DEV Community: Anish Ansari

Top 10 Google chrome extensions I use as backend web developer

Anish Ansari — Sun, 30 May 2021 11:44:10 +0000

Many extensions are available for chrome which helpful in any way but I am going to share what I use as a backend developer and going to explain how they are helping me speed up the daily. So let us start.

1.Fake Filler

I use fake filler every day and it saves me a lot of time during development and testing. It fills the form with all inputs on a page with fake/dummy data. So you don't have to enter one by one.

learn more here: Fake Filler

2.JSON Formatter

When I am building simple APIs or interacting with any other API and I don't want to leave chrome then JSON Formatter helps me a lot. I use this for formatting the response in the browser.

learn more here: JSON Formatter

3.Nimbus Capture

when I finish adding a feature or I have to clarify something to the client via screenshot or screencast then Nimbus is one solution for me I feel. It is not specific to web developers but it helps me a lot.

Learn more: Nimbus Capture

4.Wappalyzer

Wappalyzer is used to detect the Web technologies like cms, framework, etc is using. I used this to see what are others are using to build robust web applications and what I can learn from them.

Learn more: Wappalyzer

5.Vue.js devtools

When I have to work with vue.js this helps me debug vue.js applications.

Learn more: Vue.js Devtools

6.daily.dev

This extension is very helpful and it keeps me up to date about dev news, blog, and programming news.

Learn more: Daily.dev

7.Lorem Ipsum Generator

Again this one is for adding data to form input and testing the form. This extension helps me to generate random text.

Learn more: Lorem Ipsum Generator

8.Clear Cache

when a page is loaded frequently browser used to cache the content and this cause problem sometime when you're testing things out.so this extension helps me clearthe cache so that you don't have to go through setting all the time.

learn more: Clear Cache

9.Web Developer

This extension has set of tools for web developers which helps in many way.

learn more: Web Developer

10.Google Keep

I use this extension for saving if I find any important website, links. I often use it to keep information UAT servers and things like that.

Learn more: Google Keep

Thank you for reading. Stay safe

Get Azure Certifications for free

Anish Ansari — Mon, 17 May 2021 05:07:35 +0000

Azure - The Virtual Machine Service

Anish Ansari — Fri, 14 May 2021 14:58:04 +0000

Hello all, I hope everyone is safe.

Today we are going to discuss the virtual machine service on Azure. I am preparing for the Azure Administrator exam (AZ-104) and I decided to share whatever I am learning throughout the preparation so it might be helpful for others like me.

So let us start with a virtual machine.

What is a virtual machine?

A virtual machine (VM) is an abstraction of the physical environment that functions as a virtual computer system with its CPU, memory, network interface, and storage, created on a physical hardware system. So in another word, a virtual machine is a virtual environment with its resources and abstracted from the physical hardware. This is a general definition of a virtual machine.

The virtual machine service allows you to deploy virtual machines on Azure.

So let us take the example of a company that wants to set up a couple of virtual machines. Let's say one virtual machine is used for a web server and another for a database server and so on. So the company has to buy physical storage, and networking devices server and use a hypervisor to enable virtualization on the server.

A lot of expenses and a lot of work right? But these are not needed when you use the Virtual machine on Azure.

Benefits of Virtual Machine on Azure

The benefit of the virtual machine service is that the company needs not to buy and manage the physical server and other devices because storage, networking, and infrastructure are completely managed by Microsoft Azure. All we need to do is we can go to the Azure portal and create a virtual machine and use it.
Another benefit is that at any point in time you can just go ahead and delete these virtual machines if you don't need them anymore. But in the case of the company, it is not true, the company has bought this infrastructure. So if they don't deploy anything using this infrastructure it's a complete waste of an investment.
The biggest advantage is that you get to use the services such as a virtual machine service on a pay-as-you-go model. So you only pay for what you consume. If you don't need it you don't need to use the service.

Things to know before deploying the virtual machine to Azure

When you deploy a virtual machine on Azure, it deploys the virtual machine and deploys other resources. It deploys virtual networks, disks, virtual network cards, and network security groups. Let us see what are these quickly.

Virtual Network

The virtual machine needs to reside virtually and this is like a home for the virtual machine.

Disks

Two disks get deployed with the virtual machine and they are an OS disk and a temporary disk.

