At my day job, I get to write a bit of code. I’m fortunate that my employer is pretty cool about letting us open source what we write, so I’m happy to announce that two of my projects have been open sourced!
The first project is an app which I wrote in PHP, it can be used to compare an arbitrary number of .ini files on a logical basis. What this means is that if you have ini files with similar contents, but the stanzas and key/value pairs are all mixed up, this utility will read in all of the .ini files that you specify, put the stanzas and their keys and values into well defined data structures, perform comparisons, and let you know what the differences are. (if any) In production, we used this to compare configuration files for Splunk from several different installations that we wanted to consolidate. Given that we had dozens of files, some having hundreds of lines, this utility saved us hours of effort and eliminated the possibility of human error. It can be found at:
https://github.com/Comcast/compare-ini-files
The next app I developed was written in Node.js and is intended for use in a high-availability environment. In most HA environments, you will have multiple servers running behind a load balancer. In order to check the health of its servers, the load balancer will usually issue an HTTP GET request to a pre-defined endpoint to make sure each server is healthy. But what if… the server didn’t have any GET endpoints? This is actually the case with Apache NiFi, which only provides HTTP POST endpoints. What now?
That’s where this utility comes in–it starts an HTTP server on the port of your choice, and can be used to turn a GET request into a POST request (with a zero byte payload), send it to a target port on the same server, and relay back the HTTP response. This in effect proxies a GET request as a POST, and returns the result. It’s a bit of an odd way to go about it, but it let us more effectively use Apache NiFi in a high-availability environment and did not break any workflow, so we’re calling that a win. That app can be found at:
https://github.com/Comcast/http-health-check-microservice
I hope these are of use to anyone who stumbles across them. If you have any feedback or comments, feel free to leave them below or on GitHub!