Category: software

  • Mac M1 development

    For years I’ve been using a Mac for development and it’s been great. But when I switched to a new Macbook Pro M1, an inconvenient truth emerged: I’ve been running development and production on different platforms. Year after year, for bash, python, Ruby, Rails, deploying to real servers, AWS EC2, Docker/Fargate, etc, everything just worked……

  • Ansible inventory management for AWS EC2 on a Small Scale

    At TRI, we do everything the hard way… on a small scale. Many online services “best practices” and offerings are fine when you have a large operating budget and staff, and that leaves “smaller” shops with some notable problems to solve. Until recently, we ran a bunch of AWS EC2 instances using Ansible, but Ansible…

  • Discover the public IP address of an AWS Fargate container in a Docker entrypoint script

    tl;dr: you must use the +tcp option with dig We needed the public IP address to configure PASV_ADDRESS for a vsftpd service we’re running under AWS Fargate. Unfortunately, there’s no direct way for a Docker entrypoint script to get the current public IP address. There are some annoyingly-complicated ways using AWS api’s, etc, but the…

  • TRI Resources T3 plugin for WordPress

    TRI Resources International provides data, reference tools, and web services for the printer supplies industry. One of those services is “T3,” an API designed to serve data needed to support “ink and toner finders” like you see on virtually every printer supply retail site. To avoid making each of our clients write an app to…

  • Ansible, python and mysql… untangling the mess

    Nearly every “how to” article or tutorial on the web describes one way of using Ansible, python, and connecting to MySQL as if that was the only solution.  Many don’t note code versions used, or even the pub date, and the Internet is rife with simply bad advice.  I finally gave up researching all this…