hcl VS Gitea

Terraform HCL (HashiCorp Configuration Language) is an essential language for cloud engineers in 2024, particularly for those involved in infrastructure as code (IaC) practices. HCL is the configuration language used by Terraform, a widely adopted tool that enables engineers to define, provision, and manage cloud infrastructure using a declarative configuration approach. Learning Terraform HCL allows cloud engineers to automate the deployment and lifecycle management of cloud resources across various service providers, ensuring consistency, repeatability, and scalability of cloud environments.

Reminds me of [HCL](https://github.com/hashicorp/hcl), but without all the providers to deploy the config?

HCL: A Go implementation structured configuration language. The native syntax of HCL is inspired by libucl and nginx configurations. It is used to create a structured configuration language that is friendly to humans and machines, mainly for DevOps tools, server configurations, and resource configurations as a Terraform language.

HCL has a JSON representation [1], internally, objects behave that way. so it should be possible to write a Jsonnet wrapper around it. Terraform can currently parse json pipelines too.

[1]: https://github.com/hashicorp/hcl/blob/main/json/spec.md

>https://noyaml.com/

I'm not sure this is the criticism you think it is. Wow, so you basically have to add quotes to get strings in some ambiguous situations?

Yeah sure you could probably improve YAML by getting rid of these weird pitfalls, but that is a minor improvement. The alternative isn't something like TOML, because YAML is optimized for hierarchical configuration. It's every vendor implementing a different syntax such as Hashicorp with their HCL [0].

[0] https://github.com/hashicorp/hcl

The Hashicorp corporation has made a huge impact in providing valuable tools and platforms in the cloud ecosystem. The advantage of using the tools they provide, such as Terraform, Vault, and Packer, is that they all have the same language, Hashicorp Configuration Language (HCL). This means you can easily pick up any of these tools by learning HCL, which is similar to JSON. This approach can be useful when choosing tools to learn or use for a project.

Format is HCL language feature: https://github.com/hashicorp/hcl/blob/main/hclwrite/public.go

Hi, from what I read from HCL Github "HCL is a syntax and API specifically designed for building structured configuration formats.".

When the desired state is relatively simple to define and the mechanism to reach that state is not that important, writing up a declaration of what is needed and letting something/someone else deal with it is the most logical abstraction. This would be like drafting up the architectural draft for your new restaurant and paying a contracting company to actually build it, or writing HTML and letting a web browser render it, or writing a Terraform HCL file and letting the Terraform CLI tool apply it. This is called declarative programming in the software world, and has many advantages (and a few disadvantages!) for cloud infrastructure management.

Linux Mint with Cinnamon: https://www.linuxmint.com/ as far as desktop OSes go it's familiar (Ubuntu without snaps by default), whereas the UI feels both snappy, doesn't use too much resources and is actually pretty to look at.

MobaXTerm: https://mobaxterm.mobatek.net/ this one is a bit more Windows centric but I ended up paying for it and replaced mRemoteNg and PuTTY with it, it's even better than Remmina or whatever Linux has to offer - you can manage SSH/RDP/VNC/... sessions, input across multiple sessions side by side and it just simplifies things a lot (jump host support, a port forwarding too and so much more).

GitKraken: https://www.gitkraken.com/ also a piece of software that I paid for, this one actually makes using Git pleasant, feels better to use than SourceTree and Git Cola (even though that latter is wonderfully lightweight, too) and honestly I prefer that to the CLI nowadays.

Kanboard: https://kanboard.org/ is a lightweight Kanban project management tool, it might not have every feature under the sun but it's the most snappy project management tool I've ever used, looks simple and runs well. I honestly love it, what a nice thing to have.

Most modern text editors and IDEs: I personally pay for JetBrains IDEs but also like Visual Studio Code as a text editor and both have helped me immensely, they're reasonably performant when you have the RAM, look nice, often give you suggestions about how to improve your code and also have a plethora of plugins in their ecosystems. Nowadays I unapologetically use LLMs as well and overall it feels like I have these great tools and cool autocomplete (that is sometimes a bit silly and wrong) at my disposal, that makes me happy.

Kdenlive: https://kdenlive.org/ imagine if there was a successor to Windows Movie Maker, though something that gets most of the important stuff out of Sony Vegas, except is also completely free and works on most platforms. Kdenlive is all of that and also somehow quite pleasant to use, I actually prefer it to DaVinci resolve. There is a bit of a learning curve to any piece of software like this, but everything mostly makes sense in this one.

Gitea: https://about.gitea.com/ I still use this for my personal Git repositories and integrating with CI systems and it's lightweight, looks good and just feels pleasant to use. Previously I self-hosted GitLab and constantly ran into resource exhaustion as well as doubts about the next update is going to corrupt all of my data and break (it did), so now I use Gitea instead.

Drone CI: https://www.drone.io/ a container native CI solution that I can also self host. It's container oriented, integrates with Gitea nicely, is similarly nice to GitLab CI and doesn't cause me headaches like Jenkins would.

Docker: https://www.docker.com/ yes, even Docker desktop. It just makes working with containers really pleasant and predictable, even when something like Podman also exists (and also is great). I don't know, I feel like Docker really saved me from having brittle legacy environments, even self-contained containers with health checks and resource limits with still the same brittle code inside of those make me feel way more safe.

Same [1]. Zoom being outsourced to the implementing platform is one major pain-point. That example from us has grown in size.

We are clearly using the wrong tool for a diagram of this complexity, but the practicality of seeing commit changes in the diff, what property was changed by whom and instantly having the visual feedback in the Pull Request is just way too useful to use a "proper" tool.

[1] https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/issues/25803

It's a tangent, but I think it's interesting that Gitea started trying to self host in Feb 2017 (https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/issues/1029) and hasn't got there yet (based on how active the github issues/PR page are).

https://about.gitea.com/ offers me a "free cloud trial" and otherwise sounds very like other web front ends to git. So like github, except they don't trust it themselves.

In contract forgejo has "Self-hosted alternative to GitHub" written in big letters on the landing page. https://codeberg.org/forgejo is indeed self hosted.

Gitea is a versatile tool for creating and managing git-based repositories, streamlining Code Review to enhance code quality for users and businesses. It integrates a CI/CD system, Gitea Actions, compatible with GitHub Actions, allowing users to create workflows in YAML or use existing plugins. Gitea's project management features include issue tasks, labeling, and kanban boards for efficient management of requirements, features, and bugs. These tools integrate with branches, tags, milestones, assignments, time tracking, and dependencies to plan and track development progress. Furthermore, Gitea supports over 20 package management types, such as Cargo, Composer, NPM, and PyPI, catering to a wide range of public or private package management needs. This comprehensive suite of features makes Gitea a powerful platform for managing development projects and packages.

Golang has a ton of single binary websites out there. The two that come to mind off hand are Gogs/Gitea only because I contributed to them

https://github.com/gogs/gogs

https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea

My problem with Fossil is that it is a "one solution for all problems". Fossil packs all solutions together while the Git ecosystem provides several different solutions for each problem.

When you want to do things that Fossil is not meant to do, then you're in trouble. I have no idea on how to do CI/CD and DevOps with Fossil and how to integrate it with AWS/Azure/GCP.

I find that the whole ecosystem of Gitlab/Github and stand-alone alternatives like Gitea [1], Gogs [2], Notion, Jira and others is way more flexible and versatile.

[1] https://about.gitea.com/

Reminds of the GitHub issue for hosting Gitea on Gitea, it's... a read to be sure: https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/issues/1029