If you use a bastion server to access a postgresql, or any other sql database for that matter, you’ll need to create an ssh tunnel to access it. Some DB clients handle this automatically for you, but if you want to interact with the database through the shell you’ll need to create it yourself.

What is a SSH Tunnel?

Put simply, a ssh tunnel is a way to redirect requests to a port on localhost to a remote server.

If you don’t want to setup MySQL and a PHP server to develop WordPress plugins, you can use docker-compose with some volumes instead.