Choco Up | 6,415 followers on LinkedIn. Growth capital for today’s fastest-growing businesses and e-commerce brands | Fast, flexible, founder-friendly | Choco Up is a global technology and financial services platform, offering revenue-based financing and business growth solutions for digital ...

Choco Up | LinkedIn

Asia&#x27;s #1 revenue-based financing and growth platform. Get up to USD 5M with no equity dilution. Apply in minutes and get funded within 48 hours.

Choco Up: Growth capital for fast-growing businesses

Global technology and financial services platform, offering revenue-based financing and business growth solutions

Choco Up - Crunchbase Investor Profile & Investments

Apply to job opportunities at Choco Up. Get the latest information about building career at Choco Up, reviews &amp; the company culture

Choco Up Career Information 2023 | Glints

Find out about our team and our mission. The Choco Up team invests growth capital to startups in Hong Kong, Singapore, Indonesia, Taiwan and more.

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View Choco Up (http://www.choco-up.com) location in Singapore, revenue, competitors and contact information. Find and reach Choco Up&#x27;s employees by department, seniority, title, and much more.

Choco Up - Financial Services - Overview, Competitors, and Employees ...

Information on investments, active portfolio, exits, fund performance, dry powder, team and co-investors for Choco Up. Use the PitchBook Platform to explore the full profile.

Choco Up Investor Profile: Portfolio & Exits | PitchBook

Choco Up built its big data and analytics platform on AWS to enable funding decisions for clients within 1 hour. Choco Up is a revenue-based financing platform that provides fast access to capital for fast-growing companies and startups, with a focus on ecommerce merchants.

Choco Up Case Study - Amazon Web Services (AWS)

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Choco Up is a data-driven revenue-based investment platform, offering non-dilutive growth capital to fast-growing businesses. Use the CB Insights Platform to explore Choco Up&#x27;s full profile.

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At Choco-Up, we believe that great talent drives exceptional results. Are you ready to embark on an exciting career journey with us? We&#x27;re looking for dedicated individuals like you to join our dynamic team and help shape the future of our company.

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Choco Up, a portfolio company of a Nasdaq-listed company, invests in fast-growing companies with growth capital up to 10 million USD without equity dilution.

Choco up

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THE BUSINESS TIMES - Find latest business &amp; financial news including analysis and opinion on top business stories, stock markets in Singapore, Asia-Pacific &amp; global market news and more at The Business Times.

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Founded in 2018, Choco Up is a revenue-based financing and growth platform in the Asia-Pacific region, offering flexible non-dilutive funding solutions across eight countries and 10 sectors. With offices in Hong Kong and Singapore, Choco Up is a data-driven FinTech platform that leverages data ...

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Choco Up is Asia’s growth capital platform, offering revenue-based financing and growth solutions to digital merchants

Choco Up

For decades, Windows users have been made fun of by the Linux community for the lack of a cool terminal (among other things). Well, it's about time we fight! In this article, we will go through setting up a development workflow in the Windows terminal. Prerequisites Know how to type Windows 10/11 (Some things may not work for you in this article if you are on some other version) (Optional) Know Basic Unix Commands such as , , etc cd mkdir What will we be doing We will set up the following: Powershell Nerd Fonts Theme Scoop z Directory Jumper Terminal Icons Node & Git Neovim Oh-My-Posh Autocomplete Aliases Utilities Well, then, let's get started! Things to remember during the article stands for your root or home directory, the default directory where the terminal will generally open. ~ If anything doesn't work even after installing/configuring just close and reopen the terminal. The command palette opens with . ctrl+shift+p Terminal settings open with ctrl+, Getting Started Powershell First of all, let's install Powershell, this is not Windows Powershell that comes with Windows. You will have to go to the Microsoft Store and search for it, it's free so don't worry. After you have done that open Terminal (not PowerShell or Command Prompt), you can search it up, it's pre-installed on your PC. Press to open settings, here we will set Powershell as our default, it would be Command Prompt in default if you haven’t changed it before. Ctrl+, In the startup menu, change the default profile to PowerShell and save, that's it! Nerd Fonts So, what are Nerd Fonts? Nerd fonts let you use font ligatures and more glyphs in general, it's something everyone should use while coding. You might actually be using it without knowing in your IDE/text editor. I used Fira Code for a long time before knowing it was a Nerd Font. To install a nerd font, first, go to the nerd-fonts and download the zip file of your preferred Nerd Font from the latest release. Extract the zip file and install the fonts. If you have never installed a font before, that’s fine, you can just double-click the files and click on install. GitHub Repo .ttf I use the JetBrains Mono NF and another of my favorites is Hack NF (NF stands for Nerd Fonts). Themes To change the theme of your terminal, open settings and click on "Open JSON file", this will open the file for your terminal. settings.json Now to change the theme you have three options: Choose a theme from the themes already present in the terminal by default Create your own theme from scratch or modify one already present. Use a pre-written theme I use a pre-written theme, you can find a lot of them and paste it into your settings.json under “schemes”. Save the file. here Now, go back to your Terminal settings (not settings.json) and choose the theme you just added. Terminal Tools Scoop Let's first install , a package manager for Windows. We will be then using scoop to install other tools. scoop To install scoop run the following in PowerShell: winget install scoop This will install scoop. If you are wondering what winget is, it is a package manager that comes by default in Windows 10/11. In case, you don't have winget do the following: iwr -useb get.scoop.sh | iex Now type and if it returns an output like the one below then all is good. scoop Usage: scoop <command> [<args>]

Some useful commands are:

alias Manage scoop aliases
bucket Manage Scoop buckets
cache Show or clear the download cache
cat Show content of specified manifest. If available, `bat` will be used to
 pretty-print the JSON.
checkup Check for potential problems
cleanup Cleanup apps by removing old versions
config Get or set configuration values
create Create a custom app manifest
depends List dependencies for an app
download Download apps in the cache folder and verify hashes
export Exports (an importable) list of installed apps
help Show help for a command
hold Hold an app to disable updates
home Opens the app homepage
info Display information about an app
install Install apps
list List installed apps
prefix Returns the path to the specified app
reset Reset an app to resolve conflicts
search Search available apps
shim Manipulate Scoop shims
status Show status and check for new app versions
unhold Unhold an app to enable updates
uninstall Uninstall an app
update Update apps, or Scoop itself
virustotal Look for app's hash on virustotal.com
which Locate a shim/executable (similar to 'which' on Linux)

Type 'scoop help <command>' to get help for a specific command. If it doesn't return an output, just close and reopen the terminal, and it will work. This is the moment you stop using those installers, now you are a terminal guy. You can even install Mozilla Firefox, just do . scoop install firefox There is also which you can use as a package manager but we will stick with scoop for this article. choco/chocolatey z is a directory jumper. What is a directory jumper? Let's say you are in the directory , and you want to go to , the one way of doing this in your terminal would be this: z ~/Desktop/Development/NextJS/tutorial ~/SomewhereElse/Products/Product1/prod-website cd ../../../../

