Obviously for companies is a must, but if you work in your own projects, it will be super great that you configure Jenkins, so you have continuous feedback about if something breaks.
I’ll show you how to configure Jenkins for several projects using only your main computer/laptop.
Then give it an appropriate name and choose Freestyle Project.
Take in count that the name given will be used as the name of the workspace, so you may want to avoid special characters.
It is very convenient to let Jenkins deal with your repository changes instead of using shell commands. So I’m going to fill this section.
I also provided credentials, so Jenkins can log to my Gitlab.
This kind of project is the most simple and we will use the same Docker Container where Jenkins resides, to run the Unit Testing of our code.
We are going to select to Build periodically.
If your Server is in Internet, you can active the Web Hooks so your Jenkins is noticed via a web connection from GitLab, GitHub or your CVS provider. As I’m strictly running this at home, Jenkins will be periodically check for changes in the repository and do nothing if there are no changes.
I’ll set H * * * * so Jenkins will try every hour.
Go down and select Add Build Step:
Select Execute shell.
Then add a basic echo command to print in the Console Output, and ls command so you see what is in the default’s directory your shell script is executing in.
Now save your project.
And go back to Dashboard.
Click inside of Neurona.cat to view Project’s Dashboard.
Click: Build Now. And then click on the Build task (Apr 5, 2021, 10:31 AM)
Click on Console Output.
You’ll see a verbose log of everything that happened.
You’ll see for example that Jenkins has put the script on the path of the git project folder that we instructed before to clone/pull.
This example doesn’t have test. Let’s see one with Unit Test.
Running Unit Testing with pytest
If we enter the project CTOP and then select Configure you’ll see the steps I did for making it do the Unite Testing.
In my case I wanted to have several steps, one per each Unit Test file.
If each one of them I’ve to enter the right directory before launching any test.
If you open the last successful build and and select Console Output you’ll see all the tests, going well.
If a test will go wrong, pytest will exit with Exit Code different of 0, and so Jenkins will detect it and show that the Build Fails.
Building a Project from Pipeline
Pipeline is the set of plugins that allow us to do Continuous Deployment.
Inform the information about your git project.
Then in your gitlab or github project create a file named Jenkinsfile.
Jenkins will look for it when it clones your repo, to build the Pipeline.
pipeline {
agent any
stages {
stage('Show Environment') {
steps {
echo 'Showing the environment'
sh 'ls -hal'
}
}
stage('Updating from repository') {
steps {
echo 'Grabbing from repository'
withCredentials([usernamePassword(credentialsId: 'ssh-fast', usernameVariable: 'USERNAME', passwordVariable: 'USERPASS')]) {
script {
sh "sshpass -p '$USERPASS' -v ssh -o StrictHostKeyChecking=no $USERNAME@$ip_fast 'git clone https://gitlab.com/carles.mateo/python_combat_guide.git; cd python_combat_guide; git pull'"
}
}
}
}
stage('Build Docker Image') {
steps {
echo 'Building Docker Container'
withCredentials([usernamePassword(credentialsId: 'ssh-fast', usernameVariable: 'USERNAME', passwordVariable: 'USERPASS')]) {
script {
sh "sshpass -p '$USERPASS' -v ssh -o StrictHostKeyChecking=no $USERNAME@$ip_fast 'cd python_combat_guide; docker build -t python_combat_guide .'"
}
}
}
}
stage('Run the Tests') {
steps {
echo "Running the tests from the Container"
withCredentials([usernamePassword(credentialsId: 'ssh-fast', usernameVariable: 'USERNAME', passwordVariable: 'USERPASS')]) {
script {
sh "sshpass -p '$USERPASS' -v ssh -o StrictHostKeyChecking=no $USERNAME@$ip_fast 'cd python_combat_guide; docker run python_combat_guide'"
}
}
}
}
}
}
My Jenkins Docker installation has the sshpass command, and I use it to connect via SSH, with username and Password to the server defined by ip_fast environment variable.
We defined the variable ip_fast in Manage Jenkins > Configure System.
There in Global Properties , Environment Variables I defined ip_fast:
In the Build Server I’ll make a new user and allow it to build Docker:
The Credentials can be managed from Manage Jenkins > Manage Credentials.
