Provisioning Vagrant with Chef-Zero on Ubuntu 14.04 Trusty

I'm building a Vagrant instance for development and I want to use Chef to provision the machine.

I'm on Ubuntu Trusty 64. Running with the packaged versions of Vagrant and Ruby is a fool's errand. I used the Vagrant 1.5.4 package. Vagrant has an embedded Ruby which causes all kinds of grief cross-linking with stuff in the Ubuntu versions of the packages. I ended up removing them wholesale, but you may be ok if you be sure and always use the binaries from: /opt/vagrant/embedded/bin/

It took me almost a week to figure this out thanks to a lot of very unhelpful errors and red herrings. I figured I'd do a write-up and save you some suffering.

# Add the base vagrant box
vagrant box add ubuntu/trusty64 http://cloud-images.ubuntu.com/vagrant/trusty/current/trusty-server-cloudimg-amd64-vagrant-disk1.box

# Setup the vagrant instance
cd my-project
vagrant init ubuntu/trusty64

# Setup berkshelf and fix some path grief
env SSL_CERT_FILE=/opt/vagrant/embedded/cacert.pem /opt/vagrant/embedded/bin/berks
rm -rf ~/.berkshelf/default/cookbooks/
ln -s ~/.berkshelf/cookbooks/ ~/.berkshelf/default/cookbooks

# Get dependencies
sudo /opt/vagrant/embedded/bin/gem install bundler
/opt/vagrant/embedded/bin/bundle
vagrant plugin install vagrant-chef-zero
vagrant plugin install vagrant-berkshelf --plugin-version '>= 2.0.0'

Update your Vagrantfile:

config.berkshelf.enabled = true
config.chef_zero.enabled = true
config.chef_zero.environments = "./environments/"
config.chef_zero.data_bags = "./data_bags/"
config.chef_zero.roles = "./roles/"
config.chef_zero.cookbooks = "./cookbooks/"

config.vm.provision :chef_client do |chef|
  chef.run_list = [
    "role[base]" # Yours may be different
  ]
end

Then:

vagrant up

Spring MVC Serving Images - An Unreasonable PITA

I tried returning a @ResponseBody BufferedImage, but Spring kept returning an HTTP status 406.

Here's how I ended up solving the problem WITHOUT using the BufferedImageHttpMessageConverter (which seems to be a poorly documented method).
   
    @RequestMapping(value = "/{id}.jpg",
                    method = RequestMethod.GET)
    @ResponseBody
    @Secured("ROLE_READ")
    public ResponseEntity<byte[]> get(@PathVariable Long id)
                                  throws Exception {

        // Load it from disk
        File imageFile = new File(...);
        
        try {
            HttpHeaders headers = new HttpHeaders();
            headers.add("Content-Type", "image/jpg");

            byte[] bytes = FileUtils.getBytes(imageFile);

            return new ResponseEntity(bytes, headers,
                                      HttpStatus.NOT_FOUND);
        } catch (IOException e) {
            log.log(Level.INFO, "Couldn't load image file: " +
                                imageFile.getAbsolutePath(), e);

            throw e;
        }
    }

The Handiest GitHub Trick I know: ?w=no

Add it to the URL when you're looking at the diff of a pull request, and the diff will ignore whitespace changes.

It can make big ugly diff look really obvious and neat.

Use with care.

Access your AngularJS services with a handy JS console script

angular.element(document)
       .injector()
       .invoke(function($window, Todos, Account) {

  $window.MyNS = {
    Todos: Todos,
    Account: Account
  }
});


Now you have access to MyNS.Todos and MyNS.Account in the console!

Magento 403 Forbidden at /.html

The Magento installation I've been working on has a somewhat unique property - many of the products don't have names. Magento normally uses the names to generate rewrite URLs, so that causes a weird quirk: The first product with no name gets a url like store.example.com/.html

Apache2 has an explicit DENY for files beginning with '.ht' that can be overridden in your .htaccess:

###########################################
## Fixing /.html
<Files ~ "^\.html">
    Order allow,deny
    Allow from all
    Satisfy any
</Files>

HTH someone else!