cd SomewhereElse/Products/Product1/prod-website This looks small but you don't always remember where all your projects are so add 4-5 more commands in there. This wastes our time, especially over a prolonged period. This is where a directory jumper comes in, with just a single command you can go from one project to another. Let's take the above example this time you just have to do this (assume you are in ): ~/Desktop/Development/NextJS/tutorial z prod-website That's it! You just should have visited the directory once in your lifetime (which you most probably will during the project setup). You don't even need to use the full name of your project directory, you can just do and you would jump to the most recent directory which has in its name somewhere (in this case, the prod-website). z prod prod One thing to note is, to try not to include spaces in your directory names that may make it hard for the directory jumper to find them. It's a good practice in general too to not include spaces in directory names. Now to install , just type in the following and hit enter, and there you go: z Install-Module -Name z -Force Huh? This is not scoop, is it? Yes, it is not, we are currently installing a PowerShell Module (you can install some modules using scoop or winget too) and thus, we are using the command that is builtin into PowerShell. Install-Module Try it out, if it doesn't work open a new Terminal tab (shortcut: ctrl+shift+t), and it should work now. Terminal Icons As the name suggests it adds icons for when you do . To install it do the following: ls Install-Module -Name Terminal-Icons This will install the module. To be able to use it globally, we need to add it to our PowerShell profile, which we will cover in this article later. Node & Git If you use Node.js install it but if you don’t there is no need to. To install Node, first, install which stands for Node Version Manager, it also lets you have multiple versions of node installed at the same time. nvm scoop install nvm This will install nvm. Now download the stable release of Node.js with: nvm install lts for the latest release do: nvm install latest you can even specify a certain version like this: nvm install 18.1.0 To list out the versions of node available use , the one with a denotes the one being used currently. To change the version do . nvm list * nvm use version_number Quick Tip: You can also install by doing , by using that you don’t have to close and reopen the terminal for admin commands. You can use it like, . sudo scoop install sudo sudo nvm use 18.1.0 Now for git just do either of the following: using scoop: scoop install git or using winget winget install git That's it! Neovim Neovim is a fork of Vim that is better for plugins and extensions. To install Neovim, type in the following and hit the enter key: scoop install neovim Also, install any other packages it asks you to. I don't recommend jumping into Neovim right ahead if you haven't seen it ever before in your life or don't know the common commands/keybindings. You can check out this of mine for learning a bit about it and how to set it up. article I will be using Neovim here for editing files, but it's alright you can just follow along with the steps in your preferred text editor or IDE too. Oh-My-Posh Now that all your terminal tools are all set up, let's start with customizing your prompt. First of all, to install it you can do either of the following: winget install oh-my-posh or scoop install https://github.com/JanDeDobbeleer/oh-my-posh/releases/latest/download/oh-my-posh.json Now, we will start messing with config files! First, let's create a config file for our PowerShell, we will be using this file to customize our prompt as well as to set aliases and utilities. The config file will be in the PowerShell script. You can create it anywhere but you will have to link it accordingly in your PowerShell profile. PowerShell profile is from where PowerShell will load its config, you can write your config there directly but we will write it in a separate file. Let's make ours in . ~/.config/powershell cd .config

mkdir powershell && cd powershell Again, you can name your file anything just make sure it will be the same in your PowerShell profile. Let's get started with the editing then, create a file in your preferred editor, I will be using Neovim here. user_profile.ps1 nvim user_profile.ps1 Now type in the following into your PowerShell config: oh-my-posh init pwsh --config ~/.config/powershell/avi.omp.json | Invoke-Expression Save it now. Here you can see "avi.omp.json" and you can name it anything like "your_name.omp.json" just make sure to replace it in the config. Now, you may ask me though, what even is that file? That file is the one that will contain our oh-my-posh configuration for the prompt. You can create your own custom prompt from scratch by looking at the , but there are a lot of awesome ones already there. I use one of them and just modified it a bit. You can check it out on their website and copy the config. Here's the one I am using: docs {
 "$schema": "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/JanDeDobbeleer/oh-my-posh/main/themes
/schema.json",
 "blocks": [
 {
 "alignment": "left",
 "segments": [
 {
 "foreground": "#41A6B5",
 "style": "plain",
 "template": "@avi",
 "type": "session"
 },
 {
 "foreground": "#7AA2F7",
 "properties": {
 "folder_separator_icon": "/",
 "style": "full"
 },
 "style": "plain",
 "template": " \uf07b {{ .Path }} ",
 "type": "path"
 },
 {
 "foreground": "#BB9AF7",
 "powerline_symbol": "\ue0b0",
 "properties": {
 "fetch_stash_count": true,
 "fetch_upstream_icon": true
 },
 "style": "plain",
 "template": "{{ .UpstreamIcon }}{{ .HEAD }}{{ if gt .StashCount 0 }} \uf692
{{ .StashCount }}{{ end }} ",
 "type": "git"
 }
 ],
 "type": "prompt"
 },
 {
 "alignment": "left",
 "newline": true,
 "segments": [
 {
 "foreground": "#cd5e42",
 "style": "plain",
 "template": "\ue3bf ",
 "type": "root"
 },
 {
 "foreground": "#CD4277",
 "style": "plain",
 "template": "> ",
 "type": "text"
 }
 ],
 "type": "prompt"
 }
 ],
 "version": 2
} Next, open your powershell profile (you can do it by , do it from the home directory if you are not on Neovim, the file is located at ~/My Documents/powershell/Microsoft.PowerShell_profile.ps1), and type in the following: nvim $profile . $env:USERPROFILE\.config\powershell\user_profile.ps1 Save that. Close and reopen the terminal. Your prompt should load now. Awesome! Now, let's add autocomplete. Autocomplete PSReadline is a module of PowerShell that comes pre-installed which will help us out with the autocomplete. To configure it open your and add the following: user_profile.ps1 Set-PSReadLineOption -PredictionSource History

Set-PSReadLineOption -PredictionViewStyle ListView You can choose "HistoryAndPlugin" or "Plugin" too as PredictionSource. For PredictionViewStyle, the other option is InlineView, you can also switch between them by pressing the F2 key. I talked about adding Terminal Icons to the config before, you can do it by just adding the following line into your config: Import-Module Terminal-Icons Aliases Aliases can be useful in saving time. It's quite simple to set aliases, for example: Set-Alias g git The above will set the alias for as , but that will only make it the alias for this particular terminal session/tab not globally. To make it a global alias add the exact same command as above in your PowerShell config file. Now, g is the alias for git. Similarly, you can set other aliases. Here are a few of mine: git g Set-Alias v nvim
Set-Alias g git
Set-Alias y yarn
Set-Alias p pnpm
Set-Alias tig 'C:\Program Files\Git\usr\bin\tig.exe'
Set-Alias explorer explorer.exe These are PowerShell aliases, you can also set up aliases for git to speed up your development process, I won't go into the detail of it here. There is another way to set aliases for commands like , . Here is an example of making an alias for : npm start yarn dev yd yarn dev function yarnDev {
 yarn dev
}

New-Alias yd yarnDev I don’t have experience with PowerShell script, so in the above, I can only explain that we create a function and add whatever we want to run when we call the function. After that, we set the alias to call the function as . yarnDev yd Similarly, you can set up other aliases for such commands. Utilities You can even make your own little commands by setting them in your PowerShell config. For example, command (used to create a file) which is not present in PowerShell, here is how you can add it: touch function touch ($command) {
 New-Item -Path $command -ItemType File | out-null && Write-Host Created $command
} What we are doing above is creating a function and letting it have a parameter. Then, in , we are using built-in PowerShell commands to create a file, you will have to research PowerShell commands to create more utilities on your own, the documentation is amazing, so it won’t be a problem. In the second half of the function, we are just telling it to output . touch New-Item -Path $command -ItemType File Created [file_name] Here is how you can add command from Linux: rm function rm ($command) {
 Remove-Item $command -Recurse && Write-Host Removed $command
} To use this just do and it will delete the file. rm [file_name/directory_name] It is not exactly the same as the command in Linux though. rm Other tools Here are some of the other CLI tools you can use: - Commitizen is used for defining a standard way of committing rules and communicating them in Git. It is designed for teams, but I also use it for my personal projects. Commitizen - gh is GitHub on the command line. It brings pull requests, issues, and other GitHub concepts to the terminal next to where you are already working with git and your code. gh CLI - An extension of gh cli to display a dashboard with pull requests and issues. gh-dash extension - You can use this to get prettier git diffs. dunk - Rich-cli is a command-line toolbox for fancy output in the terminal. Rich CLI WSL Setup Now, you might have already heard of WSL or might even be using it, nothing wrong with it if you are not. WSL stands for Windows Subsystem For Linux, it lets you have the Linux terminal on your windows machine. I will not be discussing WSL setup here but you can check out by @stephanlamoureux, it goes through setting up WSL quite nicely. "The Complete Windows Developer Setup Guide" Conclusion So, that's finished! You can find my config files on GitHub if you want, before copying anything go through the readme once, also do not copy anything you don’t know the meaning of. here If anyone wants to add something, correct me somewhere, or ask anything please feel free to do so in the comments. Resources for themes - or https://windowsterminalthemes.dev/ https://github.com/atomcorp/themes docs for PSReadline - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/psreadline/?view=powershell-7.2 video by devsalife on setting up powershell - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-aK2_WwrmM Documentation for all other tools has been linked with their introductions in the article Also published . here