You can see how I use all this combined in the Jenkinsfile so I don’t have to store credentials in the CVS and Jenkins (Docker Container) will connect via SSH to make the computer after ip_fast Ip, to build and run another Container. That Container will run with a command to do the Unit Testing. If something goes wrong, that is, if any program return an Exit Code different from 0, Jenkins will consider the build fail.
Take in count that $? only stores the Exit Code of the last program. So be careful if you pass multiple commands in one single line, as this may mask an error.
Separating the execution in multiple Stages helps to save time, as after a failure, execution will not continue.
So I share with you my base Jenkins Dockerfile, so you can spawn a new Jenkins for your projects.
The Dockerfile installs Ubuntu 20.04 LTS as base image and add the required packages to run jenkins but also Development and Testing tools to use inside the Container to run Unit Testing on your code, for example. So you don’t need external Servers, for instance.
You will need 3 files:
Dockerfile
docker_run_jenkins.sh
requirements.txt
The requirements.txt file contains your PIP3 dependencies. In my case I only have pytest version 4.6.9 which is the default installed with Ubuntu 20.04, however, this way, I enforce that this and not any posterior version will be installed.
File requirements.txt:
pytest==4.6.9
The file docker_run_jenkins.txt start Jenkins when the Container is run and it will wait until the initial Admin password is generated and then it will display it.
File docker_run_jenkins.sh:
#!/bin/bash
echo "Starting Jenkins..."
service jenkins start
echo "Configure jenkins in http://127.0.0.1:8080"
s_JENKINS_PASSWORD_FILE="/var/lib/jenkins/secrets/initialAdminPassword"
i_PASSWORD_PRINTED=0
while [ true ];
do
sleep 1
if [ $i_PASSWORD_PRINTED -eq 1 ];
then
# We are nice with multitasking
sleep 60
continue
fi
if [ ! -f "$s_JENKINS_PASSWORD_FILE" ];
then
echo "File $s_FILE_ORIGIN does not exist"
else
echo "Password for Admin is:"
cat $s_JENKINS_PASSWORD_FILE
i_PASSWORD_PRINTED=1
fi
done
That file has the objective to show you the default admin password, but you don’t need to do that, you can just start a shell into the Container and check manually by yourself.
However I added it to make it easier for you.
And finally you have the Dockerfile:
FROM ubuntu:20.04
LABEL Author="Carles Mateo" \
Email="jenkins@carlesmateo.com" \
MAINTAINER="Carles Mateo"
# Build this file with:
# sudo docker build -f Dockerfile -t jenkins:base .
# Run detached:
# sudo docker run --name jenkins_base -d -p 8080:8080 jenkins:base
# Run seeing the password:
# sudo docker run --name jenkins_base -p 8080:8080 -i -t jenkins:base
# After you CTRL + C you will continue with:
# sudo docker start
# To debug:
# sudo docker run --name jenkins_base -p 8080:8080 -i -t jenkins:base /bin/bash
ARG DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
ENV SERVICE jenkins
RUN set -ex
RUN echo "Creating directories and copying code" \
&& mkdir -p /opt/${SERVICE}
COPY requirements.txt \
docker_run_jenkins.sh \
/opt/${SERVICE}/
# Java with Ubuntu 20.04 LST is 11, which is compatible with Jenkins.
RUN apt update \
&& apt install -y default-jdk \
&& apt install -y wget curl gnupg2 \
&& apt install -y git \
&& apt install -y python3 python3.8-venv python3-pip \
&& apt install -y python3-dev libsasl2-dev libldap2-dev libssl-dev \
&& apt install -y python3-venv \
&& apt install -y python3-pytest \
&& apt install -y sshpass \
&& wget -qO - https://pkg.jenkins.io/debian-stable/jenkins.io.key | apt-key add - \
&& echo "deb http://pkg.jenkins.io/debian-stable binary/" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/jenkins.list \
&& apt update \
&& apt -y install jenkins \
&& apt-get clean
RUN echo "Setting work directory and listening port"
WORKDIR /opt/${SERVICE}
RUN chmod +x docker_run_jenkins.sh
RUN pip3 install --upgrade pip \
&& pip3 install -r requirements.txt
EXPOSE 8080
ENTRYPOINT ["./docker_run_jenkins.sh"]
Build the Container
docker build -f Dockerfile -t jenkins:base .
