Manager plugin.

# Install latest .NET 6.0, 7.0, 8.0
dotnet-install.sh -?
dotnet-install.sh -c 6.0
dotnet-install.sh -c 7.0
dotnet-install.sh -c 8.0

# Get Git Credential Manager set up.
dotnet tool install -g git-credential-manager
git-credential-manager configure

# Other .NET tools I use. You may or may not want these.
dotnet tool install -g dotnet-counters
dotnet tool install -g dotnet-depends
dotnet tool install -g dotnet-dump
dotnet tool install -g dotnet-format
dotnet tool install -g dotnet-guid
dotnet tool install -g dotnet-outdated-tool
dotnet tool install -g dotnet-script
dotnet tool install -g dotnet-svcutil
dotnet tool install -g dotnet-symbol
dotnet tool install -g dotnet-trace
dotnet tool install -g gti
dotnet tool install -g microsoft.web.librarymanager.cli

Java

Without admin, you can’t get the system Java wrappers to be able to find any custom Java you install because you can’t run the required command like: sudo ln -sfn ~/local/opt/openjdk/libexec/openjdk.jdk /Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/openjdk.jdk

If you use bash or zsh as your shell, you might be interested in SDKMAN! as a way to manage Java. I use PowerShell so this won’t work because SDKMAN! relies on shell functions to do a lot of its job.

Instead, we’ll install the appropriate JDK and set symlinks/environment variables.

brew install openjdk

In .profile, we’ll need to set JAVA_HOME and add OpenJDK to the path. If we install a different JDK, we can update JAVA_HOME and restart the shell to switch.

export DOTNET_INSTALL_DIR="$HOME/.dotnet"
export DOTNET_ROOT="$HOME/.dotnet"
export N_PREFIX="$HOME/local"
export JAVA_HOME="$HOME/local/opt/openjdk"
export PATH="$JAVA_HOME/bin:$HOME/local/opt/grep/libexec/gnubin:$DOTNET_ROOT:$DOTNET_ROOT/tools:$HOME/local/opt/python@3.10/libexec/bin:$PATH"
eval "$($HOME/local/bin/brew shellenv)"
eval "$($HOME/local/bin/rbenv init - pwsh)"

Azure DevOps Artifacts Credential Provider

If you use Azure DevOps Artifacts, the credential provider is required for NuGet to restore packages. There’s a script that will help you download and install it in the right spot, and it doesn’t require admin.

wget -qO- https://aka.ms/install-artifacts-credprovider.sh | bash

Issue: Gatekeeper

If you download things to install, be aware Gatekeeper may get in the way.

You get messages like “XYZ can’t be opened because Apple cannot check it for malicious software.” This happened when I tried to install PowerShell by downloading the .tar.gz using my browser. The browser adds an attribute to the downloaded file and prompts you before running it. Normally you can just approve it and move on, but I don’t have permissions for that.

To fix it, you have to use the xattr tool to remove the com.apple.quarantine attribute from the affected file(s).

xattr -d com.apple.quarantine myfile.tar.gz

An easier way to deal with it is to just don’t download things with a browser. If you use curl to download, you don’t get the attribute added and you won’t get prompted.

Issue: Admin-Only Installers

Some packages installed by Homebrew (like PowerShell) try to run an installer that requires admin permissions. In some cases you may be able to find a different way to install the tool like I did with PowerShell. In some cases, like Docker, you need the admin permissions to set that up. I don’t have workarounds for those sorts of things.

Issue: App Permissions

There are some tools that may require additional permissions by nature, like Rectangle needs to be allowed to control window placement and I don’t have permissions to grant that. I don’t have workarounds for those sorts of things.

Issue: Bash Completions

Some Homebrew installs will dump completions into ~/local/etc/bash_completions.d. I never really did figure out what to do about these since I don’t really use Bash. There’s some doc about options you have but I’m not going to dig into it.

Issue: Path and Environment Variable Propagation

Since you’ve only updated your path and environment from your shell profile (e.g., not /etc/paths or whatever), these changes won’t be available unless you’re running things from your login shell.

A great example is VS Code and build tools. Let’s say you have a build set up where the command is npm. If the path to npm is something you added in your ~/.profile, VS Code may not be able to find it.

• If you start VS Code by running code from your shell, it will inherit the environment and npm will be found.
• If you start VS Code by clicking on the icon in the Dock or Finder, it will not inherit the environment and npm will not be found.

You can mitigate a little of this, at least in VS Code, by:

• Set your terminal.integrated.profiles.osx profiles to pass -l as an argument (act as a login shell, process ~/.profile) as shown in this Stack Overflow answer.
• Set your terminal.integrated.automationProfile.osx profile to also pass -l as an argument to your shell. (You may or may not need to do this; I was able to get away without it.)
• Always use shell commands to launch builds (specify "type": "shell" in tasks.json) for things instead of letting it default to "type": "process".

Other tools will, of course, require other workarounds.

Issue: Python Config During Updates

Some packages like glib have a dependency on Python for installs. However, if you have configuration settings you may need to set (for example, trusted-host), with Python being in your user folder, you may not have the rights to write to /Library/Application Support/pip to set a global config. However, sometimes these installers ignore user-level config. In this case, you may need to put your pip.conf in the folder with Python, for example ~/local/opt/python@3.12/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/3.12/pip.conf.

Conclusion

Hopefully this gets you bootstrapped into a dev machine without requiring admin permissions. I didn’t cover every tool out there, but perhaps you can apply the strategies to solving any issues you run across. Good luck!

Hosting Customized Homebrew Formulae 27 Sep 2023 4:00 PM (last year)

Scenario: You’re installing something from Homebrew and, for whatever reason, that standard formula isn’t working for you. What do you do?

I used this opportunity to learn a little about how Homebrew formulae generally work. It wasn’t something where I had my own app to deploy, but it also wasn’t something I wanted to submit as a PR for an existing formula. For example, I wanted to have the bash and wget formulae use a different main URL (one of the mirrors). The current one works for 99% of folks, but for reasons I won’t get into, it wasn’t working for me.

This process is called “creating a tap” - it’s a repo you’ll own with your own stuff that won’t go into the core Homebrew repo.

TL;DR:

• Create a GitHub repo called homebrew-XXXX where XXXX is how Homebrew will see your repo name.
• Copy the original formulae into your repo. Anything with a .rb extension will work - the name of the file is the name of the formula.
• Install using brew install your-username/XXXX/formula.rb

Let’s get a little more specific and use an example.

First I created my GitHub repo, homebrew-mods. This is where I can store my customized formulae. In there, I created a Formula folder to put them in.

I went to the homebrew-core repo where all the main formulae are and found the ones I was interested in updating:

• gettext - a dependency of bash
• bash
• libidn2 - a dependency of wget
• wget

I copied the formulae into my own repo and made some minor updates to switch the url and mirror values around a bit.

Finally, install time! It has to be installed in this order because otherwise the dependencies in the bash and wget modules will try to pull from homebrew-core instead of my mod repo.

brew install tillig/mods/gettext
brew install tillig/mods/bash
brew install tillig/mods/libidn2
brew install tillig/mods/wget

That’s it! If other packages have dependencies on gettext or libidn2, it’ll appear to be already installed since Homebrew just matches on name.

The downside of this approach is that you won’t get the upgrades for free. You have to maintain your tap and pull version updates as needed.

If you want to read more, check out the documentation from Homebrew on creating and maintaining a tap as well as the formula cookbook.

JSON Sort CLI and Pre-Commit Hook 20 Aug 2023 4:00 PM (last year)

I was recently introduced to pre-commit, and I really dig it. It’s a great way to double-check basic linting and validity in things without having to run a full build/test cycle.

Something I commonly do is sort JSON files using json-stable-stringify. I even wrote a VS Code extension to do just that. The problem with it being locked in the VS Code extension is that it’s not something I can use to verify formatting or invoke outside of the editor, so I set out to fix that. The result: @tillig/json-sort-cli.

This is a command-line wrapper around json-stable-stringify which adds a couple of features:

• It obeys .editorconfig - which is also something the VS Code plugin does.
• It can warn when something isn’t formatted (the default behavior) or autofix it if you want.
• It supports JSON with comments (using json5 for parsing) but it will remove those comments on format.

I put all of that together and included configuration for pre-commit so you can either run it manually via CLI or have it automatically run at pre-commit time.