Setting up a Development Workflow in the Windows Terminal

HackerNoon Reporter: Please tell us briefly about your background. My name is Tony, and this is my friend Daniel, and we were high school roommates. We spent a lot of time after school talking and brainstorming ideas about what we can do after graduation. Tony: We were always passionate about communication technologies and online communication in general, and this is how we decided to start our tech start-up. Daniel: What's your startup called? And in a sentence or two, what does it do? Our startup is called , and it is a sticker platform. We partner with artists from different parts of the world to create stickers for chats. Then we help to integrate these stickers into messengers through SDK and API, so their users can share them while chatting. Tony: Stipop We know that developing a feature like this takes a lot of time and resources, so we are taking over and making it easy for apps to introduce new features to their users. It is like those stickers you see on Facebook, but with one difference - you don't have to be the size of Facebook because Stipop stickers are available for anyone for free. We also help brands to advertise their products with stickers. As you can see, many things are going on, but they all are based on the same idea - we want to make stickers available to any app and any brand through accessible technologies. Daniel: What is the origin story? Some people are more comfortable meeting in person, but others (including ourselves), would rather send messages instead. But unfortunately, expressing emotions online is not quite the same as in person. And this is exactly where stickers come in handy. Tony: We grew up in Korea, and the most popular app to chat was KakaoTalk, and it was one of the very few apps that had stickers back then. Those stickers were in that app only, so communication on other platforms was still rather bland. Back then, even Facebook had 10 sticker packs only, so communication tools were very limited. So this is how the big idea got born, and we teamed up to find sticker creators, make stickers, spread them around the world, and help users express themselves better online. Daniel: What do you love about your team, and why are you the ones to solve this problem? We love solving problems, are passionate about what we do, and understand users. We are also heavy learners - what we build is fairly new, so we don't have any example to follow or success story to rely on, so we learn a lot to enhance our product. Tony: If you weren’t building your startup, what would you be doing? Hard to say, but I think eventually, we would end up building something similar. I always loved creating things, which influenced my interest in stickers and tech and helped connect the passion for both in what we do now. Tony: At the moment, how do you measure success? What are your core metrics? We have two major metrics: the number of apps integrating our API and SDK - we track API calls, sticker sends, etc., and the number of brands advertising with stickers. We also closely monitor user satisfaction because, at the end of the day, every product is built for real users. Daniel: What’s most exciting about your traction to date? We hit 650M sticker views in one month, and it was exciting to see that so many people needed stickers in their life. We also partnered with Google and PubNub, and it was great to get noticed and supported by companies like them. It helped us to push forward and expand our services. Daniel: What technologies are you currently most excited about, and most worried about? And why? We are excited about machine learning and image recognition. The whole image processing and the accuracy you can get with the recent technologies like CloudVision API by Google or NEC face recognition is truly fascinating. We, in turn, are working on tag suggestions for stickers search through image recognition right now, so we are closely monitoring industry trends like these. Tony: What drew you to get published on HackerNoon? What do you like most about our platform? HackerNoon is one of a kind community, and we are happy to be part of it. We like that so many knowledgeable tech professionals share their experience and expertise and how you support startups. Daniel: What advice would you give to the 21-year-old version of yourself? Don't be afraid to start a company - tech or not. There are no age restrictions for that. If you feel stuck, ask for help. Be sincere. Be agile. Tony: You can accomplish anything if you work hard and put your mind and heart into it. Daniel: What is something surprising you've learned this year that your contemporaries would benefit from knowing? The world needs problem solvers. Knowledge is power, but only applied knowledge makes the real difference. So if you have a chance to take action, take it! Daniel: Stipop is contesting from Seoul for . Vote now! HackerNoon startup of the year

Startup Interview with Tony Park and Daniel Cho, co-founders of Stipop

The content of the blog you are reading right now is stored in a Git repository. Every time I create an article, I create a new Git Branch to isolate the changes. To generate the skeleton of the articles, I use the command line (well, I generally use ); in particular, given that I’m using both Windows 10 and Windows 11 - depending on the laptop I’m working on - I use the , which allows you to define the style, the fonts, and so on of every terminal configured in the settings. PowerShell Integrated Terminal The : no info is shown except for the current path - I want to customize the appearance. default profile is pretty basic I want to show the status of the repository, including: Git repository name branch name outgoing commits There are lots of articles that teach how to use OhMyPosh with Cascadia Code. Unfortunately, I couldn’t make them work. In this article, I teach you . It’s a I wrote while installing it on my local machine. I hope it works for you as well! how I fixed it on my local machine step-by-step guide Step 1: Create the $PROFILE file if it does not exist In PowerShell, you can customize the current execution by updating the file. $PROFILE Clearly, you first have to . check if the profile file exists Open the PowerShell and type: $PROFILE # You can also use $profile lowercase - it's the same! This command shows you the . The file, if it exists, is stored in that location. expected path of this file In this case, the file should be available under the folder . In my case, it does not exist, though! $Profile C:\Users\d.bellone\Documents\WindowsPowerShell Therefore, you must create it manually: head to that folder and . create a file named Microsoft.PowerShell_profile.ps1 Note: it might happen that not even the folder exists. If it’s missing, well, create it! WindowsPowerShell Step 2: Install OhMyPosh using Winget, Scoop, or PowerShell To use , we have to - of course - install it. OhMyPosh As explained , there are , depending on the tool you prefer. in the official documentation three ways to install OhMyPosh If you use , just run: Winget winget install JanDeDobbeleer.OhMyPosh -s winget If you prefer , the command is: Scoop scoop install https://github.com/JanDeDobbeleer/oh-my-posh/releases/latest/download/oh-my-posh.json And, if you like working with , execute: PowerShell Set-ExecutionPolicy Bypass -Scope Process -Force; Invoke-Expression ((New-Object System.Net.WebClient).DownloadString('https://ohmyposh.dev/install.ps1')) I used , and you can see the installation process here: Winget Now, to apply these changes, you have to . restart the PowerShell Step 3: Add OhMyPosh to the PowerShell profile Open the file and add the following line: Microsoft.PowerShell_profile.ps1 oh-my-posh init pwsh | Invoke-Expression This command is executed every time you open the PowerShell with the default profile, and it initializes OhMyPosh to have it available during the current session. Now, you can save and close the file. . Hint: you can open the profile file with Notepad by running notepad $PROFILE Step 4: Set the Execution Policy to RemoteSigned Restart the terminal. In all probability, you will see an error like this: The error message The file is not digitally signed. You cannot run this script on the current system <path>\Microsoft.PowerShell_profile.ps1 means that PowerShell does not trust the script it’s trying to load. To see which Execution Policy is currently active, run: Get-ExecutionPolicy You’ll probably see that the value is . AllSigned To enable the execution of scripts created on your local machine, you have to , using this command by : set the Execution Policy value to RemoteSigned running the PowerShell in administrator mode Set-ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned Let’s see the definition of the Execution policy as per : RemoteSigned SQLShack’s article This is also a . This policy dictates that any script that was not created on the system that the script is running on, should be signed. Therefore, . safe PowerShell Execution policy to set in an enterprise environment this will allow you to write your own script and execute it So, yeah, feel free to proceed and set the new Execution policy to have your PowerShell profile loaded correctly every time you open a new PowerShell instance. Now, OhMyPosh can run in the current profile. Head to a and notice that… It’s not working!🤬 Or, well, we have the Git information, but we are missing some icons and glyphs. Git repository Step 5: Use CaskaydiaCove, not Cascadia Code, as a font We still have to . install the correct font with the missing icons We will install it using , a package manager available for Windows 11. Chocolatey To check if you have it installed, run: choco -v Now, to install the correct font family, and run: open a PowerShell with administration privileges choco install cascadia-code-nerd-font Once the installation is complete, you must tell Integrated Terminal to use the correct font by following these steps: Open the page (by hitting ) Settings CTRL + , select the profile you want to update (in my case, I’ll update the default profile) open the section Appearance under Font face, select CaskaydiaCove Nerd Font Now close the Integrated Terminal to apply the changes. Open it again, navigate to a Git repository, and admire the result. Further readings The first time I read about OhMyPosh, it was on Scott Hanselman’s blog. I couldn’t make his solution work - and that’s the reason I wrote this article. However, in his article, he shows how he customized his own Terminal with more glyphs and icons, so you should give it a read. 🔗 My Ultimate PowerShell prompt with Oh My Posh and the Windows Terminal | Scott Hanselman’s blog We customized our PowerShell profile with just one simple configuration. However, you can do a lot more. You can read Ruud’s in-depth article about PowerShell profiles. 🔗 How to Create a PowerShell Profile – Step-by-Step | Lazyadmin One of the core parts of this article is that we have to use as a font instead of the (in)famous . But why? CaskaydiaCove Cascadia Code 🔗 Why CaskaydiaCove and not Cascadia Code? | GitHub This article first appeared on Code4IT 🐧 Finally, as I said at the beginning of this article, I use Git and Git Branches to handle the creation and management of my blog articles. That’s just the tip of the iceberg! 🏔️ If you want to steal my (previous) workflow, have a look at the behind-the-scenes of my blogging process (note: in the meanwhile, a lot of things have changed, but these steps can still be helpful for you) 🔗 From idea to publishing, and beyond: how I automated my blogging workflow with GitHub, PowerShell, and Azure | Code4IT Wrapping up In this article, we learned how to install OhMyPosh in PowerShell and overcome all the errors you (well, I) don’t see described in other articles. I wrote this step-by-step article alongside installing these tools on my local machine, so . I’m confident the solution will work Did this solution work for you? Let me know! 📨 I hope you enjoyed this article! Let’s keep in touch on or ! 🤜🤛 Twitter LinkedIn Happy coding! 🐧 Also published . here