Run the Container displaying the password
sudo docker run --name jenkins_base -p 8080:8080 -i -t jenkins:base
You need this password for starting the configuration process through the web.
Visit http://127.0.0.1:8080 to configure Jenkins.
Configure as usual
Resuming after CTRL + C
After you configured it, on the terminal, press CTRL + C.
And continue, detached, by running:
sudo docker start jenkins_base
The image is 1.2GB in size, and will allow you to run Python3, Virtual Environments, Unit Testing with pytest and has Java 11 (not all versions of Java are compatible with Jenkins), use sshpass to access other Servers via SSH with Username and Password…
When you see this error for the first time it can be pretty ugly to detect why it happens.
At personal level I use only Linux for my computers, with an exception of a windows laptop that I keep for specific tasks. But my employers often provide me laptops with windows.
I suffered this error for first time when I inherited a project, in a company I joined time ago. And I suffered some time later, by the same reason, so I decided to explain it easily.
In the project I inherited the build process was broken, so I had to fix it, and when this was done I got the mentioned error when trying to run the Container:
standard_init_linux.go:190: exec user process caused "no such file or directory"
The Dockerfile was something like this:
FROM docker-io.battle.net/alpine:3.10.0
LABEL Author="Carles Mateo" \
Email="docker@carlesmateo.com" \
MAINTAINER="Carles Mateo"
ENV SERVICE cservice
RUN set -ex
RUN echo "Creating directories and copying code" \
&& mkdir -p /opt/${SERVICE}
COPY config.prod \
config.dev \
config.st \
requirements.txt \
utils.py \
cservice.py \
tests/test_cservice.py \
run_cservice.sh \
/opt/${SERVICE}/
RUN echo "Setting work directory and listening port"
WORKDIR /opt/${SERVICE}
EXPOSE 7000
RUN echo "Installing dependencies" \
&& apk add build-base openldap-dev python3-dev py-pip \
&& pip3 install --upgrade pip \
&& pip3 install -r requirements.txt \
&& pip3 install pytest
ENTRYPOINT ["./run_cservice.sh"]
So the project was executing a Bash script run_cservice.sh, via Dockerfile ENTRYPOINT.
That script would do the necessary amends depending if the Container is launched with prod, dev, or staging parameter.
I debugged until I saw that the Container never executed this in the expected way.
A echo “Debug” on top of the Bash Script would be enough to know that very basic call was never executed. The error was first.
After much troubleshooting the Container I found that the problem was that the Bash script, that was copied to the container with COPY in the Dockerfile, from a Windows Machines, contained CRLF Windows carriage return. While for Linux and Mac OS X carriage return is just a character, LF.
In that company we all use Windows. And trying to build the Container worked after removing the CRLF, but the Bash script with CRLF was causing that problem.
When I replace the CRLF by Unix type LF, and rebuild the image, and ran the container, it worked lovely.
A very easy, manual way, to do this in Windows, is opening your file with Notepad++ and setting LF as carriage return. Save the file, rebuild, and you’ll see your Container working.
Please note that in the Dockerfile provided I install pytest Framework and a file calles tests/test_cservice.py. That was not in the original Dockerfile, but I wanted to share with you that I provide Unit Testing that can be ran from a Linux Container, for all my projects. What normally I do is to have two Dockerfiles. One for the Production version to be deployed, another for running Unit Testing, and some time functional testing as well, from inside the Docker Container. So strictly speaking for the production version, I would not copy the tests/test_cservice.py and install pytest. A different question are internal Automation Tools, where it may be interested providing a All-in-One image, that can run the Unit Testing before start the service. It is interesting to provide some debugging tools in out Internal Automation Tools, so we can troubleshoot what’s going on in case of problems. Take a look at my previous article about Python version for Docker and Automation tools, for more considerations.
This article is written at 2021-03-22 so this conclusion will evolve as time passes.
Some of my articles are checked after 7 years, so be advised this choice will not be valid in a year. Although the reasoning and considerations to take in count will be the same.
I answer to the question: Why Carles, do you suggest to adopt Python 3.8, and not 3.9 or 3.7 for our Internal Automation Tools?.
Python 3.6 was released on 2016-12-23 and will get EOL on 2021-12-23.
That’s EOL in 9 months. We don’t want to recommend that.
