Today I learned - VSTS CLI and jq

Today I learned about the VSTS command line tool from a colleague.

I might actually have heard about it before, but wasn't able to try it out because I was previously using the on-premise TFS and not the cloud based VSTS, but hey, today I tried it out :)

For example, you can query VSTS for pull requests you've created by doing the following:

$ cd /your-vsts-git-repo
$ vsts login
$ vsts code pr list --creator "James Barrow"

This will return a JSON object containing info about what pull requests you have created.

If you don't really care about the entire structure, you can then use another command line tool I've come across before called jq.

For example, if you only care about the title, status and url of the pull request, you could do the following:

$ vsts code pr list --creator "James Barrow" | jq ".[] | { title, status, url }"

That's a long command, but what it basically does is pipes the JSON result into jq, which parses it by taking each element in the array of the result, and then filtering it to only take the title, status and url properties of each item in the array.

And finally, since we all know the best way to use git is via the command line and git bash, you can then also create a bash alias in your ~/.bashrc file:

alias prs='vsts code pr list --creator "James Barrow" | jq ".[] | {title,status,url}"'

So you can just check for your pull requests now by simply running:

$ prs
{
  "title": "RE #1234 - some pull request",
  "status": "active",
  "url": "https://blah.visualstudio.com/.../pullRequests/2345"
}

Which gives you something like that ;)

Much simpler than having to open up Chrome, go to VSTS, find the right tab for pull requests, etc...

I want to dig more into using jq to pull out info on if the pull requests have had votes as well, so I can just run a command from my command line and see if I need to follow up on a PR or not, but this will have to wait for another day :)

One last note is that use of single and double quotes might be important depending on your shell of choice, so keep that in mind too.

Hope this helped someone.

UPDATE: There is also vsts code pr list -o table which prints a nice format

bash startup files and aliases

Today I hosted a Beer and Tech session at Entelect on Automating Database Deployments (with Flyway).

During the session, I was using the Bash terminal to edit files or run Flyway, and interacting with git quite a bit - as we all know, using git on the command line is the best way to do so ;D

After the session, a colleague asked me how I created shortcuts for certain commands, and I explained to him how Bash supports aliases and that these can be loaded by a startup file. There are various startup files, but I tend to use ~/.bash_profile and not ~/.bashrc. Here are some of the shortcuts I currently have setup:

alias cls='clear'
alias l='ls -Al'
alias ..='cd ..'

alias gf='git fetch --prune'
alias gl='git log --name-status --abbrev-commit'
alias grh='git reset --hard'
alias gs='git status'

And so on. If you modify the file, you have to re-load these into the current session, or restart a new terminal session. To reload the file, you can just do the following:

$ . ~/.bash_profile

Hope this helped someone :)

tail on Windows with PowerShell

One of the well known Unix/Linux commands is tail, which gets the tail of a file, meaning the end of a file and prints it out to the output stream.

I used to try find nice programs for this, including Baretail which has some very nice features like colouring lines in that match certain patterns etc.

But if you just want a simple, and now built into Windows solution, just use PowerShell:

Get-Content -Tail 10 filename.txt

This will show the last 10 lines of the file. You can even follow the tail, or watch it for changes, as below:

gc -Tail 10 -Wait filename.txt

Another nice thing you can do is then pipe this into Select-String to filter the output:

gc -Tail 10 -Wait filename.txt | Select-String -Pattern somepattern

Finding the hostname for an IP address on Windows

When trying to investigate networking issues, most people know about ping and nslookup. I discovered today that there's also a utility called nbtstat to get some NetBIOS info, including the hostname and MAC address from an IP address.

nbtstat -a IPADDRESS

Easier way to get to that hosts file

In Windows, there's a hosts file mapping IP addresses to hostnames. For some weird reason, it's in the arbitrary location of c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts. This kinda reminds me of a Unix/Linux path, with the \etc\hosts. But anyway. That's often too much to type in when just trying to go Start -> Run -> notepad++ hosts. So, use symbolic links :) Something else that is Unix/Linux like, that not many people know exist on Windows:

C:\>mklink hosts c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts
symbolic link created for hosts <<===>> c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts

Then you can just say, notepad++ \hosts.

Much easier.

Symbolic links and hard links in Windows

A lot of people coming from the Linux world would probably have at some point used symbolic links or soft links, and hard links.

Windows has had shortcuts for a long time, but these are actually files that are used to point to other files, they aren't actually entries in the filesystem that merely reference other files, which is what the links are, meaning that shortcuts take up more space.

A lesser known fact about Windows is that it actually also has symbolic links, hard links, and also with Windows NTFS has the concept of a junction point, which is a hard link for a directory. The differences between them is discussed quite nicely in the post "Windows File Junctions, Symbolic Links and Hard Links".

It also appears that the capability has been around for a while, going back to Windows 2000. With Windows 7 and probably most newer Windows versions these days, there's also a nice command line tool mklink to help with this.

Open up a command line, type mklink /? and then try it out for yourself in a test area, playing with creating new files, linking to them, deleting the original files, seeing how the links are affected, etc.

Disclaimer: If you delete something that wasn't just a pointer to a file, and was the actual file, that's your own fault, don't come looking for me :D