Using OhMyPosh and CascadiaCode: Elevating PowerShell and Integrating with Git in Windows

Google’s MLKit library finds text in images and this works well for simple text but for tabular data such as receipts or tables, it does not. If you’ve ever used an you might have noticed that it works reasonably well when scanning a page with uniform text but when dealing with any kind of tables or text formatting, it just falls flat. OCR app This article discusses an algorithm used in a mobile application I wrote that processes text to keep it in line. We’ll take a common example of a store receipt. In the example below you can see exactly the problem that I’m trying to solve. Lens does not prefer lines for text but will rather put together text that is physically closer together. This works sometimes but definitely does not work for receipts and other tabular data. See specifically how Google Lens put the price as a new line because it was physically far away from the lines on the left. Google 1,49€ is an application developed specifically to scan tabular data and the results of scanning a receipt are in the top right corner. You can see how it respected the horizontal layout of the receipt and put the price together with the correct article. Line Text Scanner Google OCR library Here is a quick overview of how to use the OCR library: load an image and get text. Recognition of characters happens entirely on Google’s side. InputImage image = InputImage.fromBitmap(mSelectedImage, 0);
 TextRecognizer recognizer = TextRecognition.getClient();
 
 recognizer.process(image)
 .addOnSuccessListener(
 new OnSuccessListener<Text>() {
 @Override
 public void onSuccess(Text texts) {
 processTextRecognitionResult(texts);
 }
 })
 .addOnFailureListener(
 // 
 }); Full documentation is here and the diagram below is from this link. https://developers.google.com/ml-kit/vision/text-recognition/v2?embedable=true Once we have the Text object we can begin our own logic. We’ll try to process Text to do better than Google Lens. First, we need to look at the Text object. Text is a hierarchical representation of the scanned text as seen in the following diagram from Google’s documentation. The algorithm looks for characters and words in physical space and puts them into a hierarchical structure. As mentioned, this works well for easy text as in the diagram above but for tabular data like a receipt it does not. Below we have the full text of the receipt scanned by Google Lens. ENTRETIEN/BAZAR......
MPX FILM FRAICH30M
EPICERIE/BOISSONS.......
1,49€
265G POIS CHICHES HARICOTS ROUGES TR
0,95€
PECHE FRAICH FRTS
COOKIES SABLES CHO
1,25€
3,69€
2,39€
HYGIENE/BEAUTE.......
2,99€
20 ELAST COURTS WA
2 X BATISTE SHP SEC 6,59€ 13,18€
2è à -60%
-3,95€
MPX FIL DENTAIR 50 SOIN BLANCHEUR GOU
2,09€
7,29€
SURGELES/PRODUITS FRAIS...........
LAITIERE PV VANILL
1,69€
MALO F.FRAIS FRUIT COMTE AOP 6M 450G
2,35€
5,29€
QUICHE LORRAINE ESCAL.PANEES DE BL
2,79€
OEUFS PLEIN AIRX12
2,85€
MORIN MOUSSE CHOCO
3,25€
2,09€
LONGLEY FARM COT.C
1,99€
TOTAL HORS AVANTAGES
57,62€
18
NOMBRE D'ARTICLES I think that you’ll agree that this is not very useful. The algorithm picked the columns first rather than the rows. It made new lines for text that was far away. This is the difference in text processing that this article explores. Processing Text To demonstrate what MLKit does I’ve modified the application to only output the index of Text Elements (those are boxes with dark green border in the diagram from Google). In the screen below we can see text blocks 0 to 31. We can see how the MLKit library prefers physical distance to group words together into phrases. This is not exactly what Google Lens has outputted. We can see that Google Lens made the price of 1,49€ below the first three lines. It treated the text blocks differently but didn’t manage to output clear lines. As seen from this output, the OCR library makes up block 0 as ‘Entrentien/Bazar. MPX FILM FRAICH30M’. The second block is made up of multiple lines of the left column. The library continues to create text blocks from the left column and then moves to the right column to create the text blocks from prices. The image is correctly converted into characters and words. We’ll use these words but do it using a different algorithm to prefer lines to make our sentences. It’s clear that Google Lens also processes these blocks but obviously in yet another way. Breaking boxes Now to our algorithm. The first thing we’ll do is process all the TextBlocks from Text to extract the individual lines. Each line has one or more object and we extract them all and put them into a single list. Text.Element List<Text.Element> textElements = new ArrayList<>();

 for (int i = 0; i < blocks.size(); i++) {
 Rect rect = blocks.get(i).getBoundingBox();
 
 List<Text.Line> lines = blocks.get(i).getLines();
 
 for (int j = 0; j < lines.size(); j++) {
 List<Text.Element> elements = lines.get(j).getElements();
 for (int k = 0; k < elements.size(); k++) {
 Text.Element e = elements.get(k);
 textElements.add(e);
 }
 } At this point, we have an array of objects which all contain some text. In our example, the four in block 0 are 'ENTRETIEN/BAZAR......’, ‘MPX’, ‘FILM’, and ‘FRAICH30M’. All of the elements are put into a list. Text.Element Text.Elements Sorting boxes So now that we have all these objects in a list, how do we determine what goes after what? As seen from above, the OCR algorithm just recognized blocks of text but it made no effort to make correct sentences. First, we need to realize that object is bound by Rect object which has coordinates and dimensions. We use this fact to sort the . Text.Element Text.Element Text.Elements We take the top and left coordinates of the rectangles and sort them: public int compare(Text.Element t1, Text.Element t2) {
 int diffOfTops = t1.getBoundingBox().top - t2.getBoundingBox().top;
 int diffOfLefts = t1.getBoundingBox().left - t2.getBoundingBox().left;

 int height = (t1.getBoundingBox().height() + t2.getBoundingBox().height()) / 2;
 int verticalDiff = (int)(height * 0.35);

 int result = diffOfLefts;
 if (Math.abs(diffOfTops) > verticalDiff) {
 result = diffOfTops;
 }
 return result;
 } The main decision in this algorithm is to decide whether one rectangle should go after another based on whether it is more to the right of it or more below it. The horizontal difference is easy, if one rectangle has coordinates more to the left of another rectangle then it will come before it. But this will be taken into consideration only if the difference in the tops is more than 35% height of the line. Basically, we allow for some skew in the picture-taking where the text might not align perfectly. But if a rectangle is 35% the height of the current rectangle below the next rectangle then we consider it as another line. Overall, in our algorithm, we prefer horizontal lines along which we can find the objects. Text.Element Making lines In this final processing step, we will make lines by processing the list above. Remember that the list just has rectangles and so we need to add a condition based on coordinates to decide whether to start a new line. To do this, we get the difference between the top of the boxes and take the average of their height. We don’t check the difference in location on the horizontal axis as we already did that when sorting boxes. Here we just have one decision to make: whether or not to make a new line. private boolean isSameLine(Text.Element t1, Text.Element t2) {
 int diffOfTops = t1.getBoundingBox().top - t2.getBoundingBox().top;
 
 int height = (t1.getBoundingBox().height() + t2.getBoundingBox().height()) * 0.35;