I do realize there is already a pretty-format-json hook, but the above features I mentioned are differentiators. Why not just submit PRs to enhance the existing hook? The existing hook is in Python (not a language I’m super familiar with) and I really wanted - explicitly - the json-stable-stringify algorithm here, which I didn’t want to have to re-create in Python. I also wanted to add .editorconfig support and ability to use json5 to parse, which I suppose is all technically possible in Python but not a hill I really wanted to climb. Also, I wanted to offer a standalone CLI, which isn’t something I can do with that hook.

This is my first real npm package I’ve published, and I did it without TypeScript (I’m not really a JS guy, but to work with pre-commit you need to be able to install right from the repo), so I’m pretty pleased with it. I learned a lot about stuff I haven’t really dug into in the past - from some new things around npm packaging to how to get GitHub Actions to publish the package (with provenance) on release.

If this sounds like something you’re into, go check out how you can install and start using it!

Open-GitRemote: PowerShell Cmdlet to Open Git Web View 12 Feb 2023 3:00 PM (last year)

The GitLens plugin for VS Code is pretty awesome, and I find I use the “Open Repository on Remote” function to open the web view in the system browser is something I use a lot.

I also find that I do a lot of my work at the command line (in PowerShell!) and I was missing a command that would do the same thing from there.

Luckily, the code that does the work in the GitLens plugin is MIT License so I dug in and converted the general logic into a PowerShell command.

# Open the current clone's `origin` in web view.
Open-GitRemote

# Specify the location of the clone.
Open-GitRemote ~/dev/my-clone

# Pick a different remote.
Open-GitRemote -Remote upstream

If you’re interested, I’ve added the cmdlet to my PowerShell profile repository which is also under MIT License, so go get it!

Note: At the time of this writing I only have Windows and MacOS support - I didn’t get the Linux support in, but I think xdg-open is probably the way to go there. I just can’t test it. PRs welcome!

Halloween Force 3 Nov 2022 4:00 PM (2 years ago)

Due to some challenges with home remodeling issues we didn’t end up handing out candy this year.

We discovered a slow leak in one of the walls in our kitchen that caused some of our hardwood floor to warp, maybe a little more than a square meter. Since this was a very slow leak over time, insurance couldn’t say “here’s the event that caused it” and, thus, chalked it up to “normal wear and tear” which isn’t covered.

You can’t fix just a small section of a hardwood floor and we’ve got like 800 square feet of contiguous hardwood, so… all 800 square feet needed to be fully sanded and refinished. All out of pocket. We packed the entire first floor of the house into the garage and took a much-needed vacation to Universal Studios California and Disneyland for a week while the floor was getting refinished.

I had planned on putting the house back together, decorating, and getting right into Halloween when we came back. Unfortunately, when we got back we saw the floor was not done too well. Lots of flaws and issues in the work. It’s getting fixed, but it means we didn’t get to empty out the garage, which means I couldn’t get to the Halloween decorations. Between work and stress and everything else… candy just wasn’t in the cards. Sorry kids. Next year.

But we did make costumes - and we wore them in 90 degree heat in California for the Disney “Oogie Boogie Bash” party. So hot, but still very fun.

I used this Julie-Chantal pattern for a Jedi costume and it is really good. I’m decent at working with and customizing patterns, I’m not so great with drafting things from scratch.

I used a cotton gauze for the tunic, tabard, and sash. The robe is a heavy-weave upholstery fabric that has a really nice feel to it.

I added some magnet closures to it so it would stick together a bit nicer as well as some snaps to stick things in place. I definitely found while wearing it that it was required. All the belts and everything have a tendency to move a lot as you walk, sit, and stand. I think it turned out nicely, though.

The whole family went in Star Wars garb. I don’t have a picture of Phoenix, but here’s me and Jenn at a Halloween party. Phoenix and Jenn were both Rey, but from different movies. You can’t really tell, but Jenn’s vest is also upholstery fabric with an amazing, rich texture. She did a great job on her costume, too.

How to Manually Upgrade Rosetta 2 Nov 2022 4:00 PM (2 years ago)

Rosetta is used to enable a Mac with Apple silicon to use apps built for Intel. Most of the time, you’ll get prompted to install it the first time you need it and after that the automatic software update process will take over. However, in some environments the automatic mechanisms don’t work - maybe it’s incorrectly blocked or the update isn’t detecting things right. Here’s how to update Rosetta manually.

First, get your OS build number: 🍎 -> About This Mac -> More Info.

Click on the Version XX.X field and it should expand to show you the build number. It will be something like 22A380.

Go to the software catalog for Rosetta and search for your build number. You should see your build-specific package. The build number is in ExtendedMetaInfo:

<dict>
  <key>ServerMetadataURL</key>
  <string>https://swcdn.apple.com/content/downloads/38/00/012-92132-A_1NEH9AKCK9/k8s821iao7kplkdvqsovfzi49oi54ljrar/RosettaUpdateAuto.smd</string>
  <key>Packages</key>
  <array>
    <dict>
      <key>Digest</key>
      <string>dac241ee3db55ea602540dac036fd1ddc096bc06</string>
      <key>Size</key>
      <integer>331046</integer>
      <key>MetadataURL</key>
      <string>https://swdist.apple.com/content/downloads/38/00/012-92132-A_1NEH9AKCK9/k8s821iao7kplkdvqsovfzi49oi54ljrar/RosettaUpdateAuto.pkm</string>
      <key>URL</key>
      <string>https://swcdn.apple.com/content/downloads/38/00/012-92132-A_1NEH9AKCK9/k8s821iao7kplkdvqsovfzi49oi54ljrar/RosettaUpdateAuto.pkg</string>
    </dict>
  </array>
  <key>ExtendedMetaInfo</key>
  <dict>
    <key>ProductType</key>
    <string>otherArchitectureHandlerOS</string>
    <key>BuildVersion</key>
    <string>22A380</string>
  </dict>
</dict>

Look for the URL value (the .pkg file). Download and install that. Rosetta will be updated.

Generate Strongly-Typed Resources with .NET Core 29 Sep 2022 4:00 PM (2 years ago)

UPDATE OCT 25 2022: I filed an issue about some of the challenges here and the weird <Compile Remove> solution I had to do to get around the CS2002 warning. I got a good comment that explained some of the things I didn’t catch from the original issue about strongly-typed resource generation (which is a very long issue). I’ve updated the code/article to include the fixes and have a complete example.

In the not-too-distant past I switched from using Visual Studio for my full-time .NET IDE to using VS Code. No, it doesn’t give me quite as much fancy stuff, but it feels a lot faster and it’s nice to not have to switch to different editors for different languages.

Something I noticed, though, was that if I updated my *.resx files in VS Code, the associated *.Designer.cs was not getting auto-generated. There is a GitHub issue for this and it includes some different solutions to the issue involving some .csproj hackery, but it’s sort of hard to parse through and find the thing that works.

Here’s how you can get this to work for both Visual Studio and VS Code.

<Project Sdk="Microsoft.NET.Sdk">
  <PropertyGroup>
    <!--
        Target framework doesn't matter, but this solution is tested with
        .NET 6 SDK and above.
    -->
    <TargetFrameworks>net6.0</TargetFrameworks>

    <!--
        This is required because OmniSharp (VSCode) calls the build in a way
        that will skip resource generation. Without this line, OmniSharp won't
        find the generated .cs files and analysis will fail.
    -->
    <CoreCompileDependsOn>PrepareResources;$(CompileDependsOn)</CoreCompileDependsOn>
  </PropertyGroup>

  <ItemGroup>
    <!--
        Here's the magic. You need to specify everything for the generated
        designer file - the filename, the language, the namespace, and the
        class name.
    -->
    <EmbeddedResource Update="MyResources.resx">
      <!-- Tell Visual Studio that MSBuild will do the generation. -->
      <Generator>MSBuild:Compile</Generator>
      <LastGenOutput>MyResources.Designer.cs</LastGenOutput>
      <!-- Put generated files in the 'obj' folder. -->
      <StronglyTypedFileName>$(IntermediateOutputPath)\MyResources.Designer.cs</StronglyTypedFileName>
      <StronglyTypedLanguage>CSharp</StronglyTypedLanguage>
      <StronglyTypedNamespace>Your.Project.Namespace</StronglyTypedNamespace>
      <StronglyTypedClassName>MyResources</StronglyTypedClassName>
    </EmbeddedResource>

    <!--
        If you have resources in a child folder it still works, but you need to
        make sure you update the StronglyTypedFileName AND the
        StronglyTypedNamespace.
    -->
    <EmbeddedResource Update="Some\Sub\Folder\OtherResources.resx">
      <Generator>MSBuild:Compile</Generator>
      <LastGenOutput>OtherResources.Designer.cs</LastGenOutput>
      <!-- Make sure this won't clash with other generated files! -->
      <StronglyTypedFileName>$(IntermediateOutputPath)\OtherResources.Designer.cs</StronglyTypedFileName>
      <StronglyTypedLanguage>CSharp</StronglyTypedLanguage>
      <StronglyTypedNamespace>Your.Project.Namespace.Some.Sub.Folder</StronglyTypedNamespace>
      <StronglyTypedClassName>OtherResources</StronglyTypedClassName>
    </EmbeddedResource>
  </ItemGroup>
</Project>

Additional tips:

Once you have this in place, you can .gitignore any *.Designer.cs files and remove them from source. They’ll be regenerated by the build, but if you leave them checked in then the version of the generator that Visual Studio uses will fight with the version of the generator that the CLI build uses and you’ll get constant changes. The substance of the generated code is the same, but file headers may be different.

You can use VS Code file nesting to nest localized *.resx files under the main *.resx files with this config. Note you won’t see the *.Designer.cs files in there because they’re going into the obj folder.

{
  "explorer.fileNesting.enabled": true,
  "explorer.fileNesting.patterns": {
    "*.resx": "$(capture).*.resx, $(capture).designer.cs, $(capture).designer.vb"
  }
}

Sonatype Nexus IQ in Azure DevOps - Illegal Reflective Access Operation 7 Sep 2022 4:00 PM (2 years ago)

Using the Sonatype Nexus IQ for Azure DevOps task in your build, you may see some warnings that look like this:

WARNING: An illegal reflective access operation has occurred
WARNING: Illegal reflective access by com.google.inject.internal.cglib.core.$ReflectUtils$1 (file:/agent/_work/_tasks/NexusIqPipelineTask_4f40d1a2-83b0-4ddc-9a77-e7f279eb1802/1.4.0/resources/nexus-iq-cli-1.143.0-01.jar) to method java.lang.ClassLoader.defineClass(java.lang.String,byte[],int,int,java.security.ProtectionDomain)
WARNING: Please consider reporting this to the maintainers of com.google.inject.internal.cglib.core.$ReflectUtils$1
WARNING: Use --illegal-access=warn to enable warnings of further illegal reflective access operations
WARNING: All illegal access operations will be denied in a future release

The task, internally, just runs java to execute the Sonatype scanner JAR/CLI. The warnings here are because that JAR assumes JDK 8 and the default JDK on an Azure DevOps agent is later than that.

The answer is to set JDK 8 before running the scan.

# Install JDK 8
- task: JavaToolInstaller@0
  inputs:
    versionSpec: '8'
    jdkArchitectureOption: x64
    jdkSourceOption: PreInstalled

# Then run the scan
- task: NexusIqPipelineTask@1
  inputs:
    nexusIqService: my-service-connection
    applicationId: my-application-id
    stage: "Release"
    scanTargets: my-scan-targets

AutoMapper, Nullable DateTime, and Selecting the Right Constructor 13 Feb 2022 3:00 PM (2 years ago)

I was doing some AutoMapper-ing the other day, converting my data object…

public class Source
{
  public Source();
  public string Description { get; set; }
  public DateTimeOffset? ExpireDateTime { get; set; }
  public string Value { get; set; }
}

…into an object needed for a system we’re integrating with.

public class Destination
{
  public Destination();
  public Destination(string value, DateTime? expiration = null);
  public Destination(string value, string description, DateTime? expiration = null);
  public string Description { get; set; }
  public DateTime? Expiration { get; set; }
  public string Value { get; set; }
}

It appeared to me that the most difficult thing here was going to be mapping ExpireDateTime to Expiration. Unfortunately, this was more like a three-hour tour.

I started out creating the mapping like this (in a mapping Profile):

// This is not the answer.
this.CreateMap<Source, Destination>()
    .ForMember(dest => dest.Expiration, opt.MapFrom(src => src.ExpireDateTime));

This didn’t work because there’s no mapping from DateTimeOffset? to DateTime?. I next made a mistake that I think I make every time I run into this and have to relearn it, which is that I created that mapping, too.

// Still not right.
this.CreateMap<Source, Destination>()
    .ForMember(dest => dest.Expiration, opt.MapFrom(src => src.ExpireDateTime));
this.CreateMap<DateTimeOffset?, DateTime?>()
    .ConvertUsing(input => input.HasValue ? input.Value.DateTime : null);

It took a few tests to realize that AutoMapper handles nullable for you, so I was able to simplify a bit.

// Getting closer - don't map nullable, map the base type.
this.CreateMap<Source, Destination>()
    .ForMember(dest => dest.Expiration, opt.MapFrom(src => src.ExpireDateTime));
this.CreateMap<DateTimeOffset, DateTime>()
    .ConvertUsing(input => input.DateTime);

However, it seemed that no matter what I did, the Destination.Expiration was always null. For the life of me, I couldn’t figure it out.

Then I had one of those “eureka” moments when I was thinking about how Autofac handles constructors: It chooses the constructor with the most parameters that it can fulfill from the set of registered services.

I looked again at that Destination object and realized there were three constructors, two of which default the Expiration value to null. AutoMapper also handles constructors in a way similar to Autofac. From the docs about ConstructUsing:

AutoMapper will automatically match up destination constructor parameters to source members based on matching names, so only use this method if AutoMapper can’t match up the destination constructor properly, or if you need extra customization during construction.

That’s it! The answer is to pick the zero-parameter constructor so the mapping isn’t skipped.

// This is the answer!
this.CreateMap<Source, Destination>()
    .ForMember(dest => dest.Expiration, opt.MapFrom(src => src.ExpireDateTime))
    .ConstructUsing((input, context) => new Destination());
this.CreateMap<DateTimeOffset, DateTime>()
    .ConvertUsing(input => input.DateTime);

Hopefully that will save you some time if you run into it. Also, hopefully it will save me some time next time I’m stumped because I can search and find my own blog… which happens more often than you might think.

140 Trick-or-Treaters 1 Nov 2021 4:00 PM (3 years ago)

This year we had 140 trick-or-treaters. This is pretty low for us, but I can’t complain since it’s the first year after COVID-19.

Halloween was on a Sunday and it was chilly and windy. It had been raining a bit but didn’t rain during prime trick-or-treat time.

We didn’t hand out candy last year due to the COVID-19 outbreak. Looking up and down our street, it appeared a lot of people chose again this year to not hand out candy. We also saw some “take one” bowls on porches and various creative “candy torpedo tubes” that would send candy from the porch to the kid in a distanced fashion.

Cumulative data:

Our costumes this year:

• Me: Prisoner Loki from the Disney+ Loki show
• Jenn: Medusa
• Phoenix: Cerise Hood from Ever After High

Setting User-Specific Paths in a Shell 18 Oct 2021 4:00 PM (3 years ago)

I used to think setting up your PATH for your shell - whichever shell you like - was easy. But then I got into a situation where I started using more than one shell on a regular basis (both PowerShell and Bash) and things started to break down quickly.

Specifically, I have some tools that are installed in my home directory. For example, .NET global tools get installed at ~/.dotnet/tools and I want that in my path. I would like this to happen for any shell I use, and I have multiple user accounts on my machine for testing scenarios so I’d like it to ideally be a global setting, not something I have to configure for every user.

This is really hard.

I’ll gather some of my notes here on various tools and strategies I use to set paths. It’s (naturally) different based on OS and shell.

This probably won’t be 100% complete, but if you have an update, I’d totally take a PR on this blog entry.

Shell Tips

Each shell has its own mechanism for setting up profile-specific values. In most cases this is the place you’ll end up setting user-specific paths - paths that require a reference to the user’s home directory. On Mac and Linux, the big takeaway is to use /etc/profile. Most shells appear to interact with that file on some level.

PowerShell

PowerShell has a series of profiles that range from system level (all users, all hosts) through user/host specific (current user, current host). The one I use the most is “current user, current host” because I store my profile in a Git repo and pull it into the correct spot on my local machine. I don’t currently modify the path from my PowerShell profile.

• On Windows, PowerShell will use the system/user path setup on launch and then you can modify it from your profile.
• On Mac and Linux, PowerShell appears to evaluate the /etc/profile and ~/.profile, then subsequently use its own profiles for the path. On Mac this includes evaluation of the path_helper output. (See the Mac section below for more on path_helper.) I say “appears to evaluate” because I can’t find any documentation on it, yet that’s the behavior I’m seeing. I gather this is likely due to something like a login shell (say zsh) executing first and then having that launch pwsh, which inherits the variables. I’d love a PR on this entry if you have more info.

If you want to use PowerShell as a login shell, on Mac and Linux you can provide the -Login switch (as the first switch when running pwsh!) and it will execute sh to include /etc/profile and ~/.profile execution before launching the PowerShell process. See Get-Help pwsh for more info on that.

Bash

Bash has a lot of profiles and rules about when each one gets read. Honestly, it’s pretty complex and seems to have a lot to do with backwards compatibility with sh along with need for more flexibility and override support.

/etc/profile seems to be the way to globally set user-specific paths. After /etc/profile, things start getting complex, like if you have a .bash_profile then your .profile will get ignored.

zsh

zsh is the default login shell on Mac. It has profiles at:

• /etc/zshrc and ~/.zshrc
• /etc/zshenv and ~/.zshenv
• /etc/zprofile and ~/.zprofile

It may instead use /etc/profile and ~/.profile if it’s invoked in a compatibility mode. In this case, it won’t execute the zsh profile files and will use the sh files instead. See the manpage under “Compatibility” for details or this nice Stack Overflow answer.

I’ve set user-specific paths in /etc/profile and /etc/zprofile, which seems to cover all the bases depending on how the command gets invoked.

Operating System Tips

Windows

Windows sets all paths in the System => Advanced System Settings => Environment Variables control panel. You can set system or user level environment variables there.

The Windows path separator is ;, which is different than Mac and Linux. If you’re building a path with string concatenation, be sure to use the right separator.

Mac and Linux

I’ve lumped these together because, with respect to shells and setting paths, things are largely the same. The only significant difference is that Mac has a tool called path_helper that is used to generate paths from a file at /etc/paths and files inside the folder /etc/paths.d. Linux doesn’t have path_helper.

The file format for /etc/paths and files in /etc/paths.d is plain text where each line contains a single path, like:

/usr/local/bin
/usr/bin
/bin
/usr/sbin
/sbin

Unfortunately, path_helper doesn’t respect the use of variables - it will escape any $ it finds. This is a good place to put global paths, but not great for user-specific paths.

In /etc/profile there is a call to path_helper to evaluate the set of paths across these files and set the path. I’ve found that just after that call is a good place to put “global” user-specific paths.

if [ -x /usr/libexec/path_helper ]; then
  eval `/usr/libexec/path_helper -s`
fi

PATH="$PATH:$HOME/go/bin:$HOME/.dotnet/tools:$HOME/.krew/bin"

Regardless of whether you’re on Mac or Linux, /etc/profile seems to be the most common place to put these settings. Make sure to use $HOME instead of ~ to indicate the home directory. The ~ won’t get expanded and can cause issues down the road.

If you want to use zsh, you’ll want the PATH set block in both /etc/profile and /etc/zprofile so it handles any invocation.

The Mac and Linux path separator is :, which is different than Windows. If you’re building a path with string concatenation, be sure to use the right separator.

How to Route Ingress Traffic by Host in Istio 29 Sep 2021 4:00 PM (3 years ago)

I have a situation that is possibly kind of niche, but it was a real challenge to figure out so I thought I’d share the solution in case it helps you.

I have a Kubernetes cluster with Istio installed. My Istio ingress gateway is connected to an Apigee API management front-end via mTLS. Requests come in to Apigee then get routed to a secured public IP address where only Apigee is authorized to connect.

Unfortunately, this results in all requests coming in with the same Host header:

1. Client requests api.services.com/v1/resource/operation.
2. Apigee gets that request and routes to 1.2.3.4/v1/resource/operation via the Istio ingress gateway and mTLS.
3. An Istio VirtualService answers to hosts: "*" (any host header at all) and matches entirely on URL path - if it’s /v1/resource/operation it routes to mysvc.myns.svc.cluster.local/resource/operation.

This is how the ingress tutorial on the Istio site works, too. No hostname-per-service.

However, there are a couple of wrenches in the works, as expected:

• There are some API endpoints on the service that aren’t exposed through Apigee. They’re internal-only operations that allow for service-to-service communications in the cluster but aren’t for outside callers.
• I want to do canary deployments and route traffic slowly from an existing version of the service to a new, canary version. I need both the external and internal traffic routed this way to get accurate results.

The combination of these things is a problem. I can’t assume that the match-on-path-regex setting will work for internal traffic - I need any internal service to route properly based on host name. However, you also can’t match on host: "*" for internal traffic that doesn’t come through an ingress. That means I would need two different VirtualService instances - one for internal traffic, one for external.

But if I have two different VirtualService objects to manage, it means I need to keep them in sync over the canary, which kind of sucks. I’d like to set the traffic balancing in one spot and have it work for both internal and external traffic.

I asked how to do this on the Istio discussion forum and thought for a while that a VirtualService delegate would be the answer - have one VirtualService with the load balancing information, a second service for internal traffic (delegating to the load balancing service), and a third service for external traffic (delegating to the load balancing service). It’s more complex, but I’d get the ability to control traffic in one spot.

Unfortunately (the word “unfortunately” shows up a lot here, doesn’t it?), you can’t use delegates on a VirtualService that doesn’t also connect to a gateway. That is, if it’s internal/mesh traffic, you don’t get the delegate support. This issue in the Istio repo touches on that.

Here’s where I landed.

First, I updated Apigee so it takes care of two things for me:

1. It adds a Service-Host header with the internal host name of the target service, like Service-Host: mysvc.myns.svc.cluster.local. It more tightly couples the Apigee part of things to the service internal structure, but it frees me up from having to route entirely by regex in the cluster. (You’ll see why in a second.) I did try to set the Host header directly, but Apigee overwrites this when it issues the request on the back end.
2. It does all the path manipulation before issuing the request. If the internal service wants /v1/resource/operation to be /resource/operation, that path update happens in Apigee so the inbound request will have the right path to start.

I did the Service-Host header with an “AssignMessage” policy.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?>
<AssignMessage async="false" continueOnError="false" enabled="true" name="Add-Service-Host-Header">
    <DisplayName>Add Service Host Header</DisplayName>
    <Set>
        <Headers>
            <Header name="Service-Host">mysvc.myns.svc.cluster.local</Header>
        </Headers>
    </Set>
    <IgnoreUnresolvedVariables>true</IgnoreUnresolvedVariables>
    <AssignTo createNew="false" transport="http" type="request"/>
</AssignMessage>

Next, I added an Envoy filter to the Istio ingress gateway so it knows to look for the Service-Host header and update the Host header accordingly. Again, I used Service-Host because I couldn’t get Apigee to properly set Host directly. If you can figure that out and get the Host header coming in correctly the first time, you can skip the Envoy filter.

The filter needs to run first thing in the pipeline, before Istio tries to route traffic. I found that pinning it just before the istio.metadata_exchange stage got the job done.

apiVersion: networking.istio.io/v1alpha3
kind: EnvoyFilter
metadata:
  name: propagate-host-header-from-apigee
  namespace: istio-system
spec:
  workloadSelector:
    labels:
      istio: ingressgateway
      app: istio-ingressgateway
  configPatches:
    - applyTo: HTTP_FILTER
      match:
        context: GATEWAY
        listener:
          filterChain:
            filter:
              name: "envoy.http_connection_manager"
            subFilter:
              # istio.metadata_exchange is the first filter in the connection
              # manager, at least in Istio 1.6.14.
              name: "istio.metadata_exchange"
      patch:
        operation: INSERT_BEFORE
        value:
          name: envoy.filters.http.lua
          typed_config:
            "@type": type.googleapis.com/envoy.extensions.filters.http.lua.v3.Lua
            inline_code: |
              function envoy_on_request(request_handle)
                local service_host = request_handle:headers():get("service-host")
                if service_host ~= nil then
                  request_handle:headers():replace("host", service_host)
                end
              end

Finally, the VirtualService that handles the traffic routing needs to be tied both to the ingress and to the mesh gateway. The hosts setting can just be the internal service name, though, since that’s what the ingress will use now.

apiVersion: networking.istio.io/v1beta1
kind: VirtualService
metadata:
  name: mysvc
  namespace: myns
spec:
  gateways:
    - istio-system/apigee-mtls
    - mesh
  hosts:
    - mysvc
  http:
    - route:
        - destination:
            host: mysvc-stable
          weight: 50
        - destination:
            host: mysvc-baseline
          weight: 25
        - destination:
            host: mysvc-canary
          weight: 25

Once all these things are complete, both internal and external traffic will be routed by the single VirtualService. Now I can control canary load balancing in a single location and be sure that I’m getting correct overall test results and statistics with as few moving pieces as possible.