Python 3.7 was released on 2018-06-27 and will get EOL 2023-06-27.
That’s 2 years and 3 months from now. The Status of development is focus in Security bugfixes.
Python 3.9 was released 2020-10-05 that’s 5 months approx from now.
Honestly, I don’t recommend for Production a version of Software that has not been in the market for a year.
Most of the bugs and security bugs appears before the first year.
New features released, often are not widely fully tested , and bugs found and fixed, once a year has passed.
Python 3.8 was released on 2019-10-14.
That means that the new features have been tested for a year and five months approximately.
This is enough time to make appear most bugs.
EOL is 2024-10, that is 3 years and 7 months from now. A good balance of EOL for the effort to standardize.
Finally Python 3.8 is the Python mainline for Ubuntu 20.04 LTS.
If our deploy strategy is synchronized, we want to use Long Time Support versions, of course.
So my recommendation would be, at least for your internal tools, to use containers based in Ubuntu 20.04 LTS with Python 3.8.
We know Docker images will be bigger using Ubuntu 20.04 LTS than using other images, but that disk space is really a small difference, and we get the advantage of being able to install additional packages in the Containers if we need to debug.
This article talks about how at Riot Games they use Slack. Slack is really a powerful tool, and also makes the communication more human in companies with their approach and the funny icons and /giphy. I’m very serious when it comes to work but I recognize the friendly, warm, human and lovely touch these kind of animated icons bring to the conversations.
Remember that life of the SSD is different from spinning drives. I recommend to keep your backups on external spinning drives disconnected most of the time.
I updated it the Nov-01, as I normally do, bringing more content.
I’ve been paid the royalties for he past two months and I reinvested everything (and more from my pocket) in Hardware for working with ZFS.
I was offered by an editorial in The States to publish Python Combat Guide and other of my books worldwide. I was thinking it for a while. It was very good money, translation to multiple languages and platforms and marketing and a lot of promotion, but I would had loss the rights and the Freedom I have now, like the possibility to offer discount coupons to who I want and to update the contents often. So to celebrate my decision for you, readers of the blog, during September, I provide a discounted price of $5 USD for the fist 100 sales instead of the $25 USD suggested price. Use the following link:
As part of my effort to contributing with nice Open Source products to the Community I have made some investments to keep contributing to:
OpenZFS
My old tool for managing ZFS and Network shares easily
I’m writing a new book about managing ZFS for Small Business too, so I show how to operate on this hardware, good points and downsides.
I’m assembling a new Pc with ZFS plenty of Disk Storage within a mix of:
SAS Enterprise grade SSD 2.5″
SATA 12Gb Enterprise grade SSD 2.5″
SATA SSD 2.5″
SATA HDD 2TB 2.5″
SATA HDD 2TB 3.5″
I’m a big fan of Intel, but this time I have chosen AMD. Concretely a AMD Ryzen 7 3700X AM4 8 Core / 16 Threads, 3.6 GHz to 4.4 GHz with Turbo. The reason I chose this CPU is because it only uses 65W but still has 8 Cores / 16 Threads.
Also I want to see the performance of this AMD Ryzen with CMIPS and another important reason is that AMD motherboards support PCI 4.0. I have bought a NVMe SSD Samsung 980 PRO PCI 4.0 (x4) able to read at 6,400 MB/s. I will use this AMD box for running VMs as well. Basically Virtual Box and Docker.
I’ve been surprised that for 169.99 GBP I can have a very good Asus Motherboard with a 2.5 Gb Ethernet: ASUS ROG STRIX B550-F GAMING, AMD B550, AM4, DDR4, PCIe 4.0, SATA3, Dual M.2, CrossFire, 2.5GbE, USB 3.2 Gen2 A+C, ATX.
In order to have an Asus motherboard with a 2.5 Gb Ethernet for Intel I had to jump to a 254 GBP motherboard and Intel is still PCI 3.0. Actually there are PCI 10Gb NICs at 80 GBP so at some point I’ll upgrade my home network from Gigabit to 10 Gb. That will come slowly, but if the new equipment I assemble has 2.5 Gb when I upgrade the main switches to 10 Gb, at least I’ll be able to communicate at 2.5 Gb without ant additional change.