 if (Math.abs(diffOfTops) > height ) {
 return false;
 }
 return true;
 } This finally gives us the well-formatted tabular text. Here is the full text again. ENTRETIEN/BAZAR. 
MPX FILM FRAICH3OM 1,49€ 
EPICERIE/BO1SSONS. 
265G POIS CHICHES 0,95€ 
HARICOTS ROUGES TR 1,25e 
PECHE FRAICH FRTS 3,69e 
COOKIES SABLES CHO 2,39e 
HYGIENE/BEAUTE..... 
20 ELAST COURTS WA 2,99€ 
2 X BATISTE SHP SEC 6,59€ 13,18€ 
2è à -60% -3,95€ 
MPX FIL DENTAIR 50 2,09e 
SOIN BLANCHEUR GOU 7,29€ 
SURGELES/PRODUITS FRAIS.... 
LAITIERE PV VANILL 1,69€ 
MALO F.FRAIS FRUIT 2,35€ 
COMTE AOP 6M 450G 5,29€ 
QUICHE LORRAINE 2,79€ 
ESCAL.PANEES DE BL 2,85e 
OEUFS PLEIN AIRX12 3,25€ 
MORIN MOUSSE CHOCO 2,09e 
LONGLEY FARM COT.C 1,99e 
TOTAL HORS AVANTAGES 57,62e 
NOMBRE D'ARTICLES 18 Conclusion The solution to process the text in lines in this article is not without faults. The text should be relatively straight and not skewed too much. With some effort, we could calculate the vectors of lines even in the most crumpled receipt but that would be for another article. Here we show how a small tweak in treating the output of a large library can have a big effect for a very specific purpose. If you think that this is useful to you, the app is available in the . Google Play Store

Using Google MLKit Text Recognition to Scan Tabular Data

In this article, I am going to share the step-by-step method I followed while building a blog website using a static site generator and deploying it to . I encountered some small errors during the process; I am gonna entertain those as well. Let's get started. Hugo Netlify As I am using Windows, commands may be different, follow while building your own website using Hugo. Also, I am running all commands on git bash. official docs Step 1 Create any folder on the Desktop and open . Now, time to install Hugo. git bash choco install hugo -confirm Or if you need the “extended” Sass/SCSS version: for some supported theme. Better install it from by running it as an administrator. cmd choco install hugo-extended -confirm Step 2 Now, it's time to create a new website and add a cool theme to it. You can choose any theme from the Hugo theme library. Run the below commands. // Choose your site name in place of blognerd

hugo new site blognerd The above will create a new Hugo site in a folder named . blognerd It's time to add a theme to the site. See the for a list of themes to consider. I am using the theme. theme library Beautiful Hugo cd blognerd
git init You can access the GitHub repo of themes by just clicking the download button on the theme page as you can see in the above picture. Now, download the theme from GitHub and add it to the site's theme directory. git submodule add https://github.com/halogenica/beautifulhugo.git  themes/beautifulhugo Now, add the theme to the site configuration: echo theme = \"beautifulhugo\" >> config.toml Step 3 It's time to add some content to the newly created site. You can also add them manually, but I am creating this using commands. hugo new posts/my-first-post.md Now, open the whole folder in any code editor, I am using VS Code. Edit your post as you wish. You can see the screenshot of my editor below for a reference of the posts files. The above content may be different for the theme you are using. I am going to add one of my article contents to this post, for example, see the below screenshot. You can edit metadata between accordingly. --- Step 4 Now, is the time to test the site we created by running the Hugo server. hugo server -D  //run only this command 

Start building sites …
hugo v0.105.0-0e3b42b4a9bdeb4d866210819fc6ddcf51582ffa+extended windows/amd64 BuildDate=2022-10-28T12:29:05Z VendorInfo=gohugoio

                   | EN
-------------------+------
  Pages            |  10
  Paginator pages  |   0
  Non-page files   |   0
  Static files     | 184
  Processed images |   0
  Aliases          |   2
  Sitemaps         |   1
  Cleaned          |   0

Built in 4884 ms You can check the live view on http://localhost:1313/ Here’s my live view... Step 5 It's time to give the final touch to the newly created site. You can customize the theme or configure the site by opening up in a text editor and edit accordingly. In this theme, I took help from their GitHub . config.toml readme Now, time to build a static site. Run the below command after closing the Hugo server by pressing Ctrl+c hugo -D  //run only this command

Start building sites …
hugo v0.105.0-0e3b42b4a9bdeb4d866210819fc6ddcf51582ffa+extended windows/amd64 BuildDate=2022-10-28T12:29:05Z VendorInfo=gohugoio

                   | EN
-------------------+------
  Pages            |  16
  Paginator pages  |   0
  Non-page files   |   0
  Static files     | 184
  Processed images |   0
  Aliases          |   5
  Sitemaps         |   1
  Cleaned          |   0

Total in 763 ms Step 6 Everything is now set. You can add more blog content or customize the site according to your requirement. Now, the final work is to deploy it to . Netlify I have Netlify CLI installed, so I am going to the final step. You can install it by going to Netlify official docs and login in to your account. After installing, run the following commands: netlify dev It will open the Netlify live server on . After checking everything on your site, close the Netlify server by pressing . Time to deploy.. http://localhost:8888 Ctrl+c netlify deploy  //run only this command 

This folder isn't linked to a site yet
? What would you like to do? (Use arrow keys)
> Link this directory to an existing site
  +  Create & configure a new site Follow the instruction and select the directory. Now deploy production. (.) netlify deploy --prod

// select public directory Hurray! Now, you can access your live website with the Netlify domain from the Netlify dashboard. I have created one other site and it's deployed, check my live website here... If You ❤️ My Content! Connect With Me on or Supports Me By Twitter Buying Me A Coffee☕ Also published here

How to Create a Personal Blog With Hugo and Netlify

Foreword There is often the need to check whether your production system is working as expected. This is where sanity checks are coming to be useful. We will be implementing the project via serverless architecture in the AWS cloud leveraging platform. A year ago I've written an article about testing. And it used to be the best tool for testing, in my opinion. jest-puppeteer But today I'm glad to announce that its ancestor completed the maturation process and is ready to jump into your production codebases. Let's welcome Playwright! Puppeteer vs Playwright comparison The essential difference is that puppeteer was coined as an automation framework and playwright as the testing framework. Other discrepancies are growing from this fact. Moreover, . I'm convinced that they have a ton of relevant experience and will avoid all the challenges they faced with Puppeteer. Playwright is designed by the same core developers who did Puppeteer What did Playwright bring to the testing realm? 1. Playwright covers all three modern browser engines so you write your tests once and they will be run in different browsers. 2. Playwright now has its own test runner. You don't need to use jest or smth of a kind. 3. Built-in screenshot capturing and video recording. 4. Overall it's way more stable and usable. 5. Playwright community is great. I've reported several bugs and they all were fixed really quick. Let's create our Playwright project Firstly we need to create our file. package.json { : , : ,
} "name" "playwright_tests" "version" "1.0.0" Then we need to install browser engines and playwright itself. npm i @playwright/test --save
# install supported browsers
npx playwright install As a sidenote, you can install only browser's engines that you need. Or even install custom ones. Now let's create our folder and put there. File should have in its name to be discovered by the test runner. tests first.test.js .test.js tests/first.test.js { test, expect } = ( );

test( , ({ page }) => { page.goto( ); page.click( ); expect(page).toHaveURL( ,
  ) expect(page).toHaveTitle( ,
  )
}); const require '@playwright/test' 'top story navigation' async await 'https://hackernoon.com/' // search for "Top Stories" text then filter down to visible await 'text=Top Stories >> visible=true' await 'https://hackernoon.com/tagged/hackernoon-top-story' await "#hackernoon-top-story stories | Hacker Noon" Code is simple and mostly self-descriptive. Let's run our test case aleksandr@aleksandr-desktop:~ pw_test$ npx playwright test

Running test using worker

  ✓  tests/first.test.js: : › top story navigation ( s)

  Slow test: tests/first.test.js ( s) passed ( s) /work/ 1 1 3 1 17 17 1 17 I highly recommend you to open the and play with CLI flags. official docs Dockerization Then we need to wrap our previous efforts into containers. ./Dockerfile FROM mcr.microsoft.com/playwright:v1 -focal

WORKDIR /sanity-checks

COPY /package.json .
COPY /package-lock.json .

