Last week I decided I wanted to try out forgejo actions to build this blog instead of using webhooks, so I looked the documentation and started playing with it until I had it working as I wanted. This post is to describe how I’ve installed and configured a forgejo runner, how I’ve added an oci organization to my instance to build, publish and mirror container images and added a couple of additional organizations (actions and docker for now) to mirror interesting actions. The changes made to build the site using actions will be documented on a separate post, as I’ll be using this entry to test the new setup on the blog project. Installing the runnerThe first thing I’ve done is to install a runner on my server, I decided to use the OCI image installation method, as it seemed to be the easiest and fastest one. The commands I’ve used to setup the runner are the following: $ cd /srv $ git clone https://forgejo.mixinet.net/blogops/forgejo-runner.git $ cd forgejo-runner $ sh ./bin/setup-runner.sh...

With all the recent buzz about DeepSeek and its capabilities, I’ve decided to give it a try using Ollama and Open WebUI on my work laptop which has an NVIDIA GPU: $ lspci | grep NVIDIA 0000:01:00.0 3D controller: NVIDIA Corporation GA107GLM [RTX A2000 8GB Laptop GPU] (rev a1) For the installation I initially I looked into the approach suggested on this article, but after reviewing it I decided to go for a docker only approach, as it leaves my system clean and updates are easier. Step 0: Install dockerI already had it on my machine, so nothing to do here. Step 1: Install the nvidia-container-toolkit packageAs it is needed to use the NVIDIA GPU with docker I followed the instructions to install the package using apt from the NVIDIA website. Step 2: Run the Open WebUI container bundled with OllamaI could install ollama directly on linux or run it on docker, but I found out that there is a container with Open WebUI bundled with Ollama, so I decided to use it instead. To start the container I’ve executed the following command: docker run -d \ -e OLLAMA_HOST="0.0.0.0:11434" -p 127.0.0.1:11434:11434 \ -p 127.0.0.1:3000:8080 \ -v ollama:/root/.ollama \ -v open-webui:/app/backend/data \ --gpus=all --name open-webui --restart always \ ghcr.io/open-webui/open-webui:ollama...

Although I am a Debian Developer (not very active, BTW) I am using Ubuntu LTS (right now version 24.04.1) on my main machine; it is my work laptop and I was told to keep using Ubuntu on it when it was assigned to me, although I don’t believe it is really necessary or justified (I don’t need support, I don’t provide support to others and I usually test my shell scripts on multiple systems if needed anyway). Initially I kept using Debian Sid on my personal laptop, but I gave it to my oldest son as the one he was using (an old Dell XPS 13) was stolen from him a year ago. I am still using Debian stable on my servers (one at home that also runs LXC containers and another one on an OVH VPS), but I don’t have a Debian Sid machine anymore and while I could reinstall my work machine, I’ve decided I’m going to try to use a system container to run Debian Sid on it. As I want to use a container instead of a VM I’ve narrowed my options to lxc or systemd-nspawn (I have docker and podman installed, but I don’t believe they are good options for running system containers). As I will want to take snapshots of the container filesystem I’ve decided to try incus instead of systemd-nspawn (I already have experience with it and while it works well it has less features than incus). Installing incusAs this is a personal system where I want to try things, instead of using the packages included with Ubuntu I’ve decided to install the ones from the zabbly incus stable repository. To do it I’ve executed the following as root: # Get the zabbly repository GPG key curl -fsSL https://pkgs.zabbly.com/key.asc -o /etc/apt/keyrings/zabbly.asc # Create the zabbly-incus-stable.sources file sh -c 'cat <<EOF > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/zabbly-incus-stable.sources Enabled: yes Types: deb URIs: https://pkgs.zabbly.com/incus/stable Suites: $(. /etc/os-release && echo ${VERSION_CODENAME}) Components: main Architectures: $(dpkg --print-architecture) Signed-By: /etc/apt/keyrings/zabbly.asc EOF'...

For a long time I’ve been using the Terminator terminal emulator on Linux machines, but last week I read a LWN article about a new emulator called Ghostty that looked interesting and I decided to give it a try. The author sells it as a fast, feature-rich and cross-platform terminal emulator that follows the zero configuration philosophy. Installation and configurationI installed the debian package for Ubuntu 24.04 from the ghostty-ubuntu project and started playing with it. The first thing I noticed is that the zero configuration part is true; I was able to use the terminal without a configuration file, although I created one to change the theme and the font size, but other than that it worked OK for me; my $HOME/.config/ghostty/config file is as simple as: font-size=14 theme=/usr/share/ghostty/themes/iTerm2 Solarized Light...

I’ve always been a fan of template engines that work with text files, mainly to work with static site generators, but also to generate code, configuration files, and other text-based files. For my own web projects I used to go with Jinja2, as all my projects were written in Python, while for static web sites I used the template engines included with the tools I was using, i.e. Liquid with Jekyll and Go Templates (based on the text/template and the html/template go packages) for Hugo. When I needed to generate code snippets or configuration files from shell scripts I used to go with sed and/or envsubst, but lately things got complicated and I started to use a command line application called tmpl that uses the Go Template Language with functions from the Sprig library. tmplI’ve been using my fork of the tmpl program to process templates on CI/CD pipelines (gitlab-ci) to generate configuration files and code snippets because it uses the same syntax used by helm (easier to use by other DevOps already familiar with the format) and the binary is small and can be easily included into the docker images used by the pipeline jobs. One interesting feature of the tmpl tool is that it can read values from command line arguments and from multiple files in different formats (YAML, JSON, TOML, etc) and merge them into a single object that can be used to render the templates. There are alternatives to the tmpl tool and I’ve looked at them (i.e. simple ones like go-template-cli or complex ones like gomplate), but I haven’t found one that fits my needs. For my next project I plan to evaluate a move to a different tool or template format, as tmpl is not being actively maintained (as I said, I’m using my own fork) and it is not included on existing GNU/Linux distributions (I packaged it for Debian and Alpine, but I don’t want to maintain something like that without an active community and I’m not interested in being the upstream myself, as I’m trying to move to Rust instead of Go as the compiled programming language for my projects). Mini JinjaLooking for alternate tools to process templates on the command line I found the minijinja rust crate, a minimal implementation of the Jinja2 template engine that also includes a small command line utility (minijinja-cli) and I believe I’ll give it a try on the future for various reasons: I’m already familiar with the Jinja2 syntax and it is widely used on the industry.On my code I can use the original Jinja2 module for Python projects and MiniJinja for Rust programs.The included command line utility is small and easy to use, and the binaries distributed by the project are good enough to add them to the docker container images used by CI/CD pipelines.As I want to move to Rust I can try to add functionalities to the existing command line client or create my own version of it if they are needed (don’t think so, but who knows)....