Drupal VM has been hitting its stride this year; after adding experimental Docker support in 4.5, Docker usage has been refined in 4.6 (with a more stable and useful drupal-vm Docker image , along with a few other things:

• Drupal VM now supports running inside a Debian 9 'Stretch' Vagrant box ( Packer build here , and Vagrant Cloud box here ), or in a Docker container based on Debian 9 .
• The official Docker image includes a script that lets you set up a fresh Drupal

From time to time, there's a security patch or other update that's critical to apply ASAP to all your servers. If you use Ansible to automate infrastructure work, then updates are painless—even across dozens, hundreds, or thousands of instances! I've written about this a little bit in the past, in relation to protecting against the shellshock vulnerability , but that was specific to one package.

I have an inventory script that pulls together all the servers I manage for personal projects (

If you run your infrastructure inside Amazon's cloud (AWS), and you need to mount a shared filesystem on multiple servers (e.g. for Drupal's shared files folder, or Magento's media folder), Amazon Elastic File System (EFS) is a reliable and inexpensive solution. EFS is basically a 'hosted NFS mount' that can scale as your directory grows, and mounts are free—so, unlike many other shared filesystem solutions, there's no per-server

Generally speaking, I'm against performing major OS upgrades on my Linux servers; there are often little things that get broken, or configurations gone awry, when you attempt an upgrade... and part of the point of automation (or striving towards a 12-factor app) is that you don't 'upgrade'—you destroy and rebuild with a newer version.

But, there are still cases where you have legacy servers running one little task that you haven't yet automated entirely

I recently had to build an Ansible playbook that takes in a massive inventory structure (read from a YAML file), modifies a specific key in that file, then dumps the file back to disk. There are some other ways that may be more efficient standalone (e.g. using a separate Python/PHP/Ruby/etc. script and a good YAML library), but since I had to do a number of other things in this Ansible playbook, I thought it would keep it simple if I could

The original Raspberry Pi Camera model v1.3 came from the factory set to ∞ (infinity) focus, so when you used it out of the box for something like a landscape timelapse rig, or for security or monitoring purposes (where the Pi is at least 5 meters away from the subjects it's recording), everything would look crisp and sharp.

For many fixed-focus cameras and lower-end camera sensors, it makes sense to set them to infinity focus; closer objects are still

From time to time, I need to dynamically build a list of strings (or a list of other things) using Ansible's set_fact module.

Since set_fact is a module like any other, you can use a with_items loop to loop over an existing list, and pull out a value from that list to add to another list.

For example, today I needed to retrieve a list of all the AWS EC2 security groups in a region, then loop through them, building a

Dockerfile s have been able to use ARG s to allow passing in parameters during a docker build using the CLI argument --build-arg for some time. But until recently (Docker's 17.05 release, to be precise), you weren't able to use an ARG to specify all or part of your Dockerfile 's mandatory FROM command.

But since the pull request Allow ARG in FROM was merged, you can now specify an image / repository to use at runtime. This is