OS disk is used for holding OS-level data and the temporary disk is used for holding the temporary data but whenever the machine is stopped you will lose all your data from this disk.

Virtual network card

Data that is sent and received by the virtual machine goes via the network interface and the network interface can have private and public IP addresses.

Network security group

A network security group, also called NSG, is like a firewall. NSG decides what type of traffic flows into and out of the virtual machine.

So in this article, we learned what is the virtual machine service on Azure and what are things that need to be considered before deploying the Virtual machine, and what are the benefits.

Next, we will see how to deploy Windows and Linux virtual machines on Azure. I hope it helps you stay safe.

image credit: Here

Network Address Translation(NAT)

Anish Ansari — Thu, 13 May 2021 05:02:00 +0000

Hello Everyone, Recently, I came across a topic is NAT and, this felt so interesting so I wanted to share what is NAT and, how does it work.

So what we will be discussing in this post is :

what is NAT
1.How NAT came in to picture and a little history
2.How NAT works
3.Types of NAT

What is Network Address Translation (NAT)

NAT is used to enable multiple hosts on a private network to connect to the Internet using a single public IP address or we can say that the basic idea of NAT is to allow multiple devices to access the Internet through a single public address.

So basically, NAT helps a private network to communicate with the public network(Internet).

How NAT came in to picture and a little history

Back in 1994, there was a problem with IPV4 and the problem was the IP address was allocated based on the class. Class A address was given to big companies, smaller companies were given class B and smaller get class C address, and so on and, the main problem with this method was that millions of class A address were wasted, many of the class B address were wasted, whereas, number of addresses available in class C is so small that it cannot cater the needs of organizations.

Learn more about IP address classes and Classful Vs Classless Addressing.

The solution to this problem was to create several address ranges that are the private IP address like, 10.0.0.0/8 172.16.0.0/12 192.168.0.0/16 learn more about private IP. In this way, we were able to solve problems with classful addressing and this allows us to set up a network and pick one of these addresses to build our network. But again there was a problem that, this doesn’t allow us to communicate on the public internet because on the public internet we have to use the public IP address. That’s where NAT came in to picture and helps us to solve this problem by allowing us to communicate with the public internet.so let us see how NAT solves this problem.

How NAT Works

Network address translation between a private network and the Internet.
Image credit: Wikipedia

So if we see in the above picture there is a host connected to a private network, a router most likely be configured to use NAT and, a server connected to the internet. if we want to send a message to the server from an internal device that is connected to a private network with the source address 10.0.0.1 and destination address 200.100.10.1

Now when we send this message out, the message will easily be transferred to the server because our router looks for the destination address which is 200.100.10.1

But what happens when the server responds? let’s find out. when the server wants to respond and now destination IP will be 10.0.0.10 and source IP will be 200.100.10.1, now when the server responds, we know private is address is not routable and the packet gets rejected and thrown away.

Here comes the use of NAT, when the server sent the message to the router which will be configured to use NAT, what it does that it takes source IP (10.0.0.1) and store it in a table(also known as NAT table) and replace it with public IP(150.150.0.1).

Now, if we send any message from private IP to the internet it will reach to the server and when the server responds destination IP will be 150.150.0.1 which is public and points to our router, once the router receives the message it looks in the NAT table and it removes the public IP 150.150.0.1 and replaces it with private address 10.0.0.10 and replaces it with private address 10.0.0.10 and forwards the message back to the device.

Types of NAT
Static NAT
A single private IP address is mapped with a public IP address and is generally used for Web hosting.

Dynamic NAT
A private IP address is translated into a public IP address from a pool of public IP addresses.

Port Address Translation (PAT)
Many private IP addresses can be translated to a single registered IP address. Port numbers are used to distinguish the traffic.

That’s it, I hope it helps you in any way.

Stay home stay safe and happy learning

How To Create AWS EC2 Instance And Host PHP Applications

Anish Ansari — Thu, 24 Dec 2020 12:31:25 +0000

Hello everyone,

Recently, I had to host a PHP application and I was scratching my head as to howI could do that. I went through documentation and videos and I was able to figure it out. So, I want to share how I did it and we will start with what AWS EC2 is.

What is AWS?

So in one line, AWS stands for Amazon Web Services and it is the cloud computing platform from Amazon, for more you can read here.

