Visual Studio Code or VSCode is a text editor developed by Microsoft that supports many popular programming languages such as Go, Java, JavaScript, Node.js, Python, C and C++. It is a directory based, language agnostic source code editor which focuses on directories rather than projects and has many extensions available for it. VSCode’s feature set includes bracket matching, syntax highlighting, code folding, linting, debugging, and built in version control via Git, Subversion or Perforce. Ever since the initial release of VSCode in 2015, it has become an increasingly popular programming tool amongst users of all desktop operating systems including GNU/Linux.
One of the many benefits of using Linux over Windows is the fact that the user doesn’t have to send telemetry to Microsoft. Because VSCode is built on open source and the source code is released under the MIT license, it is seen by many in the open software community as a welcome addition. In fact, many in the community who never would have considered installing any other software from Microsoft may be tempted to try out VSCode. Microsoft wants the Linux community to use VSCode. Microsoft even provides easily installed .deb and .rpm packages in addition to a distribution independent snap package. In fact, we previously covered how to install Visual Studio Code on Ubuntu 20.04 desktop using snap. These official binary versions of VSCode have proprietary elements and built in Microsoft telemetry which is enabled by default. According to Microsoft’s privacy statement, this telemetry is also shared with their affiliates and subsidiaries. Although it is possible to disable the telemetry, simply opening the application to do so may send telemetry to Microsoft because it is activated by default. Additionally, the possibility remains that a future update could reactivate the telemetry.
Is there any way to use VSCode without Microsoft’s proprietary elements and telemetry? As it turns out, there are two options. The first option is to build VSCode from the open source MIT licensed source code hosted on GitHub. Historically, when you build VSCode from source the telemetry and proprietary elements that Microsoft adds to the binaries are not included. The second option is to install a pre-built binary provided by the VSCodium project, who essentially build a telemetry free MIT licensed version of VSCode for you. We will explore both options in this article.
In this tutorial you will learn:
How to download and build an open source version of VSCode from GitHub and ensure that telemetry is disabled.
How to add a VSCodium repository and install an open source telemetry free version of VSCode with your package manager
How to directly download, and verify, the latest release of VSCodium.
The Bash shell is the most popular shell on Linux systems, and to use the shell efficiently, you need a little knowledge about Bash shell redirections. This is also an essential step in learning Bash scripting.
In this guide, we'll show how to redirect standard output and standard error to the same file on the Bash shell command line. This will include several examples so you can pick the right method in any scenario.
In this tutorial you will learn:
How to redirect standard output and standard error to same file
How to redirect standard output and standard error to file and terminal
How to redirect standard output and standard error to /dev/null
Environment variables are part of the Linux system shell that contain changing values. They help facilitate scripts and system programs, so that code can accommodate a variety of scenarios. Unlike regular shell variables, environment variables can be accessed system-wide, by any user or process.
Let's look at a very simple example to see how environment variables work and why they exist. There are many system programs and user made scripts that need to access a current user's home directory. This can be done reliably through the HOME environment variable. Therefore, a script that contains the following line can be used by any user on the system and it will generate the same result.
In this guide, we'll show how to list all the environment variables on a Linux system, as well as set new ones. Setting new environment variables can either be done temporarily, or permanently if you need them to survive a reboot. We'll show instructions for both methods below.
In this tutorial you will learn:
How to list environment variables on Linux
How to set a temporary environment variable on Linux
How to set a permanent environment variable on Linux
The Bash shell is the most popular shell on Linux systems, and to use the shell efficiently, you need a little knowledge about Bash shell redirections. This is also an essential step in learning Bash scripting.
In this guide, we'll show how to append text or command output to a file on the Bash shell command line. This will include several examples so you can pick the right method in any scenario.
In this tutorial you will learn:
How to append text or command output to a file
How to append and view command output at the same time
Wordpress is probably the most used CMS in the world (it is estimated that almost 40% of all websites are built using the platform): it is very easy to install and use, and allows even non-developers to create website in few minutes. Wordpress has a very large plugin ecosystem; one of the most famous is Woocommerce, which allows us to turn a website into an online store in few steps. The plugin makes use of the Wordpress REST API infrastructure; in this tutorial we will see how to interact with the Woocommerce API using the Python programming language, showing how to list, create, update and delete products and categories.
In this tutorial you will learn:
How to generate Woocommerce REST API credentials and enable pretty permalinks
How to interact with the Woocommerce REST API using Python and the woocommerce package
How to get information about the existing Woocommerce categories, create, update and delete them
How to get information about the existing Woocommerce products
How to create simple and a variable products with variations
When you develop complex Bash scripts and start putting various scripts into a folder, where one script interacts with another by, for example, starting it, it quickly becomes necessary to ensure we know the path the script was started from, so we can start the other scripts with a fully qualified pathname. This is important because the first script may have been started from outside the script’s directory. We could have also done so by using a relative path, so even - somehow - reading the command that started the current script will not work.