COPY . ./

RUN npm install

CMD [ , , ] .14 .1 "npx" "playwright" "test" ./.dockerignore node_modules
infra I want to accentuate that Playwright has a bunch of its own images. Waiting for us to use them. Run our container in AWS Fargate configured with Terraform Now we need to run the container in AWS. The easiest way to do so is . It's a serverless solution with all the benefits of Paradigm. Fargate Also I suggest to use nifty . This tool provide us with the opportunity to define our infrastructure as a code. Terraform So this way we don't need to look at millions of services to understand which resources we use. Let's install terraform at your OS. Mac: brew tap hashicorp/tap
brew install hashicorp/tap/terraform
brew install awscli
brew update Linux: sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install -y gnupg software-properties-common curl awscli

curl -fsSL https: sudo apt-add-repository sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install terraform //apt.releases.hashicorp.com/gpg | sudo apt-key add - "deb [arch=amd64] https://apt.releases.hashicorp.com $(lsb_release -cs) main" Windows: choco install awscli
choco install terraform Verification of installation: aws --version terraform -help Then you need to run and provide AWS credentials. aws configure Then you need to manually create S3 bucket. In my case it's terraform-state-playwright In this bucket, Terraform will store information about our AWS infrastructure. This way we can work with it from different machines simultaneously. We don't need to worry about data-loss too. Afterwards, run: terraform init Then change infra/init.tf terraform {
  required_providers {
    aws = {
      source  = version = }
  }

  backend {
    region  = encrypt = bucket  = key     = }
}

provider {
  region  = } "hashicorp/aws" "~> 3.0" "s3" "us-west-2" true "YOUR BUCKET NAME" "playwright.tfstate" "aws" "us-west-2" Now let's begin to create the actual AWS configs. First. You need to add networking. Let it be your default VPC and default subnets where our Fargate container will run. infra/vpc.tf resource {}

resource {
  availability_zone = }

resource {
  availability_zone = } "aws_default_vpc" "default" "aws_default_subnet" "default_az1" "us-west-2a" "aws_default_subnet" "default_az2" "us-west-2b" Next, we need to create the ECS configuration itself. infra/ecs.tf resource {
  name = }

resource {
  name = tags = {
    Project = }
}

resource {
  name = }

resource {
  family = execution_role_arn = aws_iam_role.ecs_task_execution_role.arn

  container_definitions = jsonencode([
    { : { : , : {
          awslogs-group: aws_cloudwatch_log_group.playwright_tests.name,
          awslogs-region: ,
          awslogs-stream-prefix: }
      }, : , : ,
    }
  ])

  network_mode = requires_compatibilities = [ ]

  cpu = memory = tags = {
    Project = }
} "aws_ecr_repository" "playwright_tests" "playwright_tests" "aws_ecs_cluster" "playwright_tests" "playwright_tests" "playwright_tests" "aws_cloudwatch_log_group" "playwright_tests" "/ecs/playwright_tests" "aws_ecs_task_definition" "playwright_tests" "playwright_tests" logConfiguration logDriver "awslogs" options "us-west-2" "ecs" image "${aws_ecr_repository.playwright_tests.repository_url}:latest" name "playwright_tests" "awsvpc" "FARGATE" "2048" "4096" "playwright_tests" And IAM roles for our config infra/ecs_iam.tf data {
  statement {
    sid = effect = actions = [ ]
    principals {
      type = identifiers = [ ]
    }
  }
}

data {
  arn = }

resource {
  name = assume_role_policy = data.aws_iam_policy_document.assume_role_policy.json
}

resource {
  role       = aws_iam_role.ecs_task_execution_role.name
  policy_arn = data.aws_iam_policy.ecs_task_execution_role_policy.arn
} "aws_iam_policy_document" "assume_role_policy" "STSassumeRole" "Allow" "sts:AssumeRole" "AWS" "*" "aws_iam_policy" "ecs_task_execution_role_policy" "arn:aws:iam::aws:policy/service-role/AmazonECSTaskExecutionRolePolicy" "aws_iam_role" "ecs_task_execution_role" "ecs-task-execution-role" "aws_iam_role_policy_attachment" "ecs_execution_role_attachment" Next we will create event_bridge which will trigger our Fargate Container every 5 minutes. infra/event_bridge.tf resource {
  name                = schedule_expression = tags = {
    Project = }
}

resource {
  rule     = aws_cloudwatch_event_rule.trigger_playwright_tests_cron_event.name
  arn      = aws_ecs_cluster.playwright_tests.arn
  role_arn = aws_iam_role.role_for_event_bridge.arn

  ecs_target {
    task_count          = task_definition_arn = aws_ecs_task_definition.playwright_tests.arn
    launch_type         = network_configuration {
      subnets          = [
        aws_default_subnet.default_az1.id,
        aws_default_subnet.default_az2.id
      ]
      assign_public_ip = }
  }
} "aws_cloudwatch_event_rule" "trigger_playwright_tests_cron_event" "trigger_playwright_tests_cron_event" "rate(5 minutes)" "playwright_tests" "aws_cloudwatch_event_target" "state_machine_target" 1 "FARGATE" true and according to IAM role infra/event_bridge_iam.tf resource {
  name = policy = jsonencode({
    Version = ,
    Statement = [
      { : , : [ , , ], : },
      { : , : [ , , ], : },
      { : , : [ ,
        ], : },
    ]
  })
}

resource {
  role = aws_iam_role.role_for_event_bridge.name
  policy_arn = aws_iam_policy.policy_for_event_bridge.arn
}

resource {
  name = assume_role_policy = data.aws_iam_policy_document.assume_role_policy.json

  tags = {
    Project = }
} "aws_iam_policy" "policy_for_event_bridge" "policy_for_event_bridge" "2012-10-17" Effect "Allow" Action "ecs:RunTask" "ecs:StopTask" "ecs:DescribeTasks" Resource "*" Effect "Allow" Action "events:PutTargets" "events:PutRule" "events:DescribeRule" Resource "*" Effect "Allow" Action "iam:PassRole" Resource "*" "aws_iam_role_policy_attachment" "event_bridge_attach" "aws_iam_role" "role_for_event_bridge" "role_for_event_bridge" "playwright_tests" Deployment Now we are ready to apply everything. Just run: terraform plan to see the resources which will be created and then: terraform apply type yes The last step is to build and push your docker container. Go to: chose your repo and click https://us-west-2.console.aws.amazon.com/ecr/repositories?region=us-west-2 View push commands It's really simple step. Now we have our image pushed to ECR. You can automate this process with smth like CircleCI. There we go! Now we have our sanity checks up and running. If you want to destroy whole resources that you've created just run: terraform destroy Further steps... I don't want to bloat this article. So I suggest you implement notification in case of test failure by yourself. In my company, I used StepFunctions for this purpose. Also I highly recommend you official to start writing your own tests. Playwright documentation Github repo for this article: https://github.com/Xezed/playwright_tests Thank you for reading. Cheers! :)

