Container

Bulma customisation with Sass

I’ve been putting of this post for too long. I use Bulma as the CSS framework for this site. I previously used Bulma Customizer to customize some settings but this does not seem to work anymore. So here is how to customize Bulma CSS yourself. ...

Running Sass in a container

Here is how to create a Docker container on macOS to “compile” Sass stylesheets to CSS. In my case, I wanted to (re)compile my Bulma-based theme with the latest version 0.9.0 with my variable overrides. ...

OCRmyPDF: searchable text from images

I recently had a bunch of screen shots that I wanted to OCR, so that I could search for text content in the future. I found an open source solution called OCRmyPDF (created by jbarlow83 over on GitHub) to be very simple to use. It’s also very well documented with many usage examples, including my preferred option - from a Docker container. ...

Running Db2 Data Server Manager in a container

I previously played around with MongoDB in a few containers. Recently, I tried IBM Db2 Community Edition and learnt a few new things about containers along the way. The challenge was rolling my own Db2 Data Server Manager container, working around the background process that the startup script kicks off. ...

Automatically setup a development stack with Appsody

In a previous series of posts, I described how I set up Node.js in a Docker container for development on my macBook. It’s quite a lot of steps! Well, there is a much simpler way - introducing Appsody. ...

Creating a container with an entrypoint to run code

I recently wanted to test a web app written in Node.js and exposed via fixed port. The instructions asked me to install Node.js locally, which I resist! So, here is how I built my Docker container to run the code. ...

Prototyping with a Node-RED container

If the preceding posts on Node.js and MongoDB have been too complex for you, let me introduce you to a simpler drag-and-drop “flow-editor,” Node-RED.. It was developed and open-sourced by IBM, and is now hosted by the OpenJS Foundation (the same foundation that hosts projects like jQuery, and Dojo). I’ve used Node-RED for quick prototypes and demos, as it’s easy to explain each step of the flow. It saves a lot of coding effort and reduces errors buy providing built-in and pre-built third-party “nodes”. ...

Wiring up Node.js and MongoDB containers

Previously, I described my development environment setup using Docker containers. I do it in a totally different way from most tutorials, which I don’t believe leverage containers and complicate things by having to build images for development. Here I explain how I wire up (i.e. network) a few containers - a MongoDB database, a Mongo Express User Interface to manage the database, and a Node.js container using JSON Web Tokens (JWT) to authenticate users against the database. ...

Setting up Node.js in a Docker container

In this post I share with you how I set up a simple Docker container for Node.js development. I’ve never found a simple tutorial for beginners that meets my needs! My requirement is to do all development debugging in a container, so I am assured of consistent behaviour in any environment. I do not want to install Node.js or npm locally on my mac! I cannot be bothered to use a Makefile or Dockerfile to build images - this is only required in the final stage for production! ...