What is EC2?

EC2 stands for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and it is a web service that provides various compute capacity in the cloud. It lets us create the desired computing environment quickly. For example, if you need a server up and running for you to test or deploy your application it will take only a minute or two to set up your server in EC2.

So let us create a virtual machine and host a PHP application. At first, you need to have an AWS account. if you're a student then there is an easier way to get an AWS account using GitHub Student Developer Pack you can check it out here.

Step 1

Go to AWS and click on AWS Management Console under My Account then choose Root user or IAM user based on the description and enter your email.

Click on next and then enter your password and click on Sign in.

Step 2

After signing in you will see this screen under the compute click on EC2 then you will be presented with the below screen.

Click on launch instance.

Step 3
Then choose your preferred server image, I want to install an Ubuntu server so I will proceed with this.

Then I will choose the free tier. What is the free tier now?

In this tier, for the first 12 months following your AWS sign-up date, you get up to 750 hours of micro instances each month. When your free usage tier expires or if your usage exceeds the free tier restrictions, you pay standard, pay-as-you-go service rates.

Step 4

Click on Configure instance details I will leave everything default here.

Step 5

Click on next to add storage. The default provided storage is 8 GB you can add more as per your need.

Step 6

Now click on the next to add a tag. A tag consists of a case-sensitive key-value pair. For example, you could define a tag with key = Name and value = Webserver. So I am adding PHP instance.

Step 7

Click on next Configure Security Group

Step 8

Then click on review and launch now.

You will be asked to choose a key pair for authorization purposes. Choose to create a new key-pair and enter the name of your Key Pair and then click on download Key Pair. You need to keep it safe.

Click on view instance and you will see your instance running

You will see the newly created instance is running.

Step 9

Choose your instance and click on connect, now we will be using SSH client in our case it will be putty.

if you're on windows then you can download putty here and if you're Linux then you can install putty using your terminal. For Linux, these are the commands.

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install -y putty

putty

Now to connect you need to convert your keypairname.pem file to keypairname.ppk for authorization purposes. You can read how to do it. So after converting launch Putty and follow the steps to connect.

Step 10

Open putty and enter the public IP of your EC2 instance, in my case, it is 3.19.62.96. In putty, go to SSH and click auth and locate your keypairnname.ppk.

This is my putty screen:

Click on open and a Putty security alert window will be prompted click on accept and wait for some time.

After this, you must see the login and you need to enter your username which is ubuntu by default. Enter your username and hit enter and wait for some time.

If everything looks good then you will see the below screen and finally, you're running your Ubuntu server in EC2.

Step 11

Now install the Apache server and PHP to run the PHP application

In order to run a PHP application, we need to install an apache server. So follow the command to install the apache server and PHP.

sudo apt update

sudo apt install apache2

sudo apt install php libapache2-mod-php php-mysql

Now open your web browser and type your public IP in my case again it is 3.19.62.96 and you must see the below Apache2 Ubuntu Default Page. This means we have installed Apache on the Ubuntu server and it is working fine.

Now, whenever a user goes to your web app the Apache server will return HTML files; that means index.html. So we are going to change the configuration and make it look for index.php first and then index.html if index.php is not available. So for doing that below are the commands.

sudo nano /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/dir.conf

You will see something like this:

<IfModule mod_dir.c>  
   DirectoryIndex index.html index.cgi index.pl index.php index.xhtml index.htm  
</IfModule>

Now move the index.php to the first position like below and press CTRL+O and CTRL+X.

<IfModule mod_dir.c>  
   DirectoryIndex index.php index.html index.cgi index.pl index.xhtml index.htm  
</IfModule>

Now restart the apache server and check the status of the server. You must see active(running).

sudo systemctl restart apache2
sudo systemctl status apache2

Step 12

Create a PHP application that displays 'Hello World' and host.

Now we are going to write a simple PHP program that displays 'Hello World' and host it on our server. The following are the commands for that.

cd /var/www/html
sudo nano index.php

Now write this code and press CTRL+O and CTRL+X.

<?php  
   echo "Hello World";  
?>

Now go to your web browser and enter your public IP and you must see "Hello World".

I hope this is helpful, if you have any query, feedback or suggestions please do let me know. Stay Safe.