hcl VS harbormaster

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.

I use an HP ProLiant Microserver with four drives in a ZFS RAIDZ array and an SSD for the OS. For software, I mostly run it in Docker using a very small container orchestration program I wrote:

https://gitlab.com/stavros/harbormaster

I needed something that would restart containers automatically when I pushed to a branch, so I wrote a few lines of code to do it:

https://gitlab.com/stavros/harbormaster

As far as PaaSes go, it's probably the simplest, and works really well.

I was in the same boat as you and built something simple that I really like:

https://gitlab.com/stavros/harbormaster

It'll just pull some repos, make sure the containers are up, and make your configuration simple and discoverable. It really works great at that.

I do this for our services, it works great and we can easily put SSO in front of them with CF Access. I publish a Docker container that you can use as a sidecar for your Compose deployments:

https://gitlab.com/stavros/docker-cloudflared

I use this with Harbormaster (https://gitlab.com/stavros/harbormaster) so I can expose containerized stuff without ever forwarding any ports outside of Docker.

I use Dokku for that (I can share my Bitwarden repo if you want, the entire thing is four lines or something). I also made https://gitlab.com/stavros/harbormaster for things that weren't so "web server -> app -> database" and love it.

I had the same problem and didn't want to manage things by hand, so I wrote Harbormaster:

https://gitlab.com/stavros/harbormaster

It basically pulls Compose apps from the git repositories you specify, builds the containers and makes sure they're running. Pretty simple and works really well for me.

(This post should read "Argo tunnel" instead of just "Argo")

I did the same to enable secure access to services via SSO at work. I used Harbormaster[1] to deploy Compose files, but it's otherwise the same setup.

One of the big advantages this has is that the services can't be accessed any other way (not even from the same host, as they only listen inside the Docker network). That makes it hard to forget some port exposed because you listened to 0.0.0.0 instead of localhost.

Cloudflare access is very easy to set up SSO with, as well. I'd recommend this setup if you need it, though for home usage I usually just set up Caddy as a reverse proxy with basic auth, as I'll be the only person using this and I don't want Cloudflare MITMing my personal stuff.

[1]: https://gitlab.com/stavros/harbormaster

Something like harbormaster? https://gitlab.com/stavros/harbormaster