DEV Community: Edvin Dunaway

Streamlining the setup of a new user workspace on Ubuntu/Fedora

Edvin Dunaway — Thu, 24 Oct 2019 13:40:38 +0000

I’ve been wanting to streamline the process of how I set up a new workspace with all the base packages, programs, addons and dotfiles I use and need when I set up a new computer, so I decided to write a script that does exactly that for me.
Sure, I could use Ansible or Puppet and even just Git, to store, save and apply all my settings and programs, but you know.. I like shell scripts!
Also, this gives me the advantage to install everything without having to set up Ansible, Puppet or Git beforehand..

So, lets go over what the scripts do and what they install (the README.md in the repo goes into more detail, so make sure to read it)

Looking at the initial-package-install.sh and post-initial.sh scripts

The initial-package-install.sh script checks what Linux distribution I’m using (I only use Fedora and Ubuntu, so those are the only options, but it’s easy to add other distros if needed..), and based on that information, installs the corresponding packagebase that I’ve selected, along with Google Chrome and TeamViewer, so that I have the tools I need without having to install them all by hand.
The post-initial.sh script then installs all the snap applications that I want, some Python3 pip modules, my dotfiles (via stowit.sh which utilizes the stow command in a function), Oh-My-Zsh for zsh and lastly all the extensions that I use for VSCode and Gnome-Shell.

What to take into consideration before running these scripts

Read the README.md to further familiarize yourself with what the scripts do and how stowit.sh works
Make sure to look over the packagebase and change out/add any packages that you want/need
The same goes for the snaps and Python3 pip packages and VSCode/Gnome-Shell extensions
Edit and/or replace the dotfiles that you need/use in the ./dots/ directory
Remember, this is not an replacement for an complete configuration, the scripts are just to get you up and running faster, you still need to configure individual settings and applications

The scripts will keep on evolving and I will add new features as I need them to further streamline my workspace setup.
Go ahead and check out the initial-package-install script repository on my Github!

Check out this repository on GitHub.com (this link opens in a new window)

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Backups with rdiff-backup and mysqldump

Edvin Dunaway — Sat, 19 Oct 2019 20:19:28 +0000

I’ve been using rdiff-backup for my server backups along with mysqldump for the sql data for years now, as it gives me the ability to browse the increments on file system level and is extremely efficient and easy to use, both for local files and remote.

So what is rdiff-backup anyway?

rdiff-backup backs up one directory to another, possibly over a network. The target directory ends up a copy of the source directory, but extra reverse diffs are stored in a special subdirectory of that target directory, so you can still recover files lost some time ago. The idea is to combine the best features of a mirror and an incremental backup. rdiff-backup also preserves subdirectories, hard links, dev files, permissions, uid/gid ownership, modification times, extended attributes, acls, and resource forks. Also, rdiff-backup can operate in a bandwidth efficient manner over a pipe, like rsync. Thus you can use rdiff-backup and ssh to securely back a hard drive up to a remote location, and only the differences will be transmitted. Finally, rdiff-backup is easy to use and settings have sensical defaults.

– Taken from the official rdiff-backup page, http://www.nongnu.org/rdiff-backup/

Installation

Important: If you are operating over a network, you’ll have to install rdiff-backup on both servers, preferably both installations of rdiff-backup will have to be the exact same version.

On Ubuntu/Debian:

apt install librsync-dev rdiff-backup

On Fedora:

dnf install librsync rdiff-backup

On RHEL/CentOS:

wget http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/7/x86_64/e/epel-release-7-9.noarch.rpm
rpm -ivh epel-release-7-9.noarch.rpm
yum install librsync rdiff-backup

rdiff-backup usage examples

Backup of a local directory:

rdiff-backup foo bar

Backup a local directory to a remote location:

rdiff-backup /local-dir hostname::/remote-dir

Restoring a local directory:

cp -a bar/dir foo/dir

Restoring files backed up 10 days ago:

rdiff-backup -r 10D hostname::/remote-dir/file /tmp/file

You can also backup and restore from a remote location to another remote location.
Detailed examples can be found here: http://www.nongnu.org/rdiff-backup/examples.html

Here is the original version of the script that I use to backup my web and sql servers to a NFS mount on my backup server:

Backup script that utilizes rdiff-backup
https://github.com/eddinn/backup

The Dev Saloon

Edvin Dunaway — Tue, 15 Oct 2019 22:23:35 +0000

Hi!
Sorry for the off-topic post..

I've created a Discord server for devs, admins and others who want to discuss, contribute to and learn about programming, system administration and development.
It would be awesome if anyone would like to join and test it out with me, and I'm also looking for moderators for the long run, if anyone is interested.

Link: https://discord.gg/zfN8NTA

Thanks!

There are only 10 types of people...

Edvin Dunaway — Thu, 04 Jul 2019 22:49:22 +0000

...those who understand binary, and those who don't.

My zsh setup

Edvin Dunaway — Sun, 23 Jun 2019 15:40:00 +0000

I switched from using bash to zsh as my main shell environment and never looked back. You can find my .zshrc config file with Oh-My-ZSH enabled on GitHub

Theme

ZSH_THEME="agnoster"

My .zshrc plugin list

plugins=(
  git
  dotenv
  rake
  ruby
  ansible
  autoenv
  autopep8
  docker
  docker-compose
  docker-machine
  django
  git-prompt
  gnu-utils
  man
  nmap
  npm
  pip
  pipenv
  pyenv
  pylint
  python
  rsync
  sudo
  systemd
  ubuntu
  virtualenv
  vscode
)

Manage dotfiles with the GNU stow command

Edvin Dunaway — Sun, 23 Jun 2019 10:49:00 +0000

I've been looking for a good way to manage my dotfiles and configs, and I found this article written by Shawn McElroy about managing your dotfiles with GNU stow.

So I applied his methods to my config and so far I'm very pleased, and I initialized an git repo on my GitHub page with an initial config and README.md

What plugins do you use for PyCharm?

Edvin Dunaway — Tue, 30 Oct 2018 21:48:04 +0000

After testing Atom and Sublime, I've been figuring my way around PyCharm for my python/flask/django development adventures, and I always find myself installing, testing and removing plugins to get what I could say the "Ultimate IDE environment".

So I'm curious, and thus ask you this: What plugins do you think are essential to have for your "Ultimate IDE environment"?

Thanks,

-E

Getting to know Grav CMS

Edvin Dunaway — Sun, 04 Mar 2018 22:01:00 +0000

I've been figuring my way around the Grav CMS platform, and so far I like it. It has some learning curve to know ones way around the core and how it's all put togeather, but all in all it works very well. My only concern is that it's easy to break the system with minor config adjustments. While Grav has alot of themes and plugins to enrich your site, it still is very much a hands on platform where you need to get to know your way around TWIG, Markdown and YAML along with the good old HTML and CSS.