Disclaimer: There may be reasons you don’t want to treat external traffic the same as internal, like if you have different DestinationRule settings for traffic management inside vs. outside, or if you need to pass things through different authentication filters or whatever. Everything I’m working with is super locked down so I treat internal and external traffic with the same high levels of distrust and ensure that both types of traffic are scrutinized equally. YMMV.

Recover Password Sync for a Domain Joined Mac 30 Aug 2021 4:00 PM (3 years ago)

I have a Mac and my user account is attached to a Windows domain. The benefit of this is actually pretty minimal in that I can change my domain password and it propagates to the local Mac user account, but that’s about it. It seems to cause more trouble than it’s worth.

I recently had an issue where something got out of sync and I couldn’t log into my Mac using my domain account. This is sort of a bunch of tips and things I did to recover that.

First, have a separate local admin account. Make it a super complex password and never use it for anything else. This is sort of your escape hatch to try to recover your regular user account. Even if you want to have a local admin account so your regular user account can stay a user and no admin… have a dedicated “escape hatch” admin account that’s separate from the “I use this sometimes for sudo purposes” admin account. I have this, and if I hadn’t, that’d have been the end of it.

It’s good to remember for a domain-joined account there are three security tokens that all need to be kept in sync: Your domain user password, your local machine OS password, and your disk encryption token. When you reboot the computer, the first password you’ll be asked for should unlock the disk encryption. Usually the token for disk encryption is tied nicely to the machine account password so you enter the one password and it both unlocks the disk and logs you in. The problem I was running into was those got out of sync. For a domain-joined account, the domain password usually is also tied to these things.

Next, keep your disk encryption recovery code handy. Store it in a password manager or something. If things get out of sync, you can use the recovery code to unlock the disk and then your OS password to log in.

For me, I was able to log in as my separate local admin account but my machine password wasn’t working unless I was connected to the domain. Only way to connect to the domain was over a VPN. That meant I needed to enable fast user switching so I could connect to the VPN under the separate local admin and then switch - without logging out - to my domain account.

Once I got to my own account I could use the Users & groups app to change my domain password and have the domain and machine accounts re-synchronized. ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS USE USERS & GROUPS TO CHANGE YOUR DOMAIN ACCOUNT PASSWORD. I have not found a way otherwise to ensure everything is in sync. Don’t change it from some other workstation, don’t change it from Azure Active Directory. This is the road to ruin. Stay with Users & Groups.

The last step was that my disk encryption token wasn’t in sync - OS and domain connection was good, but I couldn’t log in after a reboot. I found the answer in a Reddit thread:

su local_admin
sysadminctl -secureTokenStatus domain_account_username
sysadminctl -secureTokenOff domain_account_username \
  -password domain_account_password \
  interactive
sysadminctl -secureTokenOn domain_account_username \
  -password domain_account_password \
  interactive

Basically, as the standalone local admin, turn off and back on again the connection to the drive encryption. This refreshes the token and gets it back in sync.

Reboot, and you should be able to log in with your domain account again.

To test it out, you may want to try changing your password from Users & Groups to see that the sync works. If you get a “password complexity” error, it could be the sign of an issue… or it could be the sign that your domain has a “you can’t change the password more than once every X days” sort of policy and since you changed it earlier you are changing it again too soon. YMMV.

And, again, always change your password from Users & Groups.

Adventures in mTLS Debugging 11 Jul 2021 4:00 PM (3 years ago)

I have a Kubernetes 1.19.11 cluster deployed along with Istio 1.6.14. I have a central instance of Prometheus for scraping metrics, and based on the documentation, I have a manually-injected sidecar so Prometheus can make use of the Istio certificates for mTLS during scraping. Under Prometheus v2.20.1 this worked great. However, I was trying to update some of the infrastructure components to take advantage of new features and Prometheus after v2.21.0 just would not scrape.

These are my adventures in trying to debug this issue. Some of it is to remind me of what I did. Some of it is to save you some trouble if you run into the issue. Some of it is to help you see what I did so you can apply some of the techniques yourself.

TL;DR: The problem is that Prometheus v2.21.0 disabled HTTP/2 and that needs to be re-enabled for things to work. There should be a Prometheus release soon that allows you to re-enable HTTP/2 with environment variables.

I created a repro repository with a minimal amount of setup to show how things work. It can get you from a bare Kubernetes cluster up to Istio 1.6.14 and Prometheus using the same values I am. You’ll have to supply your own microservice/app to demonstrate scraping, but the prometheus-example-app may be a start.

I deploy Prometheus using the Helm chart. As part of that, I have an Istio sidecar manually injected just like they do in the official 1.6 Istio release manifests. By doing this, the sidecar will download and share the certificates but it won’t proxy any of the Prometheus traffic.

I then have a Prometheus scrape configuration that uses the certificates mounted in the container. If it finds a pod that has the Istio sidecar annotations (indicating it’s got the sidecar injected), it’ll use the certificates for authentication and communication.

- job_name: "kubernetes-pods-istio-secure"
  scheme: https
  tls_config:
    ca_file: /etc/istio-certs/root-cert.pem
    cert_file: /etc/istio-certs/cert-chain.pem
    key_file: /etc/istio-certs/key.pem
    insecure_skip_verify: true

If I deploy Prometheus v2.20.1, I see that my services are being scraped by the kubernetes-pods-istio-secure job, they’re using HTTPS, and everything is good to go. Under v2.20.1, I see the error connection reset by peer. I tried asking about this in the Prometheus newsgroup to no avail, so… I dove in.

My first step was to update the Helm chart extraArgs to turn on Prometheus debug logging.

extraArgs:
  log.level: debug

I was hoping to see more information about what was happening. Unfortunately, I got basically the same thing.

level=debug ts=2021-07-06T20:58:32.984Z caller=scrape.go:1236 component="scrape manager" scrape_pool=kubernetes-pods-istio-secure target=https://10.244.3.10:9102/metrics msg="Scrape failed" err="Get \"https://10.244.3.10:9102/metrics\": read tcp 10.244.4.89:36666->10.244.3.10:9102: read: connection reset by peer"

This got me thinking one of two things may have happened in v2.21.0:

• Something changed in Prometheus; OR
• Something changed in the OS configuration of the Prometheus container

I had recently fought with a dotnet CLI problem where certain TLS cipher suites were disabled by default and some OS configuration settings on our build agents affected what was seen as allowed vs. not allowed. This was stuck in my mind so I couldn’t immediately rule out the container OS configuration.

To validate the OS issue I was going to try using curl and/or openssl to connect to the microservice and see what the cipher suites were. Did I need an Istio upgrade? Was there some configuration setting I was missing? Unfortunately, it turns out the Prometheus Docker image is based on a custom busybox image where there are no package managers or tools. I mean, this is actually a very good thing from a security perspective but it’s a pain for debugging.