Also memory at 3200, speed that the AMD motherboard can provide, is more than affordable.
This new server will have 64 GB of RAM (Corsair DDR4 Vengeance PC4-25600 (3200)), as I plan to run VMs and use Volumes mounted via iSCSI and locally as block devices to improve my Software. I’ve bought a new UPS to keep it running in case power goes down. That’s something that doesn’t happen often in my city in Ireland, honestly, but I never forget that this happens in Barcelona two or three times per year, and that a high tension spike can burn your motherboard, drives, or electronics like the TV or the fridge. I’ve bought as well a new KVM Switch, a HDMI 4K and USB too one, so I don’t have to have so many keyboards. My logitech M720 allowed me to use it with 3 computers, but still I want something more operational. The KVM I bought allow me to switch with a button or within a hotkey in the keyboard.
I bought a new Icy box fox handling 6 2.5 drives in just one bay of the tower, and a 850 Watt Corsair PSU that will be able to power the many drives I want at the same time.
ZFS on Ubuntu 20.04.1 LTS A guide for Small/Medium Business and power users to work with ZFS. https://leanpub.com/zfs-ubuntu
Those can be purchased while I’m still working on them and get the updates that I’ll be publishing and keeping a communication with me about doubts or improvements.
Halloween Software Offers
I saw some Halloween offers and I purchased Software licenses for Software I use.
I contribute a lot to Open Source, and many years ago before Open Source existed I was creating Freeware Software. But I think that good commercial Software deserves to be supported. Like everything in life, if they are doing a good work that is useful to me, why not giving them support?. It is also a way to make sure they will continue producing amazing Software. And in the other hand, myself, I create Software. Some times commercial Software, and I like to be paid, so I apply the same principle.
I wanted to automate certain operations that we do very often, and so I decided to do a PoC of how handy will it be to create GUI applications that can automate tasks.
As locating information in several repositories of information (ldap, databases, websites, etc…) can be tedious I decided to create a small program that queries LDAP for the information I’m interested, in this case a Location. This small program can very easily escalated to launch the VPN, to query a Database after querying LDAP if no results are found, etc…
I share with you the basic application as you may find interesting to create GUI applications in Python, compatible with Windows, Linux and Mac.
I’m super Linux fan but this is important, as many multinationals still use Windows or Mac even for Engineers and SRE positions.
With the article I provide a Dockerfile and a docker-compose.yml file that will launch an OpenLDAP Docker Container preloaded with very basic information and a PHPLDAPMIN Container.
This is a trick to restart a Service that is running on a immutable Docker, with some change, and you need to refresh the values very quickly without having to roll the CI/CD Jenkins Pipeline and uploading a new image.
So why would you need to do that?.
I can think about possible scenarios like:
Need to roll out an urgent fix in a time critical manner
Jenkins is broken
Somebody screw it on the git master branch
Docker Hub is down
GitHub is down
Your artifactory is down
The lines between your jumpbox or workstation and the secure Server are down and you have really few bandwidth
You have to fix something critical and you only have a phone with you and SSH only
Maybe the Dockerfile had latest, and the latest image has changed
FROM os:latest
The ideal is that if you work with immutable images, you roll out a new immutable image and that’s it.
But if for whatever reason you need to update this super fast, this trick may become really handy.
Let’s go for it!.
Normally you’ll start your container with a command similar to this:
docker run -d --rm -p 5000:5000 api_carlesmateo_com:v7 prod
The first thing we have to do is to stop the container.
So:
docker ps
Locate your container across the list of running containers and stop it, and then restart without the –rm:
docker stop container_name
docker run -d -p 5000:5000 api_carlesmateo_com:v7 prod
the –rm makes the container to cleanup. By default a container’s file system persists even after the container exits. So don’t start it with –rm.
Ok, so login to the container:
docker exec -it container_name /bin/sh
Edit the config you require to change, for example config.yml
If what you have to update is a password, and is encoded in base64, encode it:
echo -n "ThePassword" | base64
VGhlUGFzc3dvcmQ=
Stop the container. You can do it by stopping the container with docker stop or from inside the container, killing the listening process, probably a Python Flask.
