And now we are using Hugo

July 18, 2016

A quick story on this site is as follow.

Created a simple website using spring, mongo, dojo and hosted in Cloudfoundry
Moved it to Openshift
Reimplemented frontend using clojurescript
Never updated it much
Some feautures stopped working
Decided to focus development somewhere else
Decided to use github pages and Hugo to host the blog
Here we are

Hugo makes sense to me because all my articles were written in markdown before, though there are a couple of things that don’t work the same, it shouldn’t be that hard.

Now what I needed shouldn’t be that difficult either

All the articles where store in a collection blogEntry so I only had to get the data out of mongo
And map it to a Hugo equivalent. Hugo is pretty simple:
- you create a file .md and name of the file becomes url
- file content has a header and what not but mainly you write markdown
Make Hugo generate site content and upload it to github pages
Finally update my cname record to point to github instead of redhat and tada this (will) should be up and running

So I had to endure a couple of things worth writting about.

How I got the data out of Openshift
How I generated the content

I found it so difficult to connect from a remote machine to Openshift, I am sure I saw somewhere people doing tunneling or something in that direction. But in the end the data was the only thing needed. So I use RockMongo and generated a .js files.

I load it to a local mongo database since it would be easier (or so I thought). Then I have come to an age where having to install stuff sounds too much, and since Docker is so hip nowadays and trying to learn new stuff gave it a chance.

Running docker with boot2docker in a Mac always is a pain. So there’s a lot of indirection, for example I had to use Docker in Virtual Box, once you follow all the guidelines for Mac you always forget how to connect from your local machine to Docker. So have handy this cli always.

$ eval $(docker-machine env default)

given that default is the name of virtual box machine Now trying the line was torture

$ docker run --name database -v /Users/luisrm/prj/per/docker/var/mongodata:/data/db -d mongo

It’s supposed to run but then when was verifying that it was up and running

$ docker ps
CONTAINER ID        IMAGE               COMMAND             CREATED             STATUS              PORTS               NAMES

Bamn, nada! Driving me crazy. So more cli you can look at the logs

$ docker logs -f database
2016-07-18T20:35:46.508+0000 I CONTROL  [initandlisten] MongoDB starting : pid=1 port=27017 dbpath=/data/db 64-bit host=a8faaa94bdc6
2016-07-18T20:35:46.508+0000 I CONTROL  [initandlisten] db version v3.2.8
2016-07-18T20:35:46.508+0000 I CONTROL  [initandlisten] git version: ed70e33130c977bda0024c125b56d159573dbaf0
2016-07-18T20:35:46.508+0000 I CONTROL  [initandlisten] OpenSSL version: OpenSSL 1.0.1e 11 Feb 2013
2016-07-18T20:35:46.508+0000 I CONTROL  [initandlisten] allocator: tcmalloc
2016-07-18T20:35:46.508+0000 I CONTROL  [initandlisten] modules: none
2016-07-18T20:35:46.508+0000 I CONTROL  [initandlisten] build environment:
2016-07-18T20:35:46.508+0000 I CONTROL  [initandlisten]     distmod: debian71
2016-07-18T20:35:46.508+0000 I CONTROL  [initandlisten]     distarch: x86_64
2016-07-18T20:35:46.508+0000 I CONTROL  [initandlisten]     target_arch: x86_64
2016-07-18T20:35:46.508+0000 I CONTROL  [initandlisten] options: {}
2016-07-18T20:35:46.529+0000 I STORAGE  [initandlisten] exception in initAndListen: 98 Unable to create/open lock file: /data/db/mongod.lock errno:13 Permission denied Is a mongod instance already running?, terminating
2016-07-18T20:35:46.529+0000 I CONTROL  [initandlisten] dbexit:  rc: 100

now that gave me some shed on what’s going on, apparently though it was mounted permissions and what non sense still couldn’t acquired the lock. Doing some stack overflow research I ended up on github bugs mentioning that mounting directly wouldn’t work but you could create a docker volume (whatever that means)

$ docker volume create --name mongodbdata

and finally you run it with the volume you created and works

$ docker run --name database -v /Users/luisrm/prj/per/docker/var/mongodata:/data/db -d mongo
ae380df78141
$ docker ps
CONTAINER ID        IMAGE               COMMAND                  CREATED             STATUS              PORTS                      NAMES
ae380df78141        mongo               "/entrypoint.sh mongo"   4 seconds ago       Up 3 seconds        0.0.0.0:27017->27017/tcp   database

Now you have to remember one thing, this container is not running on your machine, is listening on port 27017 but of the Virtual Box machine

$ mongo localhost:27017
MongoDB shell version: 3.2.0
connecting to: localhost:27017/test
2016-07-20T10:31:23.328-0400 W NETWORK  [thread1] Failed to connect to 127.0.0.1:27017, reason: errno:61 Connection refused
2016-07-20T10:31:23.328-0400 E QUERY    [thread1] Error: couldn't connect to server localhost:27017, connection attempt failed :
connect@src/mongo/shell/mongo.js:226:14
@(connect):1:6

exception: connect failed

So in order for you to connect to it you have to forward that port to something else.

On virtual Box, right click the machine (default in my case) and click settings
Click on network tab
Click on Port forwarding
Click on the + icon
On the row select tcp protocol
Enter 27017 for Guest Port
And I chose 1111 for Host Port

then when you try

$ mongo localhost:1111
MongoDB shell version: 3.2.0
connecting to: localhost:1111/test

Now, off to the races. Now I need to read all the collections, generate the hugo files, upload it to Github and would be done with it. So I thought, Scala, well too easy, let’s do it Clojure way using Mongoer but let’s leave that to for a next post.

Read more