api

I recently needed to do a quick audit on all my Ansible roles, and the easiest way (since almost every one is on GitHub, and that's the main source of truth I use) was to grab a list of all my GitHub repositories. However, it can be a little tricky if you have hundreds of repos. I'm guessing most people don't have this problem, but whether you do or not, the easiest way to get all of any given user's repositories using the GitHub v3 API is to run the following command:

Example output:

I'm documenting this here, just because it's something I imagine I might have to do again someday... and when I do, I want to save myself hours of pain and misdirection.

A client had an old SOAP web service that used IP address whitelisting to authenticate/allow requests. The new PHP infrastructure was built using Docker containers and auto-scaling AWS instances. Because of this, we had a problem: a request could come from one of millions of different IP addresses, since the auto-scaling instances use a pool of millions of AWS IP addresses in a wide array of IP ranges.

Because the client couldn't change their API provider (at least not in any reasonable time-frame), and we didn't want to throw away the ability to auto-scale, and also didn't want to try to build some sort of 'Elastic IP reservation system' so we could draw from a pool of known/reserved IP addresses, we had to find a way to get all our backend API SOAP requests to come from one IP address.

The solution? Reverse-proxy all requests to the backend SOAP API.

I frequently need to check the slug or id of a particular Droplet image (or in AWS parlance, an AMI) that I can use to launch new DigitalOcean droplets via Ansible. And seeing as tonight I had to search for 'how to get a list of all DigitalOcean images' about the hundredth time, I figured I'd publish this in a blog post so I can find it more easily in the future.

Without further ado:

curl -X GET --silent "https://api.digitalocean.com/v2/images?per_page=999" -H "Authorization: Bearer $DO_API_TOKEN"

This assumes you have exported a valid $DO_API_TOKEN previously. If not, just paste your DigitalOcean API token in place of $DO_API_TOKEN, and then run the command.

It dumps out a ton of JSON, so you can either paste it through something like http://jsonprettyprint.com, or try reading it in all it's unformatted glory. And if the latter, are you a robot?

I integrate Facebook posting with a few different websites and services, so I've gotten to know Facebook's Open Graph and API pretty well over the past few years. A lot of sites I work with automatically post new stories straight to a Facebook Page's wall, and have a format with a message and an attached link. All of these parameters are well documented in Facebook's API under Post.

However, lately I've been getting the following error message whenever a site uses the first method below to send a post with a link attached:

I tried using the Open Graph Explorer, the official Facebook SDK for PHP, and other methods to see if there was any other way to get around that exception, but nothing I did turned out any different response.

After reading through a ton of documentation posts and forum topics for Amazon SES about this issue, I finally found this post about the string list format that helped me be able to send an email with Amazon SES's sendmail API to multiple recipients.

Every way I tried getting this working, I was receiving errors like InvalidParameter for the sender, Unexpected list element termination for the error code, etc.

Normally, when sending email, you can either pass a single address or multiple addresses as a string, and you'll be fine: