January 2019 - withDave

January 21, 2019November 11, 2019

Automating AWS Lightsail backups using snapshots and Lambda

Update 11/11/19 – limited automatic snapshots now available.

Some of the most glaring omissions from Lightsail are scheduled tasks or triggers – which would provide the ability to automate backups. Competitors in this space like DigitalOcean are all set, as they offer a backup option, whereas for AWS I’m assuming they hope you’ll shift over to EC2 as fast as possible to get the extra bells and whistles.

Of course you can manually create snapshots – just log in and hit the button. It’s just the scheduling that’s missing.

I have one Lightsail server that’s been running for 6 months now, and it’s all been rosy. Except – I had been using a combination of first AWS-CLI automated backups (which wasn’t ideal as it needed a machine to run them), and then some GUI automation via Skeddly. However – while Skeddly works just fine, I’d rather DIY this problem using Lambda and keep everything in cloud native functions.

January 20, 2019March 4, 2019

Using the Cloudflare API to provide free Dynamic DNS with Windows and Powershell

This post details my switch over to using Powershell and Cloudflare to update a DNS record to a server’s current IP. This effectively emulates dyndns for this host – except it’s free.

There are a load of other options out there, which even include some simple-but-quite-clunky apps for domain registrars like NameCheap; but installing third party software is not the route I want to take.

I previously had my target domain (let’s call it targetdomain.com) hosted on a Linux box, and used SSH to update the DNS settings via a Windows server. This worked well for three years without a blip – but was clunky. I was using a scheduled task to start a bat file, which then ran Putty to run the shell script…to update a config on a server which was only hosting the domain to serve this purpose.

Although the scheduler>bat>shell tasks have been running well for years, it’s time to simplify!

I’ve been using Cloudflare for years, and set aside time to write a script to use their service for this purpose. As it turns out, people have done this for years – so I’ve taken one off the shelf.

January 8, 2019March 4, 2019

Migrating a private repository from Bitbucket to GitHub with Git

As GitHub private repositories have just become free, I’m jumping on the bandwagon and shipping over a few of the repos I have on Bitbucket to reduce the number of providers I store code with.

The end result – a private GitHub repository with all the metadata from the old Bitbucket repository – note we have maintained the last commit from 10 months ago

The option below uses the shell to migrate the repo, but you can also use the GitHub importer if you prefer an automated solution (you’ll just have to wait while it does it).