Red Hat Enterprise Linux through Red Hat Developer is designed specifically so that software can be developed on the same platform to which will be deployed—and here’s why it’s the best option for you.
Continue reading Why you should be developing on Red Hat Enterprise Linux
Getting an SSL certificate for your web server has traditionally been a something of an effort. You need to correctly generate a weird thing called a certificate signing request (CSR), submit it to the web page of your chosen Certificate Authority (CA), wait for them to sign and generate a certificate, work out where to put the certificate to configure it for your web server—making sure you also configure any required intermediate CA certificates—and then restart the web server. If you got all that right, you then need to enter a calendar entry so you’ll remember to go through the process again in (say) a year’s time. Even some of the biggest names in IT can mess up this process.
With new CAs like Let’s Encrypt, along with some supporting software, the rigmarole around SSL certificates becomes a thing of the past. The technology behind this revolution is Automatic Certificate Management Environment (ACME), a new IETF standard (RFC 8555) client/server protocol which allows TLS certificates to be automatically obtained, deployed, and renewed. In this protocol, an “agent” running on the server that needs an SSL certificate will talk to to the CA’s ACME server over HTTP.
A popular method for using ACME on your Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 server is certbot. Certbot is a standalone ACME agent that is configured out-of-the-box to work with Let’s Encrypt and can work with Apache httpd, Nginx, and a wide variety of other web (and non-web!) servers. The certbot authors have an excellent guide describing how to set up certbot with httpd on RHEL7.
In this tutorial, I’ll show an alternative method—the mod_md module—which is an ACME agent implemented as a module for Apache httpd, tightly integrated with mod_ssl, and is supported today in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7. The mod_md module was implemented by Stefan Eissing—a prolific developer who also added HTTP/2 support to httpd—and contributed to the Apache Software Foundation, becoming a standard part of any new installation since httpd version 2.4.30.
Continue reading “Using Let’s Encrypt with Apache httpd on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7”
Have you tried Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 (RHEL8) yet? Read on to learn how to quickly set up a LAMP stack on RHEL8 so you can play around with the new features built into the operating system.
A LAMP stack is made up of four main components and some glue. The first main component in a LAMP stack (the “L”) is Linux. In my example, I’m using Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 for that, which gives me a secure operating system, a modern programming environment, and a user-friendly set of tools to control it.
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Building responsiveness applications is a never-ending task. With the rise of powerful and multicore CPUs, more raw power is available for applications to consume. In Java, threads are used to make the application work on multiple tasks concurrently. A developer starts a Java thread in the program, and tasks are assigned to this thread to get processed. Threads can do a variety of tasks, such as read from a file, write to a database, take input from a user, and so on.
In this article, we’ll explain more about threads and introduce Project Loom, which supports high-throughput and lightweight concurrency in Java to help simplify writing scalable software.
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If you’re like me—a developer who works with customers who rely on the tried-and-true Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), works with containerized applications, and also prefers to work with Fedora Linux as their desktop operating system—you’re excited by the announcement of the Universal Base Images (UBI). This article shows how UBI actually works, by building the container image for a simple PHP application.
With UBI, you can build and redistribute container images based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux without requiring a Red Hat subscription. Users of UBI-based container images do not need Red Hat subscriptions. No more extra work creating CentOS-based container images for your community projects or for your customers that prefer self-support.
I tested all these steps on my personal Fedora 29 system, and they should work on any Linux distribution. I am also a big fan of the new container tools such as Podman, which should be available to your favorite Linux distribution. If you are working on a Windows or MacOS system, you can replace the Podman commands with Docker.
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Many Linux services (like D-Bus, PostgreSQL, Docker, etc.) are made accessible locally using a UNIX socket. In this article, we’ll show how you can access such services remotely from .NET using SSH port forwarding.
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If you’ve ever worked with your hands, you know that you can’t do the job right without the right tools. That adage carries over quite well to software development as well. The right tools can make the difference between success or failure, regardless of the underlying technology. In the Kubernetes ecosystem, more and more tools are being introduced as folks find ways to solve a common problem. This article looks are four of those tools.
Continue reading “Command-line tools for Kubernetes: kubectl, stern, kubectx, kubens”
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 comes with modules as a packaging concept that allows system administrators to select the desired software version from multiple packaged versions. This article will show you how to manage Perl as a module.
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I have been talking about systemd in a container for a long time. Way back in 2014, I wrote “Running systemd within a Docker Container.” And, a couple of years later, I wrote another article, “Running systemd in a non-privileged container,” explaining how things hadn’t gotten much better. In that article, I stated, “Sadly, two years later if you google Docker systemd, this is still the article people see—it’s time for an update.” I also linked to a talk about how upstream Docker and upstream systemd would not compromise. In this article, I’ll look at the progress that’s been made and how Podman can help.
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In a previous article, “OpenShift 4.0 Developer Preview on AWS is up and running” I included instructions for using macOS or Linux to install and manage your Red Hat OpenShift 4.0 cluster. Since I recently added a Windows 10 PC to my technology mix, I decided to try to use Windows as my only choice.
I was saddened to learn that the installer, openshift-install, isn’t available for Windows. But, like any developer who won’t be denied; I found a way.
Continue reading “Red Hat OpenShift 4.0 Developer Preview on AWS: Up and running with Windows”