What I ended up doing was getting a recent Ubuntu image and connecting using that, just to see. I figured if there was anything obvious going on that I could take the extra steps of creating a custom Prometheus image with curl and openssl to investigate further. I mounted a manual sidecar just like I did for Prometheus so I could get to the certificates without proxying traffic, then I ran some commands:

curl https://10.244.3.10:9102/metrics \
  --cacert /etc/istio-certs/root-cert.pem \
  --cert /etc/istio-certs/cert-chain.pem \
  --key /etc/istio-certs/key.pem \
  --insecure

openssl s_client \
  -connect 10.244.3.10:9102 \
  -cert /etc/istio-certs/cert-chain.pem  \
  -key /etc/istio-certs/key.pem \
  -CAfile /etc/istio-certs/root-cert.pem \
  -alpn "istio"

Here’s some example output from curl to show what I was seeing:

root@sleep-5f98748557-s4wh5:/# curl https://10.244.3.10:9102/metrics --cacert /etc/istio-certs/root-cert.pem --cert /etc/istio-certs/cert-chain.pem --key /etc/istio-certs/key.pem --insecure -v
*   Trying 10.244.3.10:9102...
* TCP_NODELAY set
* Connected to 10.244.3.10 (10.244.3.10) port 9102 (#0)
* ALPN, offering h2
* ALPN, offering http/1.1
* successfully set certificate verify locations:
*   CAfile: /etc/istio-certs/root-cert.pem
  CApath: /etc/ssl/certs
* TLSv1.3 (OUT), TLS handshake, Client hello (1):
* TLSv1.3 (IN), TLS handshake, Server hello (2):
* TLSv1.3 (IN), TLS handshake, Encrypted Extensions (8):
* TLSv1.3 (IN), TLS handshake, Request CERT (13):
* TLSv1.3 (IN), TLS handshake, Certificate (11):
* TLSv1.3 (IN), TLS handshake, CERT verify (15):
* TLSv1.3 (IN), TLS handshake, Finished (20):
* TLSv1.3 (OUT), TLS change cipher, Change cipher spec (1):
* TLSv1.3 (OUT), TLS handshake, Certificate (11):
* TLSv1.3 (OUT), TLS handshake, CERT verify (15):
* TLSv1.3 (OUT), TLS handshake, Finished (20):
* SSL connection using TLSv1.3 / TLS_AES_256_GCM_SHA384
* ALPN, server accepted to use h2
* Server certificate:
*  subject: [NONE]
*  start date: Jul  7 20:21:33 2021 GMT
*  expire date: Jul  8 20:21:33 2021 GMT
*  issuer: O=cluster.local
*  SSL certificate verify ok.
* Using HTTP2, server supports multi-use
* Connection state changed (HTTP/2 confirmed)
* Copying HTTP/2 data in stream buffer to connection buffer after upgrade: len=0
* Using Stream ID: 1 (easy handle 0x564d80d81e10)
> GET /metrics HTTP/2
> Host: 10.244.3.10:9102
> user-agent: curl/7.68.0
> accept: */*
>
* TLSv1.3 (IN), TLS handshake, Newsession Ticket (4):
* TLSv1.3 (IN), TLS handshake, Newsession Ticket (4):
* old SSL session ID is stale, removing
* Connection state changed (MAX_CONCURRENT_STREAMS == 2147483647)!
< HTTP/2 200

A few things in particular:

1. I found the --alpn "istio" thing for openssl while looking through Istio issues to see if there were any pointers there. It’s always good to read through issues lists to get ideas and see if other folks are running into the same problems.
2. Both openssl and curl were able to connect to the microservice using the certificates from Istio.
3. The cipher suite shown in the openssl output was one that was considered “recommended.” I forgot to capture that output for the blog article, sorry about that.

At this point I went to the release notes for Prometheus v2.21.0 to see what had changed. I noticed two things that I thought may affect my situation:

1. This release is built with Go 1.15, which deprecates X.509 CommonName in TLS certificates validation.
2. [CHANGE] Disable HTTP/2 because of concerns with the Go HTTP/2 client. #7588 #7701

I did see in that curl output that it was using HTTP/2 but… is it required? Unclear. However, looking at the Go docs about the X.509 CommonName thing, that’s easy enough to test. I just needed to add an environment variable to the Helm chart for Prometheus:

env:
  - name: GODEBUG
    value: x509ignoreCN=0

After redeploying… it didn’t fix anything. That wasn’t the problem. That left the HTTP/2 thing. However, what I found was it’s hardcoded off, not disabled through some configuration mechanism so there isn’t a way to just turn it back on to test. The only way to test it is to do a fully custom build.

The Prometheus build for a Docker image is really complicated. They have this custom build tool promu that runs the build in a custom build container and all this is baked into layers of make and yarn and such. As it turns out, not all of it happens in the container, either, because if you try to build on a Mac you’ll get an error like this:

... [truncated huge list of downloads] ...
go: downloading github.com/PuerkitoBio/urlesc v0.0.0-20170810143723-de5bf2ad4578
go: downloading github.com/Azure/go-autorest/autorest/validation v0.3.1
go: downloading github.com/Azure/go-autorest/autorest/to v0.4.0
go build github.com/aws/aws-sdk-go/service/ec2: /usr/local/go/pkg/tool/linux_amd64/compile: signal: killed
!! command failed: build -o .build/linux-amd64/prometheus -ldflags -X github.com/prometheus/common/version.Version=2.28.1 -X github.com/prometheus/common/version.Revision=b0944590a1c9a6b35dc5a696869f75f422b107a1 -X github.com/prometheus/common/version.Branch=HEAD -X github.com/prometheus/common/version.BuildUser=root@76a91e410d00 -X github.com/prometheus/common/version.BuildDate=20210709-14:47:03  -extldflags '-static' -a -tags netgo,builtinassets github.com/prometheus/prometheus/cmd/prometheus: exit status 1
make: *** [Makefile.common:227: common-build] Error 1
!! The base builder docker image exited unexpectedly: exit status 2

You can only build on Linux even though it’s happening in a container. At least right now. Maybe that’ll change in the future. Anyway, this meant I needed to create a Linux VM and set up an environment there that could build Prometheus… or figure out how to force a build system to do it, say by creating a fake PR to the Prometheus project. I went the Linux VM route.

I changed the two lines where the HTTP/2 was disabled, I pushed that to a temporary Docker Hub location, and I got it deployed in my cluster.

Success! Once HTTP/2 was re-enabled, Prometheus was able to scrape my Istio pods again.

I worked through this all with the Prometheus team and they were able to replicate the issue using my repro repo. They are now working through how to re-enable HTTP/2 using environment variables or configuration.

All of this took close to a week to get through.

It’s easy to read these blog articles and think the writer just blasted through all this and it was all super easy, that I already knew the steps I was going to take and flew through it. I didn’t. There was a lot of reading issues. There was a lot of trying things and then retrying those same things because I forgot what I’d just tried, or maybe I discovered I forgot to change a configuration value. I totally deleted and re-created my test Kubernetes cluster like five times because I also tried updating Istio and… well, you can’t really “roll back Istio.” It got messy. Not to mention, debugging things at the protocol level is a spectacular combination of “not interesting” and “not my strong suit.”

My point is, don’t give up. Pushing through these things and reading and banging your head on it is how you get the experience so that next time you will have been through it.

Deploy Standalone Kayenta with an Azure Storage Backend 19 Nov 2020 3:00 PM (4 years ago)

Kayenta is the subcomponent of Spinnaker that handles automated canary analysis during a deployment. It reads from your metric sources and compares the stats from an existing deployed service against a new version of the service to see if there are anomalies or problems, indicating the rollout should be aborted if the new service fails to meet specified tolerances.

I’m a huge fan of Spinnaker, but sometimes you already have a full CI/CD system in place and you really don’t want to replace all of that with Spinnaker. You really just want the canary part of Spinnaker. Luckily, you can totally use Kayenta as a standalone service. They even have some light documentation on it!

In my specific case, I also want to use Azure Storage as the place where I store the data for Kayenta - canary configuration, that sort of thing. It’s totally possible to do that, but, at least at the time of this writing, the hal config canary Halyard command does not have Azure listed and the docs don’t cover it.

So there are a couple of things that come together here, and maybe all of it’s interesting to you or maybe only one piece. In any case, here’s what we’re going to build:

• A Kubernetes ingress to allow access to Kayenta from your CI/CD pipeline.
• A deployment of the Kayenta microservice.
• Kayenta configured to use an Azure Storage Account to hold its configuration and such.

Things I’m not going to cover:

• How exactly your CI/CD canary stage needs to work.
• How long a canary stage should last.
• How exactly you should configure Kayenta (other than the Azure part).
• Which statistics you should monitor for your services to determine if they “pass” or “fail.”
• Securing the Kayenta ingress so only authenticated/authorized access is allowed.

This stuff is hard and it gets pretty deep pretty quickly. I can’t cover it all in one go. I don’t honestly have answers to all of it anyway, since a lot of it depends on how your build pipeline is set up, how your app is set up, and what your app does. There’s no “one-size-fits-all.”

Let’s do it.

Deployment

First, provision an Azure Storage account. Make sure you enable HTTP access because right now Kayenta requires HTTP and not HTTPS.

You also need to provision a container in the Azure Storage account to hold the Kayenta contents.

