Tech Tips

I posted recently on my experience moving to Hugo from WordPress. One feature lost in the move were the Wordpress plugins used to automatically post to Twitter and LinkedIn when a new blog post was created. I always found this very useful, so looked or a way to replicate this functionality for static pages. The solution I ended up with was Azure Logic Apps. I created a Logic App with a scheduled triggered that checked my blogs’s RSS feed every 30 minutes. If it found the RSS feed had been updated, I then created a bitly link for the new post’s URL, then posts to Email (as a test), Twitter and LinkedIn. ...

Background Over the years, the Black Marble blog server has been hosted on many platforms. It’s previous incarnation was WordPress, running as a network of sites with an aggregated feed. Of late we had found this slow to serve the first page (due to website start-up time) and there was the constant need to keep the instance patched. The time had come for a new solutions, and we picked Hugo Static Pages. ...

I wanted to have a look at some GitHub Enterprise Server (GHES) upgrade scenarios so decided to create a quick GHES install on my local test Hyper-V instance. Due to me skimping on resources, and making a typo, creating this instance was much harder than it should have been. The first issue was I gave it a tiny data disk, this was down to me making a typo in my GB to Bytes conversion when specifying the size. Interestingly, the GHES setup does not initially complain but sits on the ‘reloading system services’ stage until it times out. If you check the /setup/config.log you see many Nomad related 500 errors. A reboot of the VM showed the real problem, the log then showed plenty of out-of-disk space messages. ...

GitHub’s Dependabot is a great tool to help keep your dependencies up to date, and most of the time the PR it generates just merges without a problem. However, sometimes there are issues with other related dependencies. This was the case with a recent PR to update jest-circus to 28.x. The PR failed with the error TypeError: Cannot read property ’enableGlobally’ of undefined at jestAdapter (node_modules/jest-circus/build/legacy-code-todo-rewrite/jestAdapter.js:39:25) at TestScheduler.scheduleTests (node_modules/@jest/core/build/TestScheduler.js:333:13) at runJest (node_modules/@jest/core/build/runJest.js:404:19) at _run10000 (node_modules/@jest/core/build/cli/index.js:320:7) at runCLI (node_modules/@jest/core/build/cli/index.js:173:3) ...

Issue I had an Azure DevOps YAML based pipeline that had been working but was now getting stuck with the message “Job is pending…” when trying to start a stage in which there is a deployment to an environment. Looking at the logs and Azure DevOps UI it was not obvious what the issue was. Solution Turns out it was due to environment checks and approvals. There was a branch policy on the environment. This was set to only allow use of Azure DevOps Templates on a given branch. The edit that had been done to the YAML meant it was trying to extend a template in a branch that was not in the approved list. ...

I have blogged in the past ( here and here) about the complexities and possible areas of confusion with different types of Azure DevOps pipeline variables. I have also seen issues raised over how to access custom variables across jobs and stages. Safe to say, this is an area where it is really easy to get it wrong and end up with a null value. I have recently come across another edge case to add to the list of gotchas. ...

Yesterday, yet again, I was thankful for my past self taking time to blog about a technical solution I had found. I had an error when trying to digitally sign a package. On searching on the error code I came across my own blog post with the solution. This was, as usual, one I had no recollection of writing. I find this happens all the time. It is a little disturbing when you search for an issue and the only reference is to a post you made and have forgotten, so you are the defacto expert, nobody knows anymore on the subject, but better than having no solution. ...

I have been doing some work with Azure DevOps multi-stage YAML pipelines using stage dependency variables and conditions. They can get confusing quickly, you need one syntax in one place and another elsewhere. So, here are a few things I have learnt… What are stage dependency variables? Stage Dependencies are the way you define which stage follows another in a multi-stage YAML pipeline. This is as opposed to just relying on the order they appear in the YAML file, the default order. Hence, they are critical to creating complex pipelines. ...

The Azure DevOps CLI provides plenty of commands to update Team Projects, but it does not cover all things you might want to set. A good example is setting branch policies. For a given repo you can set the policies using the Azure Repo command eg: az repos policy approver-count update --project <projectname> --blocking true --enabled true --branch main --repository-id <guid> --minimum-approver-count w --reset-on-source-push true --creator-vote-counts false --allow-downvotes false However, you hit a problem if you wish to set the ‘All Repositories’ policies for a Team Project. The issue is that the above command requires a specific --project parameter. ...

The Issue Today I came across a strange issue with a reasonably old multi-stage YAML pipeline, it appeared to be cancelling itself. The Build stage ran OK, but the Release stage kept being shown as cancelled with a strange error. The strangest thing was it did not happen all the time. I guess this is the reason the problem had not been picked up sooner. If I looked at the logs for the Release stage, I saw that the main job, and meant to be the only job, had completed successfully. But I had gained an extra unexpected job that was being cancelled in 90+% of my runs. ...