It's time for some spring-cleaning. I decided to delete a large S3 bucket we used for some backups on IONOS Cloud. My naive approach was to try to manually delete the bucket via the IONOS Cloud Web Ui. Somehow, that did not work properly, so I went on and tried the same with an S3 GUI client. It took quite a long time to delete a single directory out of the S3 bucket. To understand what's going on, I went to dive deeper into how 3S and S3 clients work. As it turns out, deleting a directory will recursively delete file by file, each triggered by its own web request. Is there a quicker way to de ..read more

Have you ever encountered an issue in Intrexx where most of your backend logic relies on event listeners, such as record insertion, updating, or deleting? It's a valid approach, but sometimes you may find yourself restricted to calling backend processes via Generic Actions triggered with an AJAX call. In such cases, you might wonder how to send data to those event listeners without duplicating all the functionality in a single Groovy Script Action. In short, a small Groovy snippet can trigger Global Timers with optional parameters. You can then use the timer filter to access the parameters sen ..read more

While developing the Sylius connector for Gally, I took a deep dive into the Sylius Grid component. I wanted to hook Gally into the Grid component so that I did not have to rebuild the grid handling logic in the code of the Gally bundle. Diving deep into the Sylius GridBundle, I realized that some parts are flexible, and others are inflexible. But let's digest things a bit. First, you can define your grid e.g. in YAML syntax like this: sylius_grid: grids: my_grid: driver: name: doctrine/orm options: class: "%app.model.user.class%" repository ..read more

In the process of migrating our Hashicorp Nomad workload to our new Nomad cluster, I also tried to simplify our CI pipelines and ran into an issue with Nomad. In our previous CI setup, we've been using Terraform to communicate with Nomad and to run jobs (aka trigger deployments). While the setup worked fine, I always felt we don't need Terraform as it "just" invokes Nomad and overcomplicates things a bit too much for my taste. In our GitLab CI pipelines, I removed the hashicorp/terraform:light Docker image and replaced it with hashicorp/nomad:1.7.5. Plus, instead of invoking the Terraform CLI ..read more

Since last year, we have been using the Technology Radar solution built by AOE to power the bitExpert TechRadar. A few days ago, the Tech Radar solution was released in a brand new version 4.0, and we've just upgraded our Tech Radar instance to the latest version. What's in for you? The visualization has been rewritten without the need for the D3 dependency, and new features include a fuzzy search based on Fuse.js, which has been added, and the tag filtering has been reworked. We like the new version and hope you like it, too ..read more

Nomad version 1.5 comes with Single sign-on (SSO) and OIDC support. As we shifted to an Office 365 environment some time ago, we have been using Entra ID (previously known as Azure Active Directory) as our primary SSO solution whenever possible. Unfortunately, the entire process of configuring OIDC - specifically with an Entra ID endpoint - is not well-documented, and troubleshooting single sign-on issues is still quite challenging. Although Hashicorp is aware of this, it may take some time before debugging becomes easier. Following a few resources I found online, I was able to put the puzzle ..read more

Years ago, a good friend showed me httpie as a curl alternative to talk to external APIs. I got hooked immediately by httpie's expressive and intuitive syntax, the colorized and formatted terminal output, and the persistent session's functionality. When I heard that the httpie people released a Desktop version of the tool, I installed it right away and used it ever since. Even though the Desktop version is still in public beta, it works quite well, I can say. If you do not want to install another app locally, you can also use the Desktop app functionality via their web version: https://httpie ..read more

When we migrated to Office 365 some years ago, the Microsoft Graph API hooked me immediately. The API exposes almost all information stored in Office 365 and allows us to connect 3rd party tools to the data stored in Office 365. As we have realized in the past, the API is good but far away from perfect. Not all the needed data is exposed or can be updated via the API. Sometimes, it can be pretty complicated to query the data you are interested in, especially when using the official SDKs. Today's task is part of the latter category. For some house cleaning, I am interested in listing all planne ..read more

For about 1 year, we've been using DDEV for most of our Docker setups. While Sylius comes with its own Docker setup, I wanted to see if I could use DDEV to develop Sylius plugins as this would offer me a similar Docker experience to our other projects. Thankfully, DDEV allows quite flexible setups, so getting it to run as I needed it was simple. As a prerequisite, you need 2 project directories, one for the Sylius application and one for the Sylius plugin you want to develop. In my case, the directory structure looks like this: ./Workspace/ForceLogin/sylius (the Sylius application is located ..read more

We are thrilled to announce that the highly anticipated second edition of Sylius Days is set to take place on April 18-19 in Mannheim, Germany at bitExpert's office. Mark your calendars and secure your spot now for this must-attend event in the Sylius ecosystem. This event is set to be an amazing get-together for the Sylius community, welcoming new members from all over Europe. The first day will include interactive workshops to help you gain a deeper understanding of the Sylius platform. This will be followed by a day filled with insightful presentations, networking opportunities, and of cour ..read more