Testing and mocking stdin in Golang I’ve been playing around with cobra recently, as it’s an awesome library for CLI applications. I always like CLI apps for learning a language, so I’ve been tinkering with a CLI app to interact with Terraform Enterprise’s API, which will force me to talking to external APIs, interpret the result and displaying it to the user. Testing, testing, 123 I want can show my application is tested and reliable. That’s meant I’ve been learning how to test golang. I’m used to Ruby, which has some awesome tools (Mocha, Rspec, Stubbing, Webmock etc). It’s possible to recreate that sort of experience in Golang, with tools like ginko, goconvey or golblin, but since we want to do things “The Golang way” I decided to try and stick to the most vanilla testing possible. ...

Fixing common spelling errors with misspell I’ve been writing a lot of documentation recently, so I’ve been looking at ways of detecting spelling mistakes. The main spelling tool you’ll find is Aspell, and it works fine. With a little bit of shell scripting, you can generally point it at some text and it’ll find mispellings: find ./content/source/ -maxdepth 5 -name "*.md" -exec aspell -x -c {} \; You’ll see something like this: ...

Demonstrating the GCE Auth method for Vault So, I discussed in my previous blog post how I was trying to automate my Vault and GCE demo, so lets talk about that! Understanding Vault As I’ve been working with customers and the community on the HashiCorp stack, I’ve been beginning to understand the core philosophies behind a lot of the products. Mitchell gave a great presentation on Vault’s 0.10 release at the London HashiCorp User Group a few months ago, and there was a slide in there that really helped me understand how Vault works: ...

Writing and playing with custom Terraform Providers I’ve been digging deeper on Terraform. It’s something I’ve tinkered with in the past, but I’ve not really sat down to really use it in anger and try and tie a large project together. So, I picked something that I recently was doing manually: the configuration of a demo of Vault with the GCP backend. Right now I was doing most of the steps for that manually, and I wanted to automate the entire process, and have a fully reproducible demo environment created in GCP. That’s a larger project I’m going to blog about later, but for now I’m going to concentrate on one thing that came up that led me down a rabbit whole of creating a provider. ...

EDIT: So, this blog was linked by DevOps Weekly #379, and seems to have climbed the SEO ranking for Hiera and Vault, but I’ve learn a lot and have some general changes since then. I did a webinar on the subject I’ll be writing an updated version of how to use Vault and Hiera soon, and link it here. Although I don’t work at Puppet anymore, it’s still my favourite config management software, and I use it for the management of machines under my control, including my home storage server and several MacBooks. ...