Test ETag Browser Caching with cURL Requests

Recently I’ve been playing around with Netlify and as a result I’m becoming more familiar with caching strategies commonly found with content delivery networks (CDN). One such strategy makes use of ETag identifiers for web resources.

In short, an ETag identifier is a value, typically a hash, that represents the version of a particular web resource. The resource is cached within the browser along with the ETag value and that value is used when determining if the particular cached resource has changed remotely.

We’re going to explore how to simulate the requests that the browser makes when working with ETag identifiers, but using simple cURL requests instead.

Continuously Deploy a Hugo Site with GitLab CI

In case you hadn’t heard it on social media, The Polyglot Developer is part of a continuous integration (CI) and continuous deployment (CD) pipeline. Rather than using Hugo to manually build the site and then manually copying the files to a DigitalOcean VPS or similar, the Hugo changes are pushed to GitLab and GitLab takes care of the building and pushing.

Now you might be wondering why this is important because the process of manually building and pushing wasn’t so strenuous.

Having your web application as part of a CI / CD pipeline can streamline things that you would have otherwise needed to take into consideration. Here are some examples of where a pipeline would be of benefit, at least in the world of static website generation through tools like Hugo:

• Multiple authors and developers can work on the project without knowing sensitive information like SSH keys.
• Scheduled builds and deployments can be configured for content that is scheduled with a future date.
• Docker images can be automatically created and uploaded to a Docker registry.

Those are just some of the examples, more specifically how things are done on The Polyglot Developer. In this tutorial, we’re going to explore how The Polyglot Developer is doing things and how you can adopt them into your static website generation workflow.

Getting Started with Visual Testing

There are tons of tools out there that help you make sure your app is functioning correctly. But how do test software from a purely visual standpoint?

Chances are you’re writing functional tests to check visual elements, or manually checking your UI whenever you push a change. If you are doing either of those things, then you know that they’re incredibly time-consuming and bugs still end up slipping through the cracks.

That’s where visual testing comes in.

Fix GLIBCXX Errors From Serverless Framework And AWS Lambda

While I haven’t done too much with Serverless Framework and Functions as a Service (Faas) recently, I did in the past and it isn’t something that I’ve forgotten. In the past I demonstrated how to deploy Node.js functions to Amazon Web Services (AWS) Lambda that contain native dependencies. While not a necessity for all Lambda functions, it is for functions that use libraries for specific operating systems and architectures. For example, my previous article titled, Use AWS Lambda and API Gateway with Node.js and Couchbase NoSQL, fell into this situation. Making use of an EC2 instance or a Docker container with Amazon Linux will help most of the time, but there are scenarios where a little bit extra must be done to accomplish the task.

In certain circumstances everything may package and deploy correctly, but still throw errors. For example, a common error is around libstdc++ and a version of GLIBCXX not being found.

In this tutorial we’re going to see how to resolve library errors that might not be caught in a typical packaging and deployment scenario with Serverless Framework and AWS Lambda.

Don't Be Afraid Of Grep

One of the most powerful commands that you could learn, grep is essentially a robust search tool. It gets its name from the acronym it stands for which is global regular expression print. This is just a fancy way of saying “to search for specific strings or patterns (using regular expressions) within a specific file or directory and print the matching results”.

Getting Started With MongoDB As A Docker Container Deployment

MongoDB is one of the most popular NoSQL databases on the market right now and is used heavily with Node.js development in particular. So what if you wanted to give MongoDB a spin and see what it’s all about?

There are plenty of deployment options when it comes to using MongoDB. For example, I had recently written a tutorial titled, Developing a RESTful API with Node.js and MongoDB Atlas which focused on the MongoDB cloud solution called Atlas. However, you can also install MongoDB on premise using multiple options.

In this tutorial we’re going to focus on using Docker to deploy MongoDB as a container and interact with it with the shell client.

Continuous Integration With GitLab CI And Docker Using A Raspberry Pi

I know I’ve mentioned this before, but I’ve recently started to get serious about my content production and deployment approach on The Polyglot Developer. My goal is to be able to write my tutorials in Markdown, push to GitLab, and have it automatically deployed as a Docker container on my production server. Being able to automate things and take advantage of Docker will definitely improve my productivity in the long term.

So I’ve been playing around with tools on the subject, more specifically GitLab, because that is what I’m using to save a history of the blog. GitLab is a source code repository, but also a whole lot more given its ability to do continuous integration, continuous deployment, and work with Docker directly.

We’re going to take a look at installing GitLab and Docker on a Raspberry Pi, then configuring a GitLab CI Runner to take control of our continuous integration process every time we push some code. While it might sound easy, there are some certain things that aren’t so obvious in the setup and configuration.