# I love me some PowerShell, so examples/scripts will be PowerShell.
# Swap in your preferred names as needed.
$ResourceGroup = "myresourcegroup"
$StorageAccountName = "kayentastorage"
$StorageContainerName = "kayenta"
$Location = "westus2"

# Create the storage account with HTTP enabled.
az storage account create `
  --name $StorageAccountName `
  --resoure-group $ResourceGroup `
  --location $Location `
  --https-only false `
  --sku Standard_GRS

# Get the storage key so you can create a container.
$StorageKey = az storage account keys list `
  --account-name $StorageAccountName `
  --query '[0].value' `
  -o tsv

# Create the container that will hold Kayenta stuff.
az storage container create `
  --name $StorageContainerName `
  --account-name $StorageAccountName `
  --account-key $StorageKey

Let’s make a namespace in Kubernetes for Kayenta so we can put everything we’re deploying in there.

# We'll use the namespace a lot, so a variable
# for that in our scripting will help.
$Namespace = "kayenta"
kubectl create namespace $Namespace

Kayenta needs Redis. We can use the Helm chart to deploy a simple Redis instance. Redis must not be in clustered mode, and there’s no option for providing credentials.

helm repo add bitnami https://charts.bitnami.com/bitnami

# The name of the deployment will dictate the name of the
# Redis master service that gets deployed. In this example,
# 'kayenta-redis' as the deployment name will create a
# 'kayenta-redis-master' service. We'll need that later for
# Kayenta configuration.
helm install kayenta-redis bitnami/redis `
  -n $Namespace `
  --set cluster.enabled=false `
  --set usePassword=false `
  --set master.persistence.enabled=false

Now let’s get Kayenta configured. This is a full, commented version of a Kayenta configuration file. There’s also a little doc on Kayenta configuration that might help. What we’re going to do here is put the kayenta.yml configuration into a Kubernetes ConfigMap so it can be used in our service.

Here’s a ConfigMap YAML file based on the fully commented version, but with the extra stuff taken out. This is also where you’ll configure the location of Prometheus (or whatever) where Kayenta will read stats. For this example, I’m using Prometheus with some basic placeholder config.

apiVersion: v1
kind: ConfigMap
metadata:
  name: kayenta
  namespace: kayenta
data:
  kayenta.yml: |-
    server:
      port: 8090

    # This should match the name of the master service from when
    # you deployed the Redis Helm chart earlier.
    redis:
      connection: redis://kayenta-redis-master:6379

    kayenta:
      atlas:
        enabled: false

      google:
        enabled: false

    # This is the big one! Here's where you configure your Azure Storage
    # account and container details.
      azure:
        enabled: true
        accounts:
          - name: canary-storage
            storageAccountName: kayentastorage
            # azure.storageKey is provided via environment AZURE_STORAGEKEY
            # so it can be stored in a secret. You'll see that in a bit.
            # Don't check in credentials!
            accountAccessKey: ${azure.storageKey}
            container: kayenta
            rootFolder: kayenta
            endpointSuffix: core.windows.net
            supportedTypes:
              - OBJECT_STORE
              - CONFIGURATION_STORE

      aws:
        enabled: false

      datadog:
        enabled: false

      graphite:
        enabled: false

      newrelic:
        enabled: false

    # Configure your Prometheus here. Or if you're using something else, disable
    # Prometheus and configure your own metrics store. The important part is you
    # MUST have a metrics store configured!
      prometheus:
        enabled: true
        accounts:
        - name: canary-prometheus
          endpoint:
            baseUrl: http://prometheus:9090
          supportedTypes:
            - METRICS_STORE

      signalfx:
        enabled: true

      wavefront:
        enabled: false

      gcs:
        enabled: false

      blobs:
        enabled: true

      s3:
        enabled: false

      stackdriver:
        enabled: false

      memory:
        enabled: false

      configbin:
        enabled: false

      remoteJudge:
        enabled: false

    # Enable the SCAPE endpoint that has the same user experience that the Canary StageExecution in Deck/Orca has.
    # By default this is disabled - in standalone we enable it!
      standaloneCanaryAnalysis:
        enabled: true

      metrics:
        retry:
          series: SERVER_ERROR
          statuses: REQUEST_TIMEOUT, TOO_MANY_REQUESTS
          attempts: 10
          backoffPeriodMultiplierMs: 1000

      serialization:
        writeDatesAsTimestamps: false
        writeDurationsAsTimestamps: false

    management.endpoints.web.exposure.include: '*'
    management.endpoint.health.show-details: always

    keiko:
      queue:
        redis:
          queueName: kayenta.keiko.queue
          deadLetterQueueName: kayenta.keiko.queue.deadLetters

    spectator:
      applicationName: ${spring.application.name}
      webEndpoint:
        enabled: true

    swagger:
      enabled: true
      title: Kayenta API
      description:
      contact:
      patterns:
        - /admin.*
        - /canary.*
        - /canaryConfig.*
        - /canaryJudgeResult.*
        - /credentials.*
        - /fetch.*
        - /health
        - /judges.*
        - /metadata.*
        - /metricSetList.*
        - /metricSetPairList.*
        - /metricServices.*
        - /pipeline.*
        - /standalone.*

Save that and deploy it to the cluster.

kubectl apply -f kayenta-configmap.yml

You’ll notice in the config we just put down that we did not include the Azure Storage acccount key. Assuming we want to commit that YAML to a source control system at some point, we definitely don’t want credentials in there. Instead, let’s use a Kubernetes secret for the Azure Storage account key.

# Remember earlier we got the storage account key for creating
# the container? We're going to use that again.
kubectl create secret generic azure-storage `
  -n $Namespace `
  --from-literal=storage-key="$StorageKey"

It’s deployment time! Let’s get a Kayenta container into the cluster! Obviously you can tweak all the tolerances and affinities and node selectors and all that to your heart’s content. I’m keeping the example simple.

apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
  name: kayenta
  namespace: kayenta
  labels:
    app.kubernetes.io/name: kayenta
spec:
  replicas: 1
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      app.kubernetes.io/name: kayenta
  template:
    metadata:
      labels:
        app.kubernetes.io/name: kayenta
    spec:
      containers:
        - name: kayenta
          # Find the list of tags here: https://console.cloud.google.com/gcr/images/spinnaker-marketplace/GLOBAL/kayenta?gcrImageListsize=30
          # This is just the tag I've been using for a while. I use one of the images NOT tagged
          # with Spinnaker because the Spinnaker releases are far slower.
          image: "gcr.io/spinnaker-marketplace/kayenta:0.17.0-20200803200017"
          env:
            # If you need to troubleshoot, you can set the logging level by adding
            # -Dlogging.level.root=TRACE
            # Without the log at DEBUG level, very little logging comes out at all and
            # it's really hard to see if something goes wrong. If you don't want that
            # much logging, go ahead and remove the log level option here.
            - name: JAVA_OPTS
              value: "-XX:+UnlockExperimentalVMOptions -Dlogging.level.root=DEBUG"
            # We can store secrets outside config and provide them via the environment.
            # Insert them into the config file using ${dot.delimited} versions of the
            # variables, like ${azure.storageKey} which we saw in the ConfigMap.
            - name: AZURE_STORAGEKEY
              valueFrom:
                secretKeyRef:
                  name: azure-storage
                  key: storage-key
          ports:
            - name: http
              containerPort: 8090
              protocol: TCP
          livenessProbe:
            httpGet:
              path: /health
              port: http
          readinessProbe:
            httpGet:
              path: /health
              port: http
          volumeMounts:
            - name: config-volume
              mountPath: /opt/kayenta/config
      volumes:
        - name: config-volume
          configMap:
            name: kayenta

And let’s save and apply.

kubectl apply -f kayenta-deployment.yml

If you have everything wired up right, the Kayenta instance should start. But we want to see something happen, right? Without kubectl port-forward?

