Posts

In this article, we will briefly go over what DNS (domain name system) is and explain how it is used in conjunction with Docker 🐳. DNS You can think of DNS like a phonebook, except instead of people’s name and phone numbers, it stores domains names and IP addresses (this can be either IPv4 or IPv6). Where a domain name is used to identify resources i.e. google.com is a domain name. This is how DNS works: ...

In this article, we will go over how you can use proxychains to proxy our traffic through a socks proxy. Background Recently, like everyone else, I’ve been working from home a lot more often. This means to access resources at work I need to use a VPN. However, to access some resources, such as production servers from my local machine, I need to use a SOCKS5 proxy. Without using a SOCKS proxy, I would need to do something shown in the diagram below. ...

In this article, we will go over how you can manage your markdown blog posts from another git repository (repo). Separate to the git repository for your Gatsby site. This is the same process that I use to manage this repo. So what this entails is the source code for my Gatsby site is in a repo called portfolio-site on Gitlab. Then I have another repo for all of my blog posts (in markdown) called articles. During build time of the Gatsby blog, we will import the markdown files from our articles git repo and use it as a source of data for our Gatsby blog. ...

In this article, we will look at how we can add an “edit post” button, to your Gatsby blog. When this button is clicked it will take the user to your markdown file, on github/gitlab that was used to generate the blog post they are currently viewing. Setup Before we add the edit button to a Gatsby blog, let’s set up a simple Gatsby site using the Gatsby blog starter. You can skip this step and add the button to an existing site. ...

In this article, we will go over how we can use the gitlab-auto-mr CLI script I wrote to help automate your Gitlab workflow. This is a very simple script you can use with Gitlab which will auto-create merge requests (MRs) every time you create a new branch on a project in Gitlab. (Optional) Git Feature Branches Feel free to skip this section if you are already familar with feature branch, skip to the Gitlab Auto MR section ...

Let’s take a look at how we can add offline local search 🔍 to a Gatsby blog. There are two main types of search we can use an offline search like elasticlunr and external API search engines like ElasticSearch. These are typically more scalable but also more expensive. You can find more info here. In this article, I will show you how to add offline search to your Gatsby blog using elasticlunr. This means your website needs to be indexed locally and will increase the bundle size as this index needs to be loaded by the client but with the scale and size of personal blogs (100s, not 1000s of blog post) this shouldn’t make a massive difference. We will also look at how we can add highlighting to our search results. ...

TailwindCSS allows us to use pre-defined classes instead of defining our CSS styles. In this article, we will go over how we can use Custom properties (sometimes referred to as CSS variables or cascading variables) with TailwindCSS. Setup First, follow the installation guide found here. This will show you how you can add TailwindCSS to your current project. For part 2 I will assume you called your CSS file global.css. This is the file that contains @tailwind base; etc. ...

This article (sort of) continues on from my previous article How to use Storybooks, Gatsby, Babel, Tailwind, Typescript together. In this article, we will document our React components using Storybook with MDX. You can find an example project using this here, you can also find a demo site for said project. Prerequisite Just to make sure everyone’s on the same page let’s follow the same steps to setup Storybook as we had in the last article. We will use the latest versions of Storybook (v6) so we can access the latest features. We will go over how we can use these features in the next article. ...

Recently I started to re-design my website, I decided to use this as an opportunity to learn some new technologies such as Gatsby, Tailwind. I also decided to try using Storybook. For this said project I used MDX to create my Storybook stories. In this article, I will show you how you can create Storybooks stories, for a Gatsby project with TailwindCSS, Typescript using MDX. You can find an example project using this here. You can also find a demo site for said project. ...

On a recent project, I was working on, I wanted to test my web service using docker-compose where I can run and kill Docker containers used by the application and see how my web application reacts to that. In this article, we will go over how you start docker containers using docker-compose from within Gitlab CI. The diagram above is a visualisation of what we are trying to achieve. We want to spawn Docker containers using docker-compose from within our job. The spawning and destruction of these Docker containers will be done via our Python code. We can achieve this by using dind (Docker in Docker). I have written a previous article on this topic which you can read more about here. This article assumes you already somewhat familiar with Docker, docker-compose and Pytest. ...

In this article, I will show you how you can test a Python web service that was built using Connexion (a wrapper library around Flask). We will go over how you can mock functions and how you can test your endpoints. There are two related articles I have written in the past listed below. In the first one we go over how to create a web service using Connexions, the same web service we will in this article. In the second article I introduce how you can use pytest-mock and pytest-flask to test a Flask web service. ...

In this article, I will go over an example project structure you can use for your React Native projects. This of couse my opinion so feel free to tweak the structure to your needs/preferences. Link to project Link to Docz Website Project Structure . ├── android ├── app.json ├── App.tsx ├── babel.config.js ├── .buckconfig ├── CHANGELOG.md ├── CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md ├── CONTRIBUTING.md ├── docs ├── doczrc.js ├── .eslintrc.js ├── gatsby-node.js ├── .gitignore ├── .gitlab ├── .gitlab-ci.yml ├── .history ├── images ├── index.d.ts ├── index.js ├── ios ├── jest.config.js ├── LICENSE ├── metro.config.js ├── __mocks__ ├── node_modules ├── package.json ├── prettier.config.js ├── public ├── react-native.config.js ├── README.md ├── src ├── __tests__ ├── tsconfig.json ├── util ├── .watchmanconfig └── yarn.lock Configs Let’s briefly go over the various config files used in this project. ...

In this article, we will go over how you can make PrismJS (syntax highlighted) code blocks editable. Introduction PrismJS can be used to add syntax highlighting to code blocks on our website. For a persona project of mine, composersiation #ShamelessPlug :plug:, I needed to allow the user to paste in their own (docker-compose) yaml files. So let’s take a look how we can let a user to first edit a code block and then re-run PrismJS to add syntax highlighting. ...

Like most developers, we want to be able to automate as many and as much of processes as possible. Pushing Docker images to a registry is a task that can easily be automated. In this article, we will cover how you can use Gitlab CI to build and publish your Docker images, to the Gitlab registry. However, you can also very easily edit this to push your images to DockerHub as well. ...

In this article, I will show how you can use React Context with React Hooks to store global state across a React app, then store that state in local storage. This can be used for example to store light vs dark theme, then whenever the user visits your website again they will have the same theme they last selected. Which leads to an improved experience. Structure Note: We will be using typescript ...

In this article I will show you how you can deploy a Docz website on Gitlab pages, using .gitlab-ci.yml. Most of this article should be applicable to Github pages as well. Docz Docz is a tool powered by Gatsby, it aims to make it easier to document your project. It uses a language called mdx which is like normal markdown with some extra features, i.e. md + jsx. The main advantage of using Docz is you can render components “live”, if you put them with the <playground> tags. A basic example may look like this: ...

A bit of backstory when I first started developing React Native apps, I found there weren’t any good example of Gitlab CI files. So in this article, I will show you an example .gitlab-ci.yml file you can use with your React Native app. You can of course tweak and makes changes as required by your project. CI/CD Before we dive straight into the CI file itself, let’s do a quicker refresher on some basic concepts. Feel free to skip this section if you are already familiar with CI/CD, Git and Gitlab CI. ...

In this article, we will talk about how you can use React Native with Firebase Cloud Functions. We will also go over how we can automate the process of updating the cloud functions using Gitlab CI. Firebase is a cloud-based platform developed by Google to aid in the development of Web and Mobile applications. It is tightly coupled with the Google Cloud Platform (GCP), so much so that there are certain actions you can only do using the GCP GUI, such as increasing the RAM of your cloud function “containers”. ...

In this article, I will show you how you can change the theme of your app depending on the time of the day. We will change the theme of the app depending on if the sun has set or risen. Our Application To get started we will create a new React Native app by running the following command, react-native init ExampleApp --template typescript. Note: We are using path aliases so ~ is the same as saying src/, this keeps the import paths cleaner. More information here #ShamelessPlug. ...

In this article, we will go over how we can use a makefile and tox to automate various Python related tools. This article assumes you are running bash (or equivalent). Tox Tox is an automation tool used primarily to add in testing. On the Tox website, it describes itself as tox aims to automate and standardize testing in Python. It is part of a larger vision of easing the packaging, testing and release process of Python software. ...

In this article, I will explain how you can use typescript aliases with Babel or TSPath. If you have been using TypeScript/JavaScript (TS/JS) and have a nested folder structure, you may well be used to seeing imports like so (using es6 style imports). This is sometimes referred to as path hell and is a very common occurrence as your project grows in size. import moduleA from "../../../moduleA"; import moduleB from "../moduleB"; These are called relative imports, as we are importing modules using paths relative to our current module/file. As you can see, they can sometimes be very ugly and hard to work out where the module is we are importing. So sometimes you will use the wrong number of “../” etc. There are a few tools we can use to help solve our problem. ...

In this article, we will go over how you can use add the new adaptive app icons to your Android app. In his article I will be using a React Native project, so the structure of your Android app may vary. Adaptive Icons Adaptive icons are a new feature introduced in Android 8.0 (API level 26). It allows your app icon to be displayed using multiple shapes across different devices and launchers, more information available here. The main advantage of using adaptive icons is so that we don’t have to have to create multiple icons, i.e. round and square versions of your app icon. You provide two layers, a foreground and the background which is usually just a colour. ...

In this article, I will show you how can automate the publishing of your AAB/APK to the Google Play Console. We will be using the Gradle Play Publisher (GPP) plugin to do automate this process for us. Using this plugin we cannot only automate the publishing and release of our app, we can also update the release notes, store listing (including photos) all from GitLab CI. Note: In this article I will assume that you are using Linux and React Native version >= 0.60. ...

In this article I will show how you can use the GitLab CI with React Native to create a binary which can be published to the Google Play Store. Prerequisites Google Developers Account A working React Native Android project Keystore First, we have to generate a keystore which we will use to sign our APK. To do this run the commands below, follow all the instructions and keep the file safe. ...

RESTful APIs are very popular at the moment and Python is a great language to develop web APIs with. In this article we will go over a documentation first approach to building APIs. We will be using Flask, Swagger Code-Gen (OpenAPI) and Connexions. I will go over an API/documentation first approach to building a RESTful API in Python. Which will try to minimise the differences between what’s defined in the API specification and the actual API logic itself. ...