In this tutorial, you will learn:
What the pwd command is, and what it does
How to discover from inside a Bash script what path that same script is in
How we express a number depends on whether we are a computer or a human. If we are human, we are likely to express numbers using our familiar 10-base decimal system. If we are a computer, we are likely, at our core, to express numbers as 2-base or binary.
So what is up with all the many ways of expressing numbers, and why do they exists? This article will go into some detail and hopefully by the end you’ll be counting octal on your fingers. Which works fine by the way, as long as you use only 8 fingers, after all… octal is 8-base.
In this tutorial you will learn:
How to do simple counting in up non-decimal systems like binary, hexadecimal and octal.
What the terms 2-base, 10-base etc. stand for and how to understand them more easily.
The connection between these various methods of expressing numbers
Bash is a great coding language, which allows you to do complex things like Big Data Manipulation, or simply create sever or desktop management scripts.
The entry level skill required to use the Bash language is quite low, and one-liner scripts (an often used jargon, which indicates multiple commands executed at the command line, forming a mini-script), as well as regular scripts, can grow in complexity (and how well written they are) as the Bash developer learns more.
Learning to use special variables in Bash is one part of this learning curve. Whereas originally the special variables may look cryptic: $$, $?, $*, $0, $1, etc., once you understand them and use them in your own scripts, things will soon become clearer and easier to remember.
In this tutorial you will learn:
How to use special variables in Bash
How to correctly quote variables, even special ones
Examples using special variables from the command line and scripts
On Linux and Unix-based operating systems, pipes are very useful since they are a simple way to achieve IPC (inter-process communication). When we connect two processes in a pipeline, the output of the first one is used as the input of the second one. To build a so called “anonymous” pipe, all we have to do is to use the | operator. Anonymous, or unnamed pipes last just as long as the processes they connect. There is, however, another type of pipe we can use: a FIFO, or named pipe. In this article we will see how named pipes work and in what they are different from the standard pipes.
If you are just starting to explore the Bash coding language, you will soon find yourself wanting to create conditional statements. Conditional statements, in other words, define ‘if a condition is true or false, then do this or that, and if the opposite is true, do something else’. This is the most basic function of any conditional statement.
This article will introduce you to the five basic if statement clauses. being if, elif, else, then and fi. The first simply opens a if statement, the then introduces the what commands to execute if the statement condition was true section and the else introduces the what commands to execute if the statement condition was false section. Finally, the fi closes the statement. We also have the special elif on which we will see more in a minute. Let’s start with an easy example.
In this tutorial you will learn:
How to implement an if statement at the Bash command line
How such if statements can also be used inside a Bash scripts
Examples showing you the if, elif, else, then and fi clauses in Bash
As sever optimal use/maximization continues to grow, it becomes more and more important to manage processes well. One aspect of this is automatic process termination. When a process has gone rogue, and is consuming too much resources, it can be terminated automatically.
This is especially suited to servers which have a lot of temporary or disposable processes. It is also well suited for testing servers which are running many test trials and where such test trials prove to be unstable or cause the software under testing to behave erratically (for example by using too much memory)
In this tutorial you will learn:
How to manage processes in an automated fashion
Which resources you may want to monitor, and why
Example code showing how automatic process termination can work for memory hogging issues
If you have ever used Bash subshells ($(...)), you know how flexible subshells can be. It only takes a few characters to start a subshell to process anything required, inline to another statement. The number of possible use cases is virtually unlimited.
We can also use Bash subshells inside if statements, inline with the statement. Doing so gives the user and developer much additional flexibility when it comes to writing Bash if statements.
In general, one may use the time Bash utility (see man time for more information) to run a program, and obtain runtime duration and system resource usage summaries. But how can one time particular sections of code, directly from within the Bash source code?
Using some easy variable assignments and calculations, it is possible to achieve accurate timing metrics for Bash script executions.
In this tutorial you will learn:
How to time Bash scripts using variable assignments and calculations
How to use overlapping timers to time specific sections of your scripts
Examples which exemplify how specific sections of code can be timed
In our automation scripts we often need to launch and monitor external programs to accomplish our desired tasks. When working with Python, we can use the subprocess module to perform said operations. This module is part of the programming language standard library. In this tutorial we will take a quick look at it, and we will learn the basics of its usage.
In this tutorial you will learn:
How to use the “run” function to spawn an external process
How to capture a process standard output and standard error
How to check the exist status of a process and raise an exception if it fails
How to execute a process into an intermediary shell
How to set a timeout for a process
How to use the Popen class directly to pipe two processes
CSV is the acronym of “Comma Separated Values”. A csv file is a just plain text document used to represent and exchange tabular data. Each row in a csv file represents an “entity”, and each column represents an attribute of it. Columns are usually separated by a comma but other characters can be used as field separator instead of it. In this tutorial we will see how to read and create csv files using Python and specifically the csv module, which is part of the language standard library.
In this tutorial you will learn:
How to read csv rows as a list of strings
How to read a csv as a list of dictionaries
How to create a csv using Python
How to create a csv starting from a list of dictionaries
