Today I Learned

When someone deletes a git tag on a remote and creates a new one with the same name, you might get a similar error like the one below while trying to do a git command, a git fetch for example.

![rejected]           2.10.14    -> 2.10.14 (would clobber existing tag)

The solution is to update your local tags with the new remote tags. This is how:

git fetch --tags -f

Postman can run JavaScript commands when executing a request. These commands can be placed in the "Tests" tab inside a request. For example, to automatically set a token as a collection variable, the following commands are used:

var auth = pm.response.headers.get("Authorization");
pm.collectionVariables.set('token', auth.split(" ")[1]);

The Docs regarding Postman scripting can be found here:

https://learning.postman.com/docs/writing-scripts/script-references/postman-sandbox-api-reference/

Hold the Command (⌘) key or Ctrl key on Windows when resizing the artboard. Otherwise, the default behavior is to resize all shapes inside as well.

We're heavily using AWS and we're scripting everything we can. As AWS CLI 2 came out recently we needed to update our scripts.

This script creates a new snapshot and deletes all snapshots older than 2 weeks, for a specific volume.

create-snapshot-and-cleanup.sh

#!/bin/bash

DESCRIPTION="example.com"
VOLUME="vol-xxxxxxxxxx"

SNAPSHOT_AGE=$(date +%Y-%m-%d --date '2 weeks ago')
TODAY=$(date +%d-%m-%Y)

echo "Creating new snapshot of volume $VOLUME."
aws ec2 create-snapshot --output text --description "$DESCRIPTION - AutoSnapshot $TODAY" --volume-id $VOLUME >> /dev/null

echo "Deleting snapshots older than: $SNAPSHOT_AGE"

snapshots=$(aws ec2 describe-snapshots --output text --filters Name=volume-id,Values=$VOLUME --query "Snapshots[?StartTime<'$SNAPSHOT_AGE'].SnapshotId")

echo "Snapshots sheduled for deletion: $snapshots"

for snapshot in $snapshots; do
  echo "Deleting $snapshot ..."
  aws ec2 delete-snapshot --snapshot-id $snapshot
done

If you ever need to check what php version do composer packages and their dependencies require, there's a special command just for that.

composer check-platform-reqs

The output should look something like below. Maybe without the failed steps.

ext-dom        20031129                                                success  
ext-fileinfo    7.3.19                                                  success  
ext-filter      7.3.19                                                  success  
ext-json       1.7.0                                                   success  
ext-libxml     7.3.19                                                  success  
ext-mbstring   7.3.19                                                  success  
ext-openssl    7.3.19                                                  success  
ext-pcre       7.3.19                                                  success  
ext-Phar       7.3.19                                                  success  
ext-SimpleXML  7.3.19                                                  success  
ext-tokenizer  7.3.19                                                  success  
ext-xml        7.3.19                                                  success  
ext-xmlwriter  7.3.19                                                  success  
lib-pcre       10.32                                                   success  
php            7.3.19    league/commonmark requires php (^7.4 || ^8.0) failed   
php            7.3.19    league/config requires php (^7.4 || ^8.0)      failed   

This is useful when your app fails due to unfulfilled dependency requirements.

Managing multiple hosts is a pain when using SSH key authentication. There are a lot of solutions out there for managing SSH keys, there's Ansible, Puppet, or other paid solutions.

There's also another option, to use a script to do the job for you.

Here's how

1. Create a targets file containing your hosts and usernames

# Host
hostname.example.com username

2. Create a add-keys.sh file

#!/bin/bash
keys=${1:-*.pub}
echo update ssh-keys: ${keys}

cat targets | grep -vE '^(\s*$|#)' | sed 's/#.*$//g' | while read host user
do
   echo "# Adding public ssh-keys for $user@$host"
   for k in ${keys};
   do
      echo "# Adding public key $k"
      touch ${k%\.pub}
      ssh-copy-id -f -i $k $user@$host
   done
done

3. Create a remove-keys.sh file

#!/bin/bash

keys=${1:-*.pub}
echo update ssh-keys: ${keys}

cat targets | grep -vE '^(\s*$|#)' | sed 's/#.*$//g' | while read host user
do
   echo "# Remove public ssh-keys for $user@$host"
   for k in ${keys};
   do
      echo "# Remove public key $k"
      key=$(<$k)
      ssh $user@$host 'bash -s' <<EOT
sed -i "/$key/d" ~/.ssh/authorized_keys
EOT
      echo "# Key removed"
   done
done

4. Add the public keys you want to add as .pub files in the same folder

5. Run one of the scripts. Done.

Have you ever been in a situation where you're a cog in a big company your work depends on other people's action and you can't get them to do their part so that you can finish your own tasks?

If the answer is yes, you know how frustrating this can be. This happens because the other people involved have their own priorities and you're at the very bottom.

In order to get things done, you have to get to the top of their list and the solution is rather simple:

Create a carefully non-personal, non-emotional email in which you explain the situation, place the person responsibile in the "To:" field and add their direct manager, your own manager, and anyone remotely responsible in the "Cc" field.

I guarantee your problem will be solved in no time. :D

You can even escalate this further up the chain with a follow-up email where you add more managers up the chain in the "Cc:" field.

Don't forget to thank everyone involved after your issue is solved.

Sometimes you need to make use of the ref attribute to access a child component in VueJs, like so:

<input ref="someRefName"></input>

this.$refs.someRefName

But what if you need to do the same thing for an html element that's still inside your app but outside of your VueJs template or component? Maybe you've tried it and this.$refs.someRefName comes in undefined.

That's when the $root instance comes in handy. Just add the ref attribute on the target element and access it in your VueJs component like this:

this.$root.$refs.someRefName

That makes VueJs look for that reference in the root instance of your app, and not only inside your component.

Just make sure you don't overuse it. Most of the times, there's a better way to do what you need to do.

"1234567890".match(/.{1,2}/g);

Results in:

["12", "34", "56", "78", "90"]

When you run the production build for your VueJS app, if a .env.production file exists VueJS will use that one, even if another .env file is present.