If your Dockerfile ends with something like:
ENTRYPOINT ["./webservice.py"]
And webservice.py has Python Flask code similar to this:
#!/usr/bin/python3
#
# webservice.py
#
# Author: Carles Mateo
# Creation Date: 2020-05-10 20:50 GMT+1
# Description: A simple Flask Web Application
# Part of the samples of https://leanpub.com/pythoncombatguide
# More source code for the book at https://gitlab.com/carles.mateo/python_combat_guide
#
from flask import Flask, request
import logging
# Initialize Flask
app = Flask(__name__)
# Sample route so http://127.0.0.1/carles
@app.route('/carles', methods=['GET'])
def carles():
logging.critical("A connection was established")
return "200"
logging.info("Initialized...")
if __name__ == "__main__":
app.run(host='0.0.0.0', port=5000, debug=True)
Then you can kill the process, and so ending the container, from inside the container by doing:
This will finish the container the same way as docker stop container_name.
Then start the container (not run)
docker start container_name
You can now test from outside or from inside the container. If from insise:
/opt/webservice # wget localhost:5000/carles
Connecting to localhost:5000 (127.0.0.1:5000)
carles 100% |**************************************************************************************************************| 3 0:00:00 ETA
/opt/webservice # cat debug.log
2020-05-06 20:46:24,349 Initialized...
2020-05-06 20:46:24,359 * Running on http://0.0.0.0:5000/ (Press CTRL+C to quit)
2020-05-06 20:46:24,360 * Restarting with stat
2020-05-06 20:46:24,764 Initialized...
2020-05-06 20:46:24,771 * Debugger is active!
2020-05-06 20:46:24,772 * Debugger PIN: 123-456-789
2020-05-07 13:18:43,890 127.0.0.1 - - [07/May/2020 13:18:43] "GET /carles HTTP/1.1" 200 -
if you don’t use YAML files or what you need is to change the code, all this can be avoided as when you update the Python code, Flash realizes that and reloads. See this line in the logs:
2020-05-07 13:18:40,431 * Detected change in '/opt/webservice/wwebservice.py', reloading
You can also start a container with shell directly:
First you have to understand that Python, Java and PHP are worlds completely different.
In Python you’ll probably use Flask, and listen to the port you want, inside Docker Container.
In PHP you’ll use a Frameworks like Laravel, or Symfony, or Catalonia Framework (my Framework) :) and a repo or many (as the idea is that the change in one microservice cannot break another it is recommended to have one git repo per Service) and split the requests with the API Gateway and Filters (so /billing/ goes to the right path in the right Server, is like rewriting URLs). You’ll rely in Software to split your microservices. Usually you’ll use Docker, but you have to add a Web Server and any other tools, as the source code is not packet with a Web Server and other Dependencies like it is in Java Spring Boot.
In Java you’ll use Spring Cloud and Spring Boot, and every Service will be auto-contained in its own JAR file, that includes Apache Tomcat and all other Dependencies and normally running inside a Docker. Tcp/Ip listening port will be set at start via command line, or through environment. You’ll have many git repositories, one per each Service.
Using many repos, one per Service, also allows to deploy only that repository and to have better security, with independent deployment tokens.
It is not unlikely that you’ll use one language for some of your Services and another for other, as well as a Database or another, as each Service is owner of their data.
In any case, you will be using CI/CD and your pipeline will be something like this:
Pull the latest code for the Service from the git repository
Compile the code (if needed)
Run the Unit and Integration Tests
Compile the service to an executable artifact (f.e. Java JAR with Tomcat server and other dependencies)
Generate a Machine image with your JAR deployed (for Java. Look at Spotify Docker Plugin to Docker build from Maven), or with Apache, PHP, other dependencies, and the code. Normally will be a Docker image. This image will be immutable. You will probably use Dockerhub.
Machine image will be started. Platform test are run.
If platform tests pass, the service is promoted to the next environment (for example Dev -> Test -> PreProd -> Prod), the exact same machine is started in the next environment and platform tests are repeated.
