Forem: Ashif Eqbal

Deploying a static site using Github Action on Github Pages

Ashif Eqbal — Sun, 08 Dec 2024 13:27:36 +0000

Hello Everyone! Thank you for visiting this blog.

In this article, we will look into how we can easily create and deploy our website(static)/webpage in Github and quickly automate it through native Github actions (CICD server).

Pre-Requisites

A sample webpage (a basic html page will work)
Github Account

And that is pretty much it.

Background

Think of traditional CICD (Continous Integration and Continous Deployment) pipeline. Whenever you made a code-checkin into the code repository, a pipeline triggers, run through series of tasks like - Build, test, scan and deploy.

We are going to achieve the same process through Github Actions (CI server for Github). However, we are not going to deploy a full-fledged web-application, but the steps will be same just we need to more tasks as per our requirement in the yaml defination for Github action.

Summary of whats going to happen

Developer made a changes to the code.
Developer pushes the code to Github Repository.
Github action worflow runs on the push event trigger.
Workflow defination file starts to run(this file contains series of steps the Github action will perform).
Finally, the code is deployed to Github Pages.
The changes are reflected on the website

Note: We have taken Github Pages as our deployment server, but it can also be any webserver on cloud or data center.

Steps to deploy to Github Pages

Under repsitory goto setting
Click on Pages from the left navigation bar
Select source as Github Pages from dropdown under Build and Deploy
[Optional] You can select the pre-populated static HTML configure tile that appears, but this is not required since we will create our own deploy.yml file

Setting up deployment files

Creating sample webpage and prepare all the files

Lets prepare all our files first

Create a repository in Github Steps to create Github Repo
Open a text editor and create the folder/files as below

An index.html file at the root
Add a folder named .github
Add a subfolder inside .github named workflow
Add a file called deploy.yml inside workflow folder

This will be the folder structure -

index.html (a sample webpage)


<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
  <meta charset="UTF-8">
  <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">
  <title>Sample Page</title>
</head>
<body>
  <h1>This is my webpage - Ashif</h1>
</body>
</html>

.github/workflow/deploy.yml



# Simple workflow for deploying static content to GitHub Pages
name: Deploy static content to Pages
on:

  push:
    branches: ["main"]


  workflow_dispatch:

permissions:
  contents: read
  pages: write
  id-token: write

concurrency:
  group: "pages"
  cancel-in-progress: false

jobs:
  deploy:
    environment:
      name: github-pages
      url: ${{ steps.deployment.outputs.page_url }}
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest

    steps:
      - name: Checkout
        uses: actions/checkout@v4

      - name: Setup Pages
        uses: actions/configure-pages@v5

      - name: Upload artifact
        uses: actions/upload-pages-artifact@v3
        with:
          # Upload entire repository
          path: './'
      - name: Deploy to GitHub Pages
        id: deployment
        uses: actions/deploy-pages@v4

If you want to read more about Github Action Workflow you can read the reference page - Worflow

Now that all our files are ready, we will checkin(upload) this to our Github Repository created -
Run the below Git commands :

git remote add origin <YOUR_GITHUB_REPOSITORY_URL>
git add .
git commit -m "Making code changes"
git push origin main

Now as soon as you perform git push, in the repository under the actions tab, you will see a workflow starts to run. This worklfow will execute all the steps defined under deploy.yml

This is completed here.

At the last step - Complete Job, you will find a pre-generated URL. Copy that URL to your browser you will see your website deployed.

Final Testing

Lets make another changes and test-

Make any chnages in index.html
Git commit and push it to repository
Workflow runs
Open the same URL or refresh
You will notice the changes are deployed.

If you want to look into more crisp and quick summary of steps needed, you can visit the following link GitHub Pages Deployment

Thank You for reading my post. If you like this post you can add your reaction or comment.

You can find more about me: 👉 Github Profile

How I cleared GCP - Associate Cloud Engineer Certification

Ashif Eqbal — Thu, 28 Nov 2024 17:34:07 +0000

Google Cloud - Associate Cloud Engineer Certification

Google Cloud is my first certification in the Google Cloud. Apart from these I have 2 certification in AWS and 1 in Azure and 1 in terraform. GCP-ACE was in my bucket list for a long time. But finally, I managed to clear it.

I have few items that I would like to share with anyone who is interested in taking up this certification but is not sure where to start to when it is the best time to finally book the exam.

About the exam

Length: 2 hours
Registration fee: $125 (plus tax where applicable). If you bases in Asia region (or India) I have taken this exam at $75 only. Not sure if this applies to any other region.
Languages: English, Japanese, Spanish, Portuguese
Exam format: 50-60 multiple choice and multiple select questions. In my exam there no MCQ only single select.
Recommended experience: 6 months+ hands-on experience with GCP.

Personal experience

I know all of us have been there and faced this situation -

🤔 Whether this is worth the effort?

🧐 Will this cert will be helpful for me in future?

😏 I am working in Azure/AWS how will GCP be any different?

😎 I am pro in Azure/AWS, I can manage other cloud as well?

😨 What if I fail and money will be wasted?

🥱 I am a procrastinator, I don't feel confident enough to sit in the exam?

Let me tell you something. Its not about whether you have 0 certification or 10+ certification. Its also not about how many of them a person has in his linkedin profile and how many can I hook it my profile. Some of us may be multi-cloud champ and we might feel we are left behind. No, thats all bullshit. I still believe that having practical experience and skills to kill it in the work outweighs certification.

But having certification is not the end. Its not the destination that matters, the journey is what matters that most. Saying so, I mean when you prepare for anything, there will be lot of obstacles, procrastination, laziness, boredom and office works etc. But hanging on it and continue to prepare for it day-after-day, you will eventually gain confident.

Enough of philosphy. Jumping to exact points for the GCP-ACE exam. See, I took almost a month or so to prepare this exam. I knew nothing about GCP except thats its AWS competitor cloud. Nor did I have any experience working with it.

So, I took few courses(will provide the names below)to understand the core concepts like - Networking, Storage, Compute, Security, GKE, IAM and security accounts. Since I am from AWS background, I way to learning was to always compare each services with similar service offering from AWS. In that way, it gave me confident as to what the service does and how is it different from similar services of different type, the GCP has to offer.

Example: For the Database offering, it has :

BigQuery: for Data-warehousing
Bigtable: Wide column DBfor IoT/sensors streaming data
Dataproc: for managed Spark/Hadoop Cluster
Cloud Spanner: SQL DB for transaction processing
Cloud SQL: for SQL data

Now if you already knew what is AWS Redshift- a data warehouse service, you wont have go in detail to read about GCP-BigQuery.

Again, if you know what Cloud pub-sub does, then you know you know about a service called AWS SQS (IYKYK)

And thats the trick, you have to be smart when you do cross cloud ceritfication.

But, that does not mean you pull a cheatsheet from google comparing all the services in AWS/AZURE/GCP.

I know you must have made you way to this below picture by now or sometime earlier. 😜

Trust me , I am not saying you have go the shortcut path nor I am big fan or reading the documentation line-by-line. But if your someone who can do some calculation in mind and be pro-active to grasp what is needed and what can be applied some common sense, you won't face much difficulty.

When I appeared for the exam, I had hard time recalling whether these questions have been there in the test series or dumps that I prepared with. Unfortunately, there was not much questions that clased up with the my preparation material. I had to re-think, re-apply the AWS knowledge in order answer each question.

I had to eliminate the wrong ones to get to 1 correct answer that closedly resembles the given requirement.

Remember, there will be 2 answers matching almost the same and you might be trapped to answer one of them which feels right. Don't do that. Read the question 10 times to see if the answer you are about to lock fits the requirement.

Example: you might be under doubt to select 2 answer

1) .... web-application using cloud run and periodic jobs using cloud run
2) .... web-application using cloud run and periodic jobs using compute engine.

You might think 1) should be correct as it has less overhead compared to 2) in which we have to manage the VM ourselves. But if question says- less overhead costs, then 2) should be better fit here.

Lastly, I would say apply your previous knowledge to mark your answers. Remember 2 hrs is enough, so if you are not confident , mark for review and proceed and visit later. I had put review flag on 35 questions.

Resources I used

Now, the main part which you need. Where did I prepared from and what where my main resources materials. Let me put in the sequence wise:

Courses:

GCP Associate Cloud Engineer - Google Cloud Certification
[course on Udemy from - Ranga Karanam]

This one is must so you understand each section-compute, datbase etc in details. I watched in 1.5x speed and tried hands-on with free-trail account I created for myself. You might be tempted to ignore this part and just continue bing watching. But it will definately put you to sleep and later you will end up scrolling insta reels.

Watch a topic > Practice the same in GCP console> re-watch if doubt/stuck somewhere.

Exam Dumps and Test Series:

I used below 2 resources for sample questions

Previous year questions form ExamTopics - https://www.examtopics.com/exams/google/associate-cloud-engineer/
Google Cloud Associate Cloud Engineer Practice Tests - By Dan Sullivan
Previous year question video- [same as 1]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ChFLKnXExU&list=PL_HS7IsXErLYst898lfpO5w3OOmMkaBgX&index=10

Disclaimer: The answers in the ExamTopics are not 100% correct so you might have to check the discussion section to see which is correct. Don't trust 100%.

Summary of points

Don't binge watch tutorial or vides - PRACTICE
Don't trust the dumps, use your judegement
Don't start making notes on paper, its time taking keep your notes resources, links etc in Notion or some online note app.
Be disciplined about your commitment and prepare everyday atleast put 15-20 mins to keep you live.
Use comparision technique to understand a service.

Important points on the exam day

Don't drink to much water and Don't eat too much before the exam. This might cause diziness and cost you lack of focus during the exam. Suitable a time that best suits you and during which you have less distraction from family and friends
Don't panic. Ask if anything required prior to exam. You will have to go through basic screening process and system checks. Do not panic if you are stuck at some where or where it is taking longer than usual time to start the checks. Your exam duration won't be compromised.
Dont' rush. You have 2hrs. Settle down and relax. Make yourself comfortable and tackle each questions with outmost care. Give each questions proper time and mind to understand and then proceed. Don't overthink if you are not able to answer, just mark it for review and proceed and re-visit later.
Lastly, its not the end of the world. Just a certification exam. Even if you fail, there is nothing to worry about. Atleast you tried. Yes, there would be small dent on your pocket but you can re-learn, re-attempt and come back stronger 💪

Resources Links:

Some articles worth reading-

Courses & Practice Papers-

Thank You for reading my post. If you like this post you can add your reaction or comment.

You can find more about me: 👉 Github Profile

How I cleared AWS Certified DevOps Professional Certification-2024

Ashif Eqbal — Thu, 14 Mar 2024 15:48:34 +0000

How I cleared AWS Certified DevOps Professional Certification-2024

This certification exam is considered one of the most tough exam to clear as this requires you to have minimum 1+ years of experience working with AWS and DevOps.

I have read few reviews and in some tutorial that you can still pass the exam if you take up the XYZ course and complete n number of mock exams. Unfortunately this is completely NOT true.

Since the exam require your critical thinking and every questions are scenario based. There will be choices which looks to be much similar and you would end up selecting either of them which best match but turns out the answer would not be either of them. :)

My recommendations:

Do NOT appear for the exam if you do not have enough enough and enough preparation. You will face tough time during the exam. Do not hurry and chase for certification. Instead, sit for study distraction free and focus on each topics, AWS services and why they are used. Say- what is the purpose of AWS Config, why are they used and where and what problems does this solve. This way it will give length and breadth of the understanding the service.
Stick to one material for course. You might be tempted to learn from multiple sources - like Udemy, Youtube and any other courses available. I won't say they are not good. They are excellent but once you understand the concepts from 1 course do not waste more time learning same thing from other courses. This will eventual make you more worried about the exam.
You must take Mock exams from multiple sources. This is contradiction to the above point(2) but this is essential. Attempting more test papers will make your awareness more about the kind of questions being asked and you end up getting similar or somewhat close questions in the actual exams. I have also seen people trying to save money and relying on FREE materials for mock exams online. Trust me this confuse you even more. I have felt that myself. I initially looked for free dumps online but they differ to much in the answer they provide. Instead invest in good practise paper available. I have provided some at the end. They are really impressive. And trust me without enough practise test you simply cannot appear for the actual exam.
Practice discipline. You must know that actual exam will be 180 minutes long (~3hrs) and you have to answer 75 questions in total. Remember that these questions are not direct questions and compeltely scenario based so each questions will be paragraph long. To make yourself ready and not get burned down you have to practice to make your mind to be discplined and focused. I used to switch off the cell phone during practice exams and remove any distration from my workspace. Usually try to give these exams when your completely free from your office work or household chores, preferably during night as it would be less noise. And this is really important as you might be tempted to scroll through your phone or go off from your desk after having completed 10-15 or 20 questions , but dont as this will be break your momentum.
Now which topics to focus. As this exam mostly tests your DevOps and SDLC abilities you need to focus not only on the core DevOps and CICD services but also other services that are linked to it like S3, IAM, route53 etc.

AWS CICD Services :

CodeCommit
CodeBuild
CodeDeploy
CodePipeline

Know about how to deploy across region using codedeploy and codepipeline

Cloudformation : Cross deployment stack and change sets
Elastic Beanstalk : Know about various deployment strategies
CloudWatch, EventBridge & CloudTrail - Know the difference between where to use Cloudwatch, Cloudtrail and Elas
AWS Organization
AWS Catalog
AWS Health

These are some services to know deeply about it, however since other services like API Gateway, Lambda, ELB etc will be linked so those need to be focused as well.

References:

Course:

AWS Certified DevOps Engineer Professional 2024 - DOP-C02

Practice Sets

Practice Exams | Stephane Maarek
Practice Exams | Neal Davis
Practice Exams | testpreptraining

Finally

Since you read till here, I hope this post must be some useful to your prep journey. At last, I would also like to tell you that certification are good only if you have good knowledge of the domain. Do not rush for certification, take time to understand the domain and apply those knowledge that you learned.

LinkedIN: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ashif-eqbal/

Learning JavaScript 2024

Ashif Eqbal — Mon, 08 Jan 2024 15:53:58 +0000

In the mid of December-2023, I started learning JavaScript from the very basic (vanilla JavaScript). After spending some amount of time on Udemy Courses, I felt bored and lack of practice.

Then going to the DEV community post, I came through one of the best JavaScript RoadMap Tutorial which is this -

JavaScript - The Complete Guide.

One of the best thing about this Roadmap is that this is very interactive and since each section is well divided into chunks, you can go through it at your own pace.

Mostly importantly this is not video tutorial so you won't have the fear to complete the entire lecture of 20 mins or so and then try your hands-on, you can jump right on.
My Suggestion would be to try directly on another tab using the Chrome Dev Tool Console. You will speed in no time.

Lastly, this course only covers what you need to know in order to start your JS Developer Journey and get your hands on the keyboard as quickly as possible. Even if face difficulty understanding a certain concepts (say- Promises) you can go through his video lecture on Youtube(but I feel you won't need those).

Thanks to author - Tapas Adhikary for designing this awesome roadmap.