automation

All my posts about automation.

The next version of Laravel News has been launched

Earlier today laravel-news.com, the official Laravel news source, received a new coat of paint. In a post announcing the launch Eric shares how the site works behind the curtains.

During this move, I have redone the way the site is powered. Previously it ran on WordPress with a custom theme I put together, it worked fine but added new features, and sections became harder and harder, and I wanted the ability to use what I am comfortable with, Laravel. However, I didn’t want to give up the media library and editing experience of WordPress.

So to have the best of both worlds I kept the old site on WordPress and used the WP Rest API paired with the Laravel Scheduler. This allows me to automatically sync data from WordPress into my database without having to rebuild an entire CMS admin area. I have the same setup for the podcast section, and it hooks into the Simplecast API to pull those over.

https://laravel-news.com/2016/08/welcome-to-the-next-version-of-laravel-news/

I sure would like to read a tutorial on how that sync works in detail.

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The Bash For Loop, The First Step in Automation on Linux

In a post on his site Mattias Geniar shares how to write for loops in Bash.

Let me first start by saying something embarrassing. For the first 4 or 5 years of my Linux career -- which is nearing 10 years of professional experience -- I never used loops in Bash scripts. Or at the command line.

The thing is, I was a very fast mouse-clicker. And a very fast copy/paster. And a good search & replacer in vim and other text editors. Quite often, that got me to a working solution faster than working out the quirky syntax, testing, bugfixing, ... of loops in Bash.

And, to be completely honest, if you're managing just a couple of servers, I think you can get away with not using loops in Bash. But, once you master it, you'll wonder why you haven't learned Bash for-loops sooner.

https://ma.ttias.be/bash-loop-first-step-automation-linux/

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Recovering from a rm -rf

????

I run a small hosting provider with more or less 1535 customers and I use Ansible to automate some operations to be run on all servers. Last night I accidentally ran, on all servers, a Bash script with a `rm -rf {foo}/{bar}` with those variables undefined due to a bug in the code above this line.

All servers got deleted and the offsite backups too because the remote storage was mounted just before by the same script (that is a backup maintenance script).

http://serverfault.com/questions/769357/recovering-from-a-rm-rf

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Posting successful SSH logins to Slack

I use Slack for many things and it's great to see how many integrations are available out of the box. But building integrations yourself is extremely easy using Incoming Web Hooks.

Wouldn't it be nice if you could see a message in Slack each time a user connects to one of your machines over SSH? Yes it would!

http://sandrinodimattia.net/posting-successful-ssh-logins-to-slack/

(I found this via cron.weekly. If you haven't subscribed yet, you're missing out)

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