Before deploying to Production the new Service, I recommend running special Application Tests / Behavior-driven. By this I mean, to conduct tests that really test the functionality of everything, using a real browser and emulating the acts of a user (for example with BeHat, Cucumber or with JMeter). I recommend this specially because Microservices are end-points, independent of the implementation, but normally they are API that serve to a whole application. In an Application there are several components, often a change in the Front End can break the application. Imagine a change in Javascript Front End, that results in a call a bit different, for example, with an space before a name. Imagine that the Unit Tests for the Service do not test that, and that was not causing a problem in the old version of the Service and so it will crash when the new Service is deployed. Or another example, imagine that our Service for paying with Visa cards generates IDs for the Payment Gateway, and as a result of the new implementation the IDs generated are returned. With the mocked objects everything works, but when we deploy for real is when we are going to use the actual Bank Payment. This is also why is a good idea to have a PreProduction environment, with PreProduction versions of the actual Services we use (all banks or the GDS for flights/hotel reservation like Galileo or Amadeus have a Test, exactly like Production, Gateway)
If you work with Microsoft .NET, you’ll probably use Azure DevOps.
We IT Engineers, CTOs and Architects, serve the Business. We have to develop the most flexible approaches and enabling the business to release as fast as their need.
Take in count that Microservices is a tool, a pattern. We will use it to bring more flexibility and speed developing, resilience of the services, and speed and independence deploying. However this comes at a cost of complexity.
Microservices is more related to giving flexibility to the Business, and developing according to the Business Domains. Normally oriented to suite an API. If you have an API that is consumed by third party you will have things like independence of Services (if one is down the others will still function), gradual degradation, being able to scale the Services that have more load only, being able to deploy a new version of a Service which is independent of the rest of the Services, etc… the complexity in the technical solution comes from all this resilience, and flexibility.
If your Dev Team is up to 10 Developers or you are writing just a CRUD Web Application, a PoC, or you are an Startup with a critical Time to Market you probably you will not want to use Microservices approach. Is like killing flies with laser cannons. You can use typical Web services approach, do everything in one single Https request, have transactions, a single Database, etc…
But if your team is 100 Developer, like a big eCommerce, you’ll have multiple Teams between 5 and 10 Developers per Business Domain, and you need independence of each Service, having less interdependence. Each Service will own their own Data. That is normally around 5 to 7 tables. Each Service will serve a Business Domain. You’ll benefit from having different technologies for the different needs, however be careful to avoid having Teams with different knowledge that can have hardly rotation and difficult to continue projects when the only 2 or 3 Devs that know that technology leave. Typical benefit scenarios can be having MySql for the Billing Services, but having NoSQL Database for the image catalog, or to store logs of account activity. With Microservices, some services will be calling other Services, often asynchronously, using Queues or Streams, you’ll have Callbacks, Databases for reading, you’ll probably want to have gradual and gracefully failure of your applications, client load balancing, caches and read only databases/in-memory databases… This complexity is in order to protect one Service from the failure of others and to bring it the necessary speed under heavy load.
Here you can find a PDF Document of the typical resources I use for Microservice Projects.
This was interesting under the point of view of dealing with elastic Ip’s, Amazon AWS Volumes, etc… but was a process basically manual. I could have generated an immutable image to start from next time, but this is another discussion, specially because that Server Instance has different base Software, including a MySql Database.
This time I want to explain, step by step, how to conainerize my Server, so I can port to different platforms, and I can be independent on what the Server Operating System is. It will work always, as we defined the Operating System for the Docker Container.
So we start to use IaC (Infrastructure as Code).
So first you need to install docker.
So basically if your laptop is an Ubuntu 18.04 LTS you have to:
sudo apt install docker.io
Start and Automate Docker
The Docker service needs to be setup to run at startup. To do so, type in each command followed by enter:
sudo systemctl start docker
sudo systemctl enable docker
Create the Dockerfile
For doing this you can use any text editor, but as we are working with IaC why not use a Code Editor?.
You can use the versatile PyCharm, that has modules for understanding Docker and so you can use Control Version like git too.
