Tag: Coding

Multipass cloud-init

Multipass is pretty useful but what a pain this was to figure out, due to Ubuntu’s Node.js package not working with AWS-CDK.

Multipass lets you manage VM in Ubuntu and can take cloud-init scripts as a parameter. I wanted an Ubuntu LTS instance with AWS CDK, which needs Node.js and python3-venv.

#cloud-config
packages:
  - python3-venv
  - unzip

package_update: true

package_upgrade: true

write_files:
  - path: "/etc/environment"
    append: true
    content: |
      export PATH=\
      /opt/node-v20.11.1-linux-x64/bin:\
      /usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:\
      /usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:\
      /usr/games:/usr/local/games:\
      /snap/bin

runcmd:
  - wget https://nodejs.org/dist/v20.11.1/node-v20.11.1-linux-x64.tar.xz 
  - tar xvf node-v20.11.1-linux-x64.tar.xz -C /opt
  - export PATH=/opt/node-v20.11.1-linux-x64/bin:$PATH
  - npm install -g npm@latest
  - npm install -g aws-cdk
  - git config --system user.name "Dougie Richardson"
  - git config --system user.email "xx@xxxxxxxxx.com"
  - git config --system init.defaultBranch main
  - wget https://awscli.amazonaws.com/awscli-exe-linux-x86_64.zip
  - unzip awscli-exe-linux-x86_64.zip
  - ./aws/install

Save that as cdk.yaml and spin up an new instance:

multipass launch --name cdk --cloud-init cdk.yaml

There’s a couple useful things to note if you’re checking this out:

Inside the VM there’s a useful log to assist debugging /var/log/cloud-init-output.log.
While YAML has lots of ways to split text over multiple lines, when you don’t want space use a backslash.

Shell into the new VM with multipass shell cdk, then we can configure programmatic access and bootstrap CDK.

aws sso configure
aws sso login --profile profile_name
aws sts get-caller-identity --profile profile_name
aws configure get region --profile profile_name

The last two commands give the account and region to bootstrap:

cdk bootstrap aws://account_number/region --profile profile_name

March 24, 2024

Setup a Multipass CDK Environment
I want to be able to connect to the environment using Visual Studio Code, so first we need to create a SSH key:
```
ssh-keygen -t rsa
```
We need a configuration YAML, replace <generated ssh-rsa key> with the above key, saved as cloud-init.yaml:
```
groups:
  - vscode
runcmd:
  - adduser ubuntu vscode
ssh_authorized_keys:
  - ssh-rsa <generated ssh-rsa key>
```
Assuming you’ve got Multipass installed (if not sudo snap install multipass) then:
```
multipass launch mantic --name ubuntu-cdk --cloud-init 
```
We’ll come back to Visual Studio Code later but first lets set everything up in the VM. We need to install aws-cli which I want to use with SSO (hence why we installed Mantic).
```
multipass shell ubuntu-cdk
sudo apt install awscli
aws configure sso
```
Follow the prompts and sign in to AWS as usual. Then install CDK:
```
sudo apt install nodejs npm
sudo npm install -g aws-cdk
```
Almost there, lets bootstrap¹ (provisioning resources needed to make deployments) substituting the relevant values:
```
cdk bootstrap aws://<account>/<region> --profile <profile>
```
You should see a screen like this:

Create a new CDK application by creating a new folder, changing into it and initialising CDK:
```
cdk init app --language python
source .venv/bin/activate
python -m pip install -r requirements.txt
```
And that’s about it, except for Visual Studio Code. You’ll need to install Microsoft’s Remote-SSH extension:

You can get the IP address from multipass list, then in Code add a new SSH connection using ubuntu@<ip>:

Accept the various options presented and you’re there!
1. Bootstrapping provisions resources in your environment such as an Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) bucket for storing files and AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) roles that grant permissions needed to perform deployments. These resources get provisioned in an AWS CloudFormation stack, called the bootstrap stack. It is usually named CDKToolkit. Like any AWS CloudFormation stack, it will appear in the AWS CloudFormation console of your environment once it has been deployed. ↩︎
February 25, 2024
Rust
Picked up a book, Programming Rust (2nd Edition) by Jim Blandy, and have been working through it over the holidays (non-stop party here).

Published in late 2021, it’s surprising how much of the code doesn’t work and it isn’t encouraging to spend half an hour searching for solutions to an early worked example. Nothing in the book’s errata.

So if you’re stuck with the early “serving pages to the web” example on page 15, it was caused by a breaking change in actix-web crate‘s chrono dependency. I ended up setting the version before the change.
```
[package]
name = "actix-gcd"
version = "0.1.0"
edition = "2021"

# See more keys and their definitions at https://doc.rust-lang.org/cargo/reference/manifest.html

[dependencies]
chrono = { version = "= 0.4.29" }
actix-web = "1.0.8"
serde = { version = "1.0", features = ["derive"] }
```
Funnily the author wrote “One of Rust’s strengths is the collection of freely available library packages […]” and “[…] by naming the specific versions we tested this code against, we can ensure the code will continue to compile even as new versions of the packages are published.“. True, as long as every dependency behaves itself and it reminded me of this XKCD:

Anyway it’s a great read and these things happen. There’s updated version of the completed exercise code on Github.
January 1, 2024

Multipass cloud-init

Setup a Multipass CDK Environment

Rust