GitHub API repo size

This is like a black hole out there… Nobody can tell you exactly the answer. But the answer is not simple at all…
Ok, first of all, there’s a pretty big difference between how the size is calculated for GitHub.com and for GitHub Enterprise.

The short answer is that the size shown doesn’t match the repo’s size after clone. The size shown is as close as possible to the .git folder present in your repo.

Continue reading

Setting up an Amazon Electric Beanstalk instance

Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers a whole bunch of services that enables us to deploy and host services, store process data, scales these services etc. It involves dealing with load balances, security, operating systems etc. In short it’s not exactly quick and easy. So Amazon released Elastic Beanstalk to help make deployment, versioning and scaling and general management of these services easier.

From a testing point of view AWS can be a good place to host your Jenkins instance, create a test environment and even run your tests. And Elastic Beanstalk is an easy way to set this up. Below I’ll walk through how to deploy a basic Docker application on Elastic Beanstalk.

Continue reading

3 Steps to set up a temporary Jenkins server

Every now and then I’ve had to set up Jenkins (usually locally) either to test an idea out or because I’m waiting for one to be set up by the “Environments” team. Setting up Jenkins is pretty straight forward but it does have a foot print and can be troublesome further down the track if you don’t tidy up or forget about what resource its taking up. For example, Jenkins uses port 8080 by default. However this is a common port that is used by other web apps which mean you could end up with a conflict. (which is easy to fix if you remember installing Jenkins months ago or that it’s the app that’s using the port.)

One way of avoiding these sorts of problem is by setting up Jenkins in a virtual machine. This means you can quickly get everything up and running and tear it down quickly. And with the current tools this is easier to do than ever.

Continue reading