This is the Dockerfile
FROM ubuntu:19.04
MAINTAINER Carles <carles@carlesmateo.com>
ARG DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
#RUN echo "nameserver 8.8.8.8" > /etc/resolv.conf
RUN echo "Europe/Ireland" | tee /etc/timezone
# Note: You should install everything in a single line concatenated with
# && and finalising with apt autoremove && apt clean
# In order to use the less space possible, as every command is a layerRUN apt-get update && apt-get install -y apache2 ntpdate libapache2-mod-php7.2 \
mysql-server php7.2-mysql php-dev libmcrypt-dev php-pear git && \
apt autoremove && apt clean
RUN a2enmod rewrite
RUN mkdir -p /www
# In order to activate Debug
# RUN sed -i "s/display_errors = Off/display_errors = On/" /etc/php/7.2/apache2/php.ini
# RUN sed -i "s/error_reporting = E_ALL & ~E_DEPRECATED & ~E_STRICT/error_reporting = E_ALL/" /etc/php/7.2/apache2/php.ini
# RUN sed -i "s/display_startup_errors = Off/display_startup_errors = On/" /etc/php/7.2/apache2/php.ini
# To Debug remember to change:
# config/{production.php|preproduction.php|devel.php|docker.php}
# in order to avoid Error Reporting being set to 0.
ENV PATH_CATALONIA_CACHE /www/www.cataloniaframework.com/cache/
ENV APACHE_RUN_USER www-data
ENV APACHE_RUN_GROUP www-data
ENV APACHE_LOG_DIR /var/log/apache2
ENV APACHE_PID_FILE /var/run/apache2/apache2.pid
ENV APACHE_RUN_DIR /var/run/apache2
ENV APACHE_LOCK_DIR /var/lock/apache2
ENV APACHE_LOG_DIR /var/log/apache2
RUN mkdir -p $APACHE_RUN_DIR
RUN mkdir -p $APACHE_LOCK_DIR
RUN mkdir -p $APACHE_LOG_DIR
# Remove the default Server
RUN sed -i '/<Directory \/var\/www\/>/,/<\/Directory>/{/<\/Directory>/ s/.*/# var-www commented/; t; d}' /etc/apache2/apache2.conf
RUN rm /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default.conf
COPY www.cataloniaframework.com.conf /etc/apache2/sites-available/
RUN chmod 777 $PATH_CATALONIA_CACHE
RUN chmod 777 $PATH_CATALONIA_CACHE.
RUN chown --recursive $APACHE_RUN_USER.$APACHE_RUN_GROUP $PATH_CATALONIA_CACHERUN ln -s /etc/apache2/sites-available/www.cataloniaframework.com.conf /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/
# Note: You should clone locally and COPY to the Docker Image
# Also you should add the .git directory to your .dockerignore file
# I made this way to show you and for simplicity, having everything
# in a single file
RUN git clone https://github.com/cataloniaframework/cataloniaframework_v1_sample_website /www/www.cataloniaframework.com
RUN git checkout tags/v.1.16-web-1.0
# In order to change profile to Production
# RUN sed -i "s/define('ENVIRONMENT', DOCKER)/define('ENVIRONMENT', PRODUCTION)/" /var/www/www.cataloniaframework.com/config/general.php # for debugging
#RUN apt-get install -y vim
RUN service apache2 restart
EXPOSE 80
CMD ["/usr/sbin/apache2", "-D", "FOREGROUND"]
This will copy the file www.cataloniaframework.com.conf that must be in the same directory that the Dockerfile file, to the /etc/apache2/sites-available/ folder in the conainer.
<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerAdmin webmaster@cataloniaframework.com# Uncomment to use a DNS name in a multiple VirtualHost Environment #ServerName www.cataloniaframework.com #ServerAlias cataloniaframework.com DocumentRoot /www/www.cataloniaframework.com/www
<Directory /www/www.cataloniaframework.com/www/>
Options -Indexes +FollowSymLinks +MultiViews AllowOverride All Order allow,deny allow from all Require all granted
</Directory>
ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/www-cataloniaframework-com-error.log # Possible values include: debug, info, notice, warn, error, crit, # alert, emerg. LogLevel warn CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/www-cataloniaframework-com-access.log combined
</VirtualHost>
Stoping, starting the docker Service and creating the Catalonia image
service docker stop && service docker start
To build the Docker Image we will do:
docker build -t catalonia . --no-cache
I use the –no-cache so git is pulled and everything is reworked, not kept from cache.
Now we can run the Catalonia Docker, mapping the 80 port.
docker run -d -p 80:80 catalonia
If you want to check what’s going on inside the Docker, you’ll do:
docker ps
And so in this case, we will do:
docker exec -i -t distracted_wing /bin/bash
Finally I would like to check that the web page works, and I’ll use my preferred browser. In this case I will use lynx, the text browser, cause I don’t want Firefox to save things in the cache.
