Make your Terminal Sassy !

Sonali — Mon, 12 Oct 2020 23:09:29 +0000

Recently a few people asked me about my colorful terminal. So I decided to write a quick article about it. If you like what you see then scroll down.

Here are easy to follow steps to make your terminal "SaSsY" like mine ;)

1) https://www.iterm2.com

download this

2) Install homebrew

 % /bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install.sh)"

3) Download ohmyzsh framework

sh -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ohmyzsh/ohmyzsh/master/tools/install.sh)"

4) Run `brew install httpie`.

This is a commandline http-client with a cool UI, syntax highlighting, JSON support & many more features & I use it instead of graphical programs like Postman Ref: https://httpie.org/docs#installation

5) Run `brew install htop`.

It's a pretty cool interactive process viewer. Ref: https://htop.dev. After installing you can run the command htop

6) For the js folks `brew install node`.

Then you can check your node version using node -v & npm version using npm -v. You can also look into nvm which is a node version manager to easily switch between differnt node versions.

7) Run `npm install -g tree-cli`.

This will list the content of directories in tree like format when you run the command tree
Ref: https://github.com/MrRaindrop/tree-cli

9) Make vim pretty

If you would like a colorful vim editor then do this:
vi ~/.vimrc and add syntax on
If you'd always like to see line numbers then add set number in your vimrc

8) Configuring zshrc

1. To configure zsh

you need to customize somethings inside zshrc so run this command vi ~/.zshrc

2. Theme

The name of the theme I use is "Jonathan". So far I like it. You can search for the following in your zshrc ZSH_THEME and set it to whichever theme you like.

3. Plugins:

I use the following plugins. Find plugins in your zshrc & add the name of the plugins like this.

    plugins=(
        git
        zsh-autosuggestions
        zsh-syntax-highlighting
    )

But for those plugins to work you need to first clone them so run the following commands:

zsh-autosuggestions
This is a super handy plugin for auto suggestions. It suggests commands as you type based on history and completions.
Ref: https://github.com/zsh-users/zsh-autosuggestions
```
git clone https://github.com/zsh-users/zsh-autosuggestions ~/.oh-my-zsh/custom/plugins/zsh-autosuggestions
```

zsh-syntax-highlighting
Provides some cool syntax hylighting.
Ref: https://github.com/zsh-users/zsh-syntax-highlighting

git clone https://github.com/zsh-users/zsh-syntax-highlighting.git ~/.oh-my-zsh/custom/plugins/zsh-syntax-highlighting

4. thefuck - Yes, thefuck ? you read it right!

It's fine friends, we all use bad words sometimes(jk), sometimes though :P!
This one corrects errors in previous console commands. So let's say you type pd instead of pwd (eyeroll) , it's obviously an invalid command. So all you gotta do is type "fuck" and it would tell you what went wrong.
I'm still exploring this one, it's not super accurate but for now I like it.
To get this to work, inside your zshrc copy the following
eval $(thefuck --alias)
Ref: https://github.com/nvbn/thefuck
Here's what it looks like

5. Let's talk about colors ..

For this one, go to Preferences -> i-term -> profiles -> Colors. I changed the font to be Chalkduster and set a different color as well. Here is my config:

9) Now, let's get into the coolest part ;) ft. ASCII art , lolcat , cowsay

ASCII Art

I created my funky ASCII name art using this tool

https://dev.to/lakatos88/ascii-themes-node-js-cli-interface-to-generate-themed-ascii-art-4ck8

but if you do not want to go through those steps, you can always create your own art using this tool & copy paste it. http://www.patorjk.com/software/taag/#p=display&f=Patorjk-HeX&t=SONA

I created a file called welcome.sh & copy pasted the design there. Make sure you put each line in an echo "your ascii" command . Checkout the screenshot.