Sanity-Checks with Playwright in Fargate container on schedule

Kubernetes has become the name of the game when it comes to container orchestration. It allows teams to deploy and scale applications to meet changes in demand while providing a great developer experience. The key to handling modern dynamic, scalable workloads in Kubernetes is a networking stack that can deliver API management, a service mesh and an ingress controller. allows users to manage the routing rules that control external user access to the service in a Kubernetes cluster from the same platform. Kong Ingress Controller This article will look at how you can use for full-stack application deployments with Kubernetes. By full-stack, we mean Kong can handle: Kong Containers Container networking Pod networking Service networking Host networking Load balancing Rate limiting HTTPS redirects Let's get started by creating our cluster. Installing Kind Kubernetes With Kind, you can run local Kubernetes clusters using Docker. It was designed for testing Kubernetes but is perfect for local K8 development like we will do in this example. There are quite a few ways to install Kind, depending on your operating system. If you have a Mac, you can install it quickly with Homebrew: brew install kind If you are on a Windows machine and have Chocolatey installed, the command is just as simple: choco install kind If you have Go and Docker installed, you can run the following command to install kind: GO111MODULE= go get sigs.k8s.io/kind@v0 "on" .10 .0 For more installation options, see the . Kind quickstart Once Kind is installed, you need to create a cluster:: kind create cluster After making the cluster, you can interact with it using kubectl. To list your clusters, run: kind get clusters It should return kind, the default cluster context name. Now run the following to point kubectl to the kind cluster: kind kubeconfig export If you set up Kind correctly, running the following command will give you details about your cluster: kubectl cluster-info Installing Kong Ingress Controller Now that we have a cluster running, we can install Kong quickly by applying the manifest directly with the following command: kubectl create -f https: //bit.ly/k4k8s Now run the following command to get details on kong-proxy: kubectl -n kong get service kong-proxy You will notice that the external IP is still pending. Kind only exposes the Kubernetes API endpoint, and so the service is not accessible outside of the cluster. Since we are using Kind, we will have to run a port forward to do this. This command does not get daemonized, so you will have to open another console window to run other commands. kubectl -n kong port-forward --address localhost, svc/kong-proxy : 0.0 .0 .0 8080 80 Next, we need to set an environment variable with the IP address from where we want to access Kong. This will be localhost since we are using a port forward. PROXY_IP=localhost: export 8080 You can curl the IP now or visit in a browser and should see: { : } "message" "no Route matched with those values" Deploying an Example App Now let's deploy something that will return some results. Kubernetes has multiple example applications available in a . We are going to deploy the with these commands: Github repo Guestbook App kubectl apply -f https: kubectl apply -f https: kubectl apply -f https: kubectl apply -f https: //k8s.io/examples/application/guestbook/mongo-deployment.yaml //k8s.io/examples/application/guestbook/mongo-service.yaml //k8s.io/examples/application/guestbook/frontend-deployment.yaml //k8s.io/examples/application/guestbook/frontend-service.yaml Now, if we run kubectl get services, we will see two new services: We can also query the pods to make sure their status is ‘Running’: kubectl get pods -l app.kubernetes.io/name=guestbook -l app.kubernetes.io/component=frontend To test it, you can run another port forward really quick with: kubectl port-forward svc/frontend : 8000 80 You will find the guestbook running at . We will now set up the Kong Ingress Controller. http://localhost:8000/ Expose the App to the Internet Now we can use the Kong Ingress Controller, so we need to set up a resource to serve traffic. We can create a proxy for our application with the following command: echo | kubectl apply -f - '
apiVersion: networking.k8s.io/v1
kind: Ingress
metadata:
  name: guestbook
  annotations:
    konghq.com/strip-path: "true"
    kubernetes.io/ingress.class: kong
spec:
  rules:
  - http:
  	paths:
  	- path: /
        pathType: Prefix
        backend:
          service:
            name: frontend
            port:
              number: 80
' Now you will see the guestbook app at . http://localhost:8080/ Using Plugins as Services in Kong With Kong Ingress, we can execute plugins on the service level. That way, Kong will execute a plugin whenever a request is sent to a specific service, no matter which ingress path from where it came. If we want to add rate limits to our app, we can add the rate limiting plugin to our Kubernetes installation with the following command: echo | kubectl apply -f -
kongplugin.configuration.konghq.com/rl-by-ip created "
apiVersion: configuration.konghq.com/v1
kind: KongPlugin
metadata:
  name: rl-by-ip
config:
  minute: 5
  limit_by: ip
  policy: local
plugin: rate-limiting
" Once you install the plugin, you can apply the konghq.com/plugins annotation on our Guestbook with the following command: kubectl patch svc frontend \
  -p '{"metadata":{"annotations":{"konghq.com/plugins": "rl-by-ip\n"}}}' If you curl the guestbook app, you will see that rate limiting has been set up. If you plan on testing the Guestbook frequently during this example, you may want to set the limit higher, or you will run into a Kong error that says the rate limit has been exceeded. Configuring an HTTPS Redirect So far, the app is running on HTTP, and we want it to run on HTTPS. If we want to tell Kong to redirect all the HTTP requests, we can update its annotations to HTTPS and issue a 301 redirect with this command to patch the ingress entry: kubectl patch ingress guestbook -p '{"metadata":{"annotations":{"konghq.com/protocols":"https","konghq.com/https-redirect-status-code":"301"}}}' To test this using kind, set up another port-forward with the following command: kubectl -n kong port-forward --address localhost, svc/kong-proxy : 0.0 .0 .0 8443 443 You can now access a "secure" version of the guestbook at . It will not have a certificate, so you will run into warnings in your browser. Let's look at how we can add certificates. https://localhost:8443 Adding the Cert-Manager You can install the cert-manager with the following command: kubectl apply -f https: //github.com/jetstack/cert-manager/releases/download/v1.3.1/cert-manager.yaml Once the images pull down, you can verify that it is running with this command: kubectl get all -n cert-manager You should see something like this: Since we have Kubernetes running locally with a port-forward, the IP address for the Kong proxy is 127.0.0.1. If you weren’t using a port forward, you could run the following command to find the IP address: kubectl get -o jsonpath= service -n kong kong-proxy "{.status.loadBalancer.ingress[0].ip}" But since we are using a port forward, this command will return nothing. If this were in production, you would then set up DNS records to resolve your domain to the IP address you just retrieved. Once that is done, you can request a certificate from Let's Encrypt by running the following, making sure to change the email: echo | kubectl apply -f - "apiVersion: cert-manager.io/v1alpha2
kind: ClusterIssuer
metadata:
  name: letsencrypt-prod
  namespace: cert-manager
spec:
  acme:
    email: user@example.com #change this email
    privateKeySecretRef:
      name: letsencrypt-prod
    server: https://acme-v02.api.letsencrypt.org/directory
    solvers:
    - http01:
      ingress:
        class: kong" Next, you will have to update your ingress resource to provide a certificate with the following command, changing the domain to your own: echo | kubectl apply -f - '
apiVersion: networking.k8s.io/v1
kind: Ingress
metadata:
  name: guestbook-example-com
  annotations:
    kubernetes.io/tls-acme: "true"
    cert-manager.io/cluster-issuer: letsencrypt-prod
    kubernetes.io/ingress.class: kong
spec:
  tls:
  - secretName: guestbook-example-com
    hosts:
    - demo.example.com #change this domain/subdomain
  rules:
  - host: demo.example.com #change this domain/subdomain
    http:
      paths:
      - path: /
        pathType: Prefix
        backend:
          service:
            name: guestbook
            port:
              number: 80
' Once that is updated, the cert-manager will start to provision the certificate and the certificate will be ready soon. Missing a Tool in Your K8s Stack? Kong may be the missing tool in your Kubernetes stack. can implement authentication, HTTPS redirects, security certificates, and more across all your Kubernetes clusters. Using Kong, you can control your containers, networking, load balancing, rate limiting and more from one platform. It truly is the choice for full-stack ingress deployments. Kong Ingress Controller Also published on: https://dzone.com/articles/kubernetes-full-stack-example-with-kong-ingress-co

