In many companies, appplications quickly become a web of interconnected systems with dependencies upon each other and testing changes to a single application may be hard, as the behaviour of the application may depend on interaction with other interconnnected applications. Ideally it would be nice to have a test complete environment with (dedicated) test versions of any other application impacting the application being tested - and have a coherent and applicable test-data set to use (but let’s leave test data for another post).

Hello from a new server The most recent years this site was run of a Digital Ocean Droplet. A Droplet is their fancy name for a virtual private server (VPS) on shared hardware, but not anymore. Generally I’ve been quite happy on Digital Ocean and they’ve provided a stable service through years. There was how ever a few things which caused an opportunity to move away. I was running on a 32bit OS, and needed to reinstall the Droplet to move to a current OS.

I have for many years paid to have a fixed IP number at home. The main reason was to allow me to access servers and have the remote access restricted to the home IP number. This was just one of many layers of the security of the server and the SSH setup, but no more. I’ve been playing with (Tailscale)[https://tailscale.com/] which essentially provide an overlay network and allows you to have a secure private network across the public internet.

If you’re jumping around on servers and need to figure out what the IPnumber(s) of the server are, here’s a little bash line which usually works (tough with a few catches): ifconfig eth0 | grep inet | awk '{ print $2 }' This command assume the eth0 is the public WAN interface in the server. If there are more network cards this may not be correct - or the only interface for the net.

Bruno is an open source alternative to tools like Postman or Insomnia. Both are nice, but they also seem to becoming more complicated than I really need, so I’ve been looking for something else. Initially I didn’t have more complicated needs than wanting a tool to tinker and play with simple REST APIs, so I looked around and found Bruno. As many APIs require some authentication, you often need to manage credentials, tokens or other sensitive data which shouldn’t be in your git repo, and luckily Bruno has a nice way it can be used with 1Password which is my password manager of choice.