Let’s put a LoadBalancer service in here so we can access it. I’m going to show the simplest Kubernetes LoadBalancer here, but in your situation you might have, say, an nginx ingress in play or something else. You’ll have to adjust as needed.

apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
  name: kayenta
  namespace: kayenta
  labels:
    app.kubernetes.io/name: kayenta
spec:
  ports:
    - port: 80
      targetPort: http
      protocol: TCP
      name: http
  selector:
    app.kubernetes.io/name: kayenta
  type: LoadBalancer

Let’s see it do something. You should be able to get the public IP address for that LoadBalancer service by doing:

kubectl get service/kayenta -n $Namespace

You’ll see something like this:

NAME         TYPE           CLUSTER-IP     EXTERNAL-IP      PORT(S)    AGE
kayenta      LoadBalancer   10.3.245.137   104.198.205.71   80/TCP     54s

Take note of that external IP and you can visit the Swagger docs in a browser: http://104.198.205.71/swagger-ui.html

If it’s all wired up, you should get some Swagger docs!

The first operation you should try is under credentials-controller - GET /credentials. This will tell you what metrics and object stores Kayenta thinks it’s talking to. The result should look something like this:

[
  {
    "name": "canary-prometheus",
    "supportedTypes": [
      "METRICS_STORE"
    ],
    "endpoint": {
      "baseUrl": "http://prometheus"
    },
    "type": "prometheus",
    "locations": [],
    "recommendedLocations": []
  },
  {
    "name": "canary-storage",
    "supportedTypes": [
      "OBJECT_STORE",
      "CONFIGURATION_STORE"
    ],
    "rootFolder": "kayenta",
    "type": "azure",
    "locations": [],
    "recommendedLocations": []
  }
]

If you are missing the canary-storage account pointing to azure - that means Kayenta can’t access the storage account or it’s otherwise misconfigured. I found the biggest gotcha here was that it’s HTTP-only and that’s not the default for a storage account if you create it through the Azure portal. You have to turn that on.

Troubleshooting

What do you do if you can’t figure out why Kayenta isn’t connecting to stuff?

Up in the Kubernetes deployment, you’ll see the logging is set up at the DEBUG level. The logging is pretty good at this level. You can use kubectl logs to get the logs from the Kayenta pods or, better, use stern for that Those logs are going to be your secret. You’ll see errors that pretty clearly indicate whether there’s a DNS problem or a bad password or something similar.

If you still aren’t getting enough info, turn the log level up to TRACE. It can get noisy, but you’ll only need it for troubleshooting.

Next Steps

There’s a lot you can do from here.

Canary configuration: Actually configuring a canary is hard. For me, it took deploying a full Spinnaker instance and doing some canary stuff to figure it out. There’s a bit more doc on it now, but it’s definitely tricky. Here’s a pretty basic configuration where we just look for errors by ASP.NET microservice controller. No, I can not help or support you in configuring a canary. I’ll give you this example with no warranties, expressed or implied.

{
  "canaryConfig": {
    "applications": [
      "app"
    ],
    "classifier": {
      "groupWeights": {
        "StatusCodes": 100
      },
      "scoreThresholds": {
        "marginal": 75,
        "pass": 75
      }
    },
    "configVersion": "1",
    "description": "App Canary Configuration",
    "judge": {
      "judgeConfigurations": {
      },
      "name": "NetflixACAJudge-v1.0"
    },
    "metrics": [
      {
        "analysisConfigurations": {
          "canary": {
            "direction": "increase",
            "nanStrategy": "replace"
          }
        },
        "groups": [
          "StatusCodes"
        ],
        "name": "Errors By Controller",
        "query": {
          "customInlineTemplate": "PromQL:sum(increase(http_requests_received_total{app='my-app',azure_pipelines_version='${location}',code=~'5\\\\d\\\\d|4\\\\d\\\\d'}[120m])) by (action)",
          "scopeName": "default",
          "serviceType": "prometheus",
          "type": "prometheus"
        },
        "scopeName": "default"
      }
    ],
    "name": "app-config",
    "templates": {
    }
  },
  "executionRequest": {
    "scopes": {
      "default": {
        "controlScope": {
          "end": "2020-11-20T23:01:09.3NZ",
          "location": "baseline",
          "scope": "control",
          "start": "2020-11-20T21:01:09.3NZ",
          "step": 2
        },
        "experimentScope": {
          "end": "2020-11-20T23:01:09.3NZ",
          "location": "canary",
          "scope": "experiment",
          "start": "2020-11-20T21:01:09.3NZ",
          "step": 2
        }
      }
    },
    "siteLocal": {
    },
    "thresholds": {
      "marginal": 75,
      "pass": 95
    }
  }
}

Integrate with your CI/CD pipeline: Your deployment is going to need to know how to track the currently deployed vs. new/canary deployment. Statistics are going to need to be tracked that way, too. (That’s the same as if you were using Spinnaker.) I’ve been using the KubernetesManifest@0 task in Azure DevOps, setting trafficSplitMethod: smi and making use of the canary control there. A shell script polls Kayenta to see how the analysis is going.

How you do this for your template is very subjective. Pipelines at this level are really complex. I’d recommend working with Postman or some other HTTP debugging tool to get things working before trying to automate it.

Secure it!: You probably don’t want public anonymous access to the Kayenta API. I locked mine down with oauth2-proxy and Istio but you could do it with nginx ingress and oauth2-proxy or some other mechanism.

Put a UI on it!: As you can see, configuring Kayenta canaries without a UI is actually pretty hard. Nike has a UI for standalone Kayenta called “Referee”. At the time of this writing there’s no Docker container for it so it’s not as easy to deploy as you might like. However, there is a Dockerfile gist that might be helpful. I have not personally got this working, but it’s on my list of things to do.

Huge props to my buddy Chris who figured a lot of this out, especially the canary configuration and Azure DevOps integration pieces.

Hamilton Halloween 5 Nov 2020 8:00 AM (4 years ago)

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we didn’t end up doing our usual hand-out-candy-and-count-kids thing. However, we did make costumes. How could we not? Something had to stay normal.

My daughter Phoenix, who is now nine, is obsessed with Hamilton. I think she listens to it at least once daily. Given that, she insisted that we do Hamilton costumes. I was to be A. Ham, Jenn as Eliza, and Phoenix as their daughter also named Eliza.

I was able to put Phoe’s costume together in two or three days. We used a pretty standard McCall’s pattern with decent instructions and not much complexity.

For mine… I had to do some pretty custom work. I started with these patterns:

• Coat - Smoke and Fire SF201 18th century regimental coat
• Shirt - JP Ryan 1700’s colonial shirt
• Vest - Laughing Moon men’s regency and romantic era vest
• Pants - McCall’s M4745 Civil War coat and trousers

It took me a couple of months to get things right. They didn’t really have 6’2” fat guys in the Revolutionary War so there was a lot of adjustment, especially to the coat, to get things to fit. I made muslin versions of everything probably twice, maybe three times for the coat to get the fit right.

I had a really challenging time figuring out how the shoulders on the coat went together. The instructions on the pattern are fairly vague and not what I’m used to with more commercial patterns. This tutorial article makes a similar coat and helped a lot in figuring out how things worked. It’s worth checking out.

Modifications I had to make:

• Coat:
  • Arms lengthened.
  • Arm holes bigger around.
  • Arms bigger around.
  • Body lengthened.
  • Lapels trimmed to be square at the top (more like the stage production).
  • Didn’t put on the shoulder buttons or the back ribbons the pattern called for.
  • Set buttonholes 2” long and 2.5” apart (roughly - they don’t specify this in the pattern but other research turned these measurements up and it worked out).
  • Six buttonholes around each cuff instead of three (more like the stage production).
• Pants:
  • Cut off slightly below the knee.
  • Taper to fit tightly around the bottom below the knee.
  • Add a “flap” on each side at the bottom of each leg to look like there are buttons holding it together.
  • Finish the bottom of each leg with a band.
• Vest: Lengthen the body.

I didn’t have to modify the shirt. The shirt is already intentionally big and baggy because that’s how shirts were back then, so there was a lot of play.

The pants were more like… I didn’t have a decent pattern that actually looked like Revolutionary War pants so I took some decent costume pants and just modded them up. They didn’t have button fly pants back then and my pants have that, but I also wasn’t interested in drop-front pants or whatever other pants I’d have ended up with. I do need to get around in these things.

I didn’t keep a cost tally this time and it’s probably good I didn’t. There are well over 50 buttons on this thing and buttons are not cheap. I bought good wool for the whole thing at like $25/yard (average) and there are a good six-to-eight yards in here. I went through a whole bolt of 60” muslin betwee my costume and the rest of our costumes. I can’t possibly have come out under $300.

But they turned out great!

Here’s my costume close up on a dress form:

And the costume in action:

Here’s the whole family! I think they turned out nicely.

Work! Work!