Companionway

The tool of choice is mogrify which come from the imagemagic package on your linux platform.

I had one image that looked fine when I displayed it using display tools in linux but when placed into a webpage the image would be reversed.

Our last post discussed using fisa-vimrc and appreciating the simple installation and ease of use. This post will explore, briefly, some tweaks and a short “how to” for each of the loaded plugins. This exercise will be worth your time if you have not explored these tools before.

I have posted several articles about python fabric and yet I failed to warn you about the dangers of version and module chaos.

Initially, fabric came as a python2 only application. They added support for python3 later. Here is the version I am using in a virtual environment (more about that in a minute). From within my pipenv project directory with pipenv shell loaded this is what I get running fab –version

fab --version
Fabric3 1.14.post1
Paramiko 2.4.2

Here is how I created my virtual environment. I have used almost all of python’s virtual environment tools (and there a quite a few). And there has been a steady progression of improvements in those tools. My current goto for a python virtual environment is pipenv. It is simple, clean, and almost fool proof which is essential for me.

Python fabric is a library tool for executing ssh commands remotely and responding as you desire. I use python fabric for promoting code and web content. Essentially it is my devops tool to satisfy the single most important devops rule: never log into a server! I use this over ansible or some of the other devop tools because fabric only requires knowning one langauge and that is python.

My network changes a lot as I take servers down or stand them up frequently. Normally that would require changing the environment roles (host lists) in my fabfile.py with all my changes. In the past I set aside certain IPs in my network for each role. For example all my raspberry pies get named before I ever introduce them to the network. Using the option –skip_bad_hosts with fabric is one way to do this but I really want more control.

test_it && commit_it || reject_it

Using a pre-commit script when committing code makes sense and fits with every respectable dev-ops model. The goal is to have respectable code before it lands in a repository. Git makes this very easy through the use of “hooks”. If you look in any of your git project directories you will find these files in the ./.git/hooks/ directory:

VIM is a standard for me. My UNIX career hung on my “vi” savvy which I learned appreciate from mentors who encouraged me to learn the tips and tricks of using vi. My learning curve with vi/vim has never leveled off, but rather, always gives me new features and tricks that energize me again. The latest vim “trick” is ALE (Asynchronous Lint Engine).