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Thursday, September 10, 2020

Windows Application setup - using chocolatey

 


 

Today I am using Chocolatey to install the basic every day apps I use on my windows devops desktop
Chocolatey is a package manager for windows, that works in the same fashion as brew does for MacOS. It is a pretty lightweight set of powershell commands and uses pre-compiled packages for Windows. It also works for older versions of windows, so if you are hanging onto that Windows 7 installation, this should help.

First we want to install Chocolatey itself, and that is done within powershell. 
You want to run powershell 'As Administrator' so that you have privileged access. 
The next set is to check that you are able to run the signed code,

Get-ExecutionPolicy

If the above command returns "Restricted" run

https://youtu.be/xn5-1fbiTRY

This will allow the running of all signed code. 

Now we are able to install Chocolatey, and to do that, we run the command

Set-ExecutionPolicy Bypass -Scope Process -Force; [System.Net.ServicePointManager]::SecurityProtocol = [System.Net.ServicePointManager]::SecurityProtocol -bor 3072; iex ((New-Object System.Net.WebClient).DownloadString('https://chocolatey.org/install.ps1'))

Now we can install the apps. 
To install an application, you can use the following command

choco install vscode
 
 
The apps i am installing are:

Using Chocolatey allows you to install the apps from just the powershell prompt and makes it a bit simpler to use.
You can also stack the apps instead of installing one by one,
choco install git python awscli

This is a huge time saver as well since it goes directly from one app to the next. 

 

Overall I think chocolatey is a great resource for managing application installs on stand alone workstation or servers.  I have not used it aside from "one off" instances so I cannot give it any type of valid input there. 

 

Tuesday, August 4, 2020

MacMini - Day 1

I honestly forgot that I should write blog posts about my videos. Also I am not overly happy with how this video looks or feels so I will be playing with that as time goes on.



So in this video we do a few basic things, re-arrange the dock, and installed a few applications
oh-my-zsh was installed using the curl command to fetch the installation script and the run it.

As an added bonus, if you are on a Mac, you will get an error about

Insecure completion-dependent directories detected:

To resolve that issue just run the command it gives you on the directory it shows. In my case it was

compaudit| xargs chmod g-w,o-w /usr/local/share/zsh

Then the error warning about not being able to load completion rules went away.
 
Install instructions:

$ sh -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.github.com/ohmyzsh/ohmyzsh/master/tools/install.sh)" 


With brew again we have a curl to a script for installation, and this one did not give any issues.

/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install.sh)"

Brew is used to install a lot of items we will need form the command line, as a simple package manager kind of like apt or yum in the linux world.

It comes in really handy and has a lot of support for being able to install just about any FOSS appication.

Next we want to install Amazon Web Services Command Line Interface  (AWS CLI), it will be used more later, but as for right now, we just want to install it.
With AWS CLI from brew, it will also install Python 3.8.5. This can be handy later or it could mess up anything you were working on within python.
brew install awscli


With terraform we will be using it to deploy the environment to AWS. It will be used to limit mistakes and make results repeatable. I will also be uploading my code to github after it is completed.

brew install terraform
With VS Code we will be using it as an Integrated Development Environment for things like Terraform and Docker. We will also use it for a lot of general editing.
brew cask install visual-studio-code

With docker we did a standard install to get the desktop services, Docker Desktop, and this will be more for ease of use and container configuiration.


  • Hardware
If you are curious about the hardware it is a 2012 MacMini i7, 16BG RAM, 1TB SSD. This hardware should be good enough to run a few containers. There is a chance that a change that this MacMini will get bootcamp and have Windows 10 installed just to show counter points, but it depends on audience request.

Saturday, May 16, 2020

Brush this thing off

So a little bit of an update. I am going to do a few videos for terraform and see how that goes.
I have been on a keyboard kick lately, and ended up with another keyboard. I will post it on twitter, since I should post more there. I will also be a little more active there and possibly instagram also. Instagram will depend on if I can  take pics and tag them correctly.
I should setup a user account on my computer to do all this devops stuff, but let's see if I do it, or remain lazy.
Also, while I am here, why not update this blog's theme. I mean it is my blog and it should reflect things that I enjoy. So let's get spicy.


Old Look:













Vs whatever I have choosen to go around this.

There have been a few major life events lately, so let me take those as a reason to be more motivated, to quote Casey Niestat "Do More"


There is also the question of why do I have a blog? I never update it. Well I think I will start doing that.
I am going to attempt to do a post every Monday and Thursday for the next 4 weeks. I think that will be a fun little challenge to see if I really want to go down this route.

Starting Monday, I will go ahead with the terraform VPC, and post the basics of that.