davd.io

OS X: Automated provisioning using Homebrew and Cask

I’m changing my hardware quite frequently as I often end up unsatisfied with my current setup. Setting up a computer from scratch is a pain in the a** but restoring a backup implies carrying around configuration files, useless software and other stuff for years. So I’ve decided to create a script that would set up a new computer from scratch and configure it the way I want it to be.

FreeBSD: Send mails over an external SMTP server

FreeBSD is shipped with sendmail as the default MTA, which is configured to local delivery on a vanilla installation. Therefore many people don’t even recognize one of FreeBSDs great features for system administrators: FreeBSD sends system status emails through periodic(8)…

OS X: Run any command in a sandbox

Beside the pre-configured profiles, OS X’s sandbox wrapper command sandbox-exec provides a flexible configuration syntax that allows one to create a customized sandbox that either blacklists or whitelists specific abilities of the application executed within.

rsync over SSH

rsync as a very important tool in a system administrators' toolbox. It allows to synchronize files and directories and is preferred over cp by many, especially when operating on a large file base because it allows to resume copying in case it is canceled. But rsync can do so much more… For example syncing files and folders over SSH, like scp copies files and folders over SSH but again, with some advantages.

FreeBSD jails with a single public IP address

Jails in FreeBSD provide a simple yet flexible way to set up a proper server layout. In the most setups the actual server only acts as the host system for the jails while the applications themselves run within those independent containers. Traditionally every jail has it’s own IP for the user to be able to address the individual services. But if you’re still using IPv4 this might get you in trouble as the most hosters don’t offer more than one single public IP address per server.

Introduction to automated, static code analysis in PHP

In my daily work one of my jobs is to assure code quality of our web applications written in PHP. Beside the usual checks like manual code review, training (e.g. using XP programming sessions) and automated unit tests using PHPUnit, there are some metrics that can be measured automatically making my work easier and helping to reduce error rates in the review process. In the following article I want to introduce the most common methods and tools addressing static code analysis in PHP.

FreeBSD Init-Script for the Caddy Webserver

I have used Caddy for a while now on FreeBSD. But though it lacks a working init script, I decided to write one on my own. Here’s the result, description below:

My Top 20 OS X tools

There are some tools that make a developers' daily work much easier. Here’s my top 20.

Git: Delete merged branches

When using Git extensively, you’ll likely have multiple branches which need to be cleaned up from time to time. In some repositories I have hundreds of feature/, hotfix/ and release/ branches, which are already merged to the master branch and deleting them manually would be a mess.

So here’s how to delete all branches from the server, that are already merged to the master branch. In this case, branches need to start with either feature/, hotfix/ or release/ but you can simply adjust this to match your needs.

Simple mail forwarding using Postfix

It’s more than likely that your email provider of choice, especially the ones that offer mail services free of charge, will not support receiving email to custom domain names like, in my case, davd.net. Running your own mail server would solve this problem but running a fully featured mail stack including POP, IMAP, Sieve filters et cetera requires a fairly powerful machine. Additionally, if not configured properly, there’s big potential for abuse, e.g. spam.

As an alternative, it’s possible to just run a MTA which redirects all incoming email to an external mail server. This can be ran on almost any machine, even on a low-budget computer like the Raspberry Pi or a cheap virtual server.