How to Use Kong for Full-stack Application Deployments with Kubernetes

If you’ve ever worked with complex high-load cloud infrastructure in Microsoft Azure, you probably understand how important it is to have an appropriate monitoring system. Unfortunately, there aren’t always ready-made solutions that can guarantee the proper coverage of all required metrics and provide the option for extra customization. Eventually, if you find them, they will likely cost your company a fortune, particularly if you have a complex multicomponent infrastructure. First, here’s a few words about the company and why we’ve implemented this solution, which will give you a better understanding of what we’re dealing with. Wirex's entire platform is hosted in the Microsoft Azure cloud. We have a complex multicomponent infrastructure with thousands of transactions and a million events each day. As a fintech product with 3.5 million clients, our platform uses cryptocurrencies in addition to traditional currencies, so we can't allow customers to experience any difficulties during transactions or any delays when exchanging currencies. This imposes certain risks and challenges which means it requires specific monitoring systems that need to be more advanced and dynamic. What problems did we try to solve with the implementation of the monitoring system in Microsoft Azure? Here’s the list of our main targets: Multicomponent monitoring, including metric collection and coverage of the maximum possible number of components in our cloud. Scale Set monitoring (part of the Service Fabric cluster). Without properly monitoring Scale Sets, we can't get full tracking of our cluster. Monitoring of microservices. Our platform itself and our entire product consist of many separate services that are interconnected and work in a single cluster. Unfortunately, Microsoft Azure doesn't provide the ability to monitor microservices. Continuous monitoring deployment. We want to simplify our monitoring system's deployment process, as the monitoring infrastructure's failing would lead to blind spots. Continuous monitoring upgrade. We want to be able to release updates as quickly as possible, often in less than a minute; that's why it should be continuous. Alerting. Our goal is to use alerts to cover every Scale Set instance and each service. For example, we want to have thresholds set up on 90% of using compute resources; in this case, we want to determine the particular microservices on a development stage and react immediately if there begins to be a high consumption. We can't afford this service to be deployed to the production because it will significantly impact the product. Before going any further, let's take a brief look at what we’re dealing with: More than 150 Virtual Machines Scale Sets (This is not just a Virtual Machine, this is a set of instances, which, in our case, can be up to 25 Virtual Machines) Service Fabriс clusters include about 12 active environments on which development is carried out, and this includes production. There are about 50 applications with up to 370 microservices in each environment. Our goal is to monitor every single Virtual Machine instance, each microservice, and receive metrics for every single environment. What tools can be used for infrastructure monitoring in Microsoft Azure? Let's start at the beginning with tools Microsoft offers from the box. Azure has a standard , a great instrument that allows you to get different insights on various services such as Key Vaults, Storage Accounts, VM, Service Health Statuses among all resources. This tool also gives the ability to set up auto-scale for scaling resources, which is really useful to have all in one place. What’s more, you can configure alerts. Azure Monitor has convenient settings for sending notifications regarding service health statuses to any preferred messenger. An added bonus is that it can be easily integrated with our 3rd party products. Azure Monitor Another essential tool from Microsoft is , and I think it’s worth mentioning as it's a unique tool with a unique script language. It provides a large number of modules to work with Azure, and you can even cover aspects and metrics of resources that are sometimes hidden and hard to find, such as various different customization tools. PowerShell Of course, Microsoft provides a lot more, but we are not going to cover them all. The main point to understand is that we’re still not able to get all the information we need. In addition to Microsoft tools, we have third-party products that we use to monitor our infrastructure. . This is our main tool for visualization. It provides dashboards that display the monitoring of specific resources. Grafana . We'll talk about this product later. Prometheus is used for log analytics and for working with Big Data on applications. Splunk provides custom scripts for alerting. PowerShell . With the help of Grafana, we can partially get metrics using this integration. Azure Monitoring Integration is a stack for additional integrations and manipulations. ELK What metrics did we collect when implementing our additional monitoring system? First of all, we had all of our Application Insights metrics in one place. Azure cache, databases, Virtual Machines, Application Services, Key Vaults, Storage Accounts, and many more. Below is just a brief look at what we have visualized and customized in Grafana. Unfortunately, we were unable to display information on Scale Sets and microservices and this information is not only fundamental but it’s also a goal target of our cluster. The issue is that the integration with Azure Monitor does not provide metrics on output from Virtual Machine Scale Sets. We also didn't know what was happening with our microservices on each instance; so, we tried to solve this problem. What kind of solution did we come up with? Our first answer is . It's an Open Source product, and, in the world of Open Source projects, it’s quite popular in the monitoring industry, almost as popular as  Kubernetes is for cluster orchestration. Prometheus How does the Prometheus work? According to the official documentation, Prometheus scrapes metrics from instrumented jobs, either directly or via an intermediary push gateway for short-lived jobs. It stores all scraped samples locally and runs rules over this data to either aggregate and record new time series from existing data or generate alerts. or other API consumers can then be used to visualize the collected data. Grafana Source: https://prometheus.io/docs/introduction/overview/ What’s useful is that Prometheus includes a local on-disk time-series database and optionally integrates with remote storage systems. It might sound like a disadvantage initially, but in general, it’s good to have the extra security in regards to the setup process, as it means there will be fewer points for database failure as well as a direct read/write operation. Of course, a big plus is that Prometheus can discover Scale Sets automatically with Azure configurations. Why is this a plus for us? Usually, when you write a Prometheus configuration, you have to set each target individually, using the target IP address with its name. But when you have an infrastructure with more than 150 Virtual Machine Scale Sets with more than 20 instances in each set, that's not so convenient. The question is how to discover each Scale Set, especially the Scale Sets that appear after auto-scaling? Furthermore, would you have the ability to monitor these new, extra Scale Set? The answer is “yes” because it will be automatically discovered, and named as it is in Grafana, which is extremely useful. Prometheus also has a customization tool called PromQL, which allows you to customize your queries and get the information that you need. So, here’s the list of main Prometheus benefits: It’s an Open Source system monitoring and alerting toolkit. It supports fast and reliable deployment through containerized infrastructure. Azure SD configurations allow you to discover and retrieve scrape targets from Azure. It includes a local on-disk time-series database. Grafana supports querying Prometheus (PromQL). How does Prometheus know what’s happening in each particular instance? And how do we connect Prometheus with our instances? The answer is with Windows Exporter. Windows Exporter is an extra tool developed by the Prometheus community. It's deployed on each instance of the Virtual Machine Scale Set. And this service collects metrics that were previously set in a pre-deploy. Here's a brief view of available collectors. The most important thing here is that we’re able to display information on processes. Our microservice exists on an instance as a process, so getting metrics for processes allows us to monitor them. We get information specifically for services such as its CPU time, working set, virtual bites, i/o, display of when the process was started, etc. Also, if you have extra deployed services on your instance that need to be monitored, this isn’t a problem. How Windows Exporter and configuration can be deployed in every instance In these situations, we use Terraform, DSC configurations, and Chocolatey. Terraform is our main "infrastructure as a code" tool for managing our infrastructure's deployment in the cloud. DSC is a powerful PowerShell extension and a very flexible solution from Microsoft that allows you to manage server configurations. Chocolatey or Choco is probably the most popular package manager for downloading additional applications for Windows. We deploy DSC configuration with the described procedure to install an exporter as a Virtual Machine extension in Azure. What do these tools give us? It allows us to manage the infrastructure and control our resources. We can deploy our exporter on every instance and configure continuous configuration deployment. It’s a good advantage as we get rid of all drift configurations, so all our instances are consistent with each other, and that's really remarkable. How can we visualize the monitoring process? Here is a monitoring scheme. On the left, you can see a Service Fabric cluster which consists of several Scale Sets; it could even be adopted for Kubernetes. Each Scale Set has its own installed Exporter and, of course, deployed application microservices. Then we have our Prometheus with TSDB and Grafana, which use Prometheus as a data source. What does Exporter do? It runs on localhost on a specific port (9128, by default) and collects all predefined metrics, and posts them. Prometheus then scrapes metrics with configured scrape intervals through HTTP, which could be 5-10-15 seconds, so you can get instant updates. For example, you could configure your entire monitoring infrastructure as a separate local network and whitelist required connections through firewall rules without exposing resources to the public. Lastly, you need to configure Grafana to use Prometheus as a data source and customize output through PromQL in order to display all the data on the beautiful dashboards. How to automate deployment? Here’s how we configured the monitoring system in Continuous mode. We have a BitBucket repository with Ansible playbooks, which describes the installation process and configuration for Prometheus. We also have TeamCity as our main Continuous Integration (CI) tool that we use for our deployment project builds, allowing them to deploy and update. We have Ansible as a configuration management tool for the deployment of Prometheus of Grafana as Docker containers. Here, Ansible could be a separate instance, or it could be configured as a TeamCity runner; either option is possible. If you select a runner, it means it will be adapted as a TeamCity plugin. How does the pipeline work? It’s actually quite simple. TeamCity pulls configuration for our Prometheus configuration and then it triggers Ansible, which is deploying Prometheus as a Docker container. All this running through TeamCity agents. This is how you can implement your automation pipeline. It could take less than 20 seconds to deploy a new container or update it with our pre-deployed configuration. What have we got as a result? Thanks to Grafana and Prometheus, we've got all the metrics we need, and more for all our Virtual Machine Scale Sets instances, plus we’ve got information for the instances themselves and for each microservice in every instance. We monitor about 370 microservices in every environment, from development to production and we’ve got metrics for all Scale Sets. We have a better view of what is happening on production, and, as a bonus, we understand what's going on with each service on development before it’s deployed on the production. This means we can be notified and react quickly. We’re not worried about targeting and auto-naming if auto-scaling goes up or down on our Virtual Machine Scale Sets, we’re still able to monitor each service and instance. Also, we've got configured thresholds alerts, and we are able to receive alerts for a huge number of different events. We also get great customization options. Grafana provides us with the ability to build dashboards as we want, writing the queries to receive all the needed metrics. And thanks to these tools, we can continuously deploy, re-work, re-design and re-upgrade our infrastructure.

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