I then put this ./welcome.sh at the end of my zshrc file.

lolcat

If you like rainbow effects then run brew install lolcat. If you want to apply this rainbow effect to your welcome message then in your zshrc add this at the end of the file
./welcome.sh | lolcat

fortune & cowsay

If you would like a random quote by a cow and want all of that in rainbow colors then
brew install fortune and brew install cowsay and then again go back to the end of your zshrc and after the welcome message add the following fortune | cowsay | lolcat

Pls Note: for all the above changes to take effect, run source ~/.zshrc or restart your terminal.
Yes, your terminal is going to look absolutely beautiful after all this!

10) Aliases

Aliases are super helpful & you can add that in your zshrc as per your use-case & convenience. I wanted the lolcat effect for a few commands so I added the following aliases with lolcat in my config

alias ls='ls | lolcat'
alias pwd='pwd | lolcat'
alias gs='git status | lolcat'
alias tree='tree | lolcat'

I hope this was helpful!

If you would like to share cool tricks with "lolcat" or anything else, I would love to hear from you!

Also, on our medium blog:

https://medium.com/just2girlsintech/make-your-terminal-sassy-776465b1becd

Monitoring in AWS — Let’s cloud!

Sonali — Fri, 21 Aug 2020 18:56:34 +0000

Recently while debugging some performance related issues, I had to monitor the AWS resources that my application was using & a part of it involved checking out the cloudwatch alarms & metrics. While doing so I went deep into all the clouds — there’s cloudwatch, there’s cloudtrail, there’s config. What’s the purpose of these different clouds for monitoring ?
Whatever you build on AWS, you will have to monitor it and also do some sort of logging & auditing so that you can get an idea of how your systems are performing.

AWS CloudWatch:

It’s a monitoring service for AWS resources and applications. Its main job is to monitor the performance & resources. How is the performance affected based on certain actions of the user ? — Cloudwatch can tell you that. There are a bunch of things in cloudwatch:

1. Cloudwatch Metrics:

It provides metrics for every service in AWS. For example CPUUtilization, network etc. There are up to 10 dimensions per metric. Dimensions is basically an attribute of a metric (eg — environment, instanceId etc). Metrics also have timestamps. We can create cloudwatch dashboards of these metrics. You can also define & send your own Custom Metrics to cloudwatch using the putMetricData api call.

2. CloudWatch Dashboards:

It consists of a bunch of graphs from same or different regions. It gives you a good visual representation. You can also set automatic refresh of the dashboard. You can choose any timeframe you want eg — last 6hrs , last 30 mins etc.

3. CloudWatch Logs:

Cloudwatch can get logs from your application or various AWS resources eg: API Gateway, Route53, AWS lambda etc. Cloudwatch logs can also be sent to S3 or elastic search etc for further analytics.

4. CloudWatch Alarms:

They are used to trigger notifications for any metric. eg messages on your SQS queue exceeded a certain limit etc. These alarms have 3 states OK, INSUFFICIENT_DATA, ALARM.

5. CloudWatch Events:

It is a stream of system events describing changes in your AWS resources.

AWS CloudTrail:

It deals with API level monitoring. When user logs into AWS and performs any actions — all that can be monitored using cloudtrail. So it has all the info of who made what changes eg — I created new ec2 instance or I created a new queue etc all that info is monitored using cloudtrail. If you see that a resource is deleted in AWS — check your cloudtrail first. Cloudtrail is enabled by default.

AWS Config:

It records config level changes of your AWS resources. It also notifies if any changes are made to your account.

Ummm…there are actually two more clouds left — Cloudformation & Cloudfront !! But they have nothing to do with monitoring.

CloudFormation:

It is just a template that will spin up all the AWS resources you need effortlessly. You just define whatever you want in that template & AWS magically creates it for you! https://aws.amazon.com/cloudformation/

CloudFront:

It’s just a content delivery network for low latency distribution of contents with high data transfer speeds. https://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/

Have fun clouding ;)!

Also in medium on our blog: https://medium.com/just2girlsintech/monitoring-in-aws-lets-cloud-2c122979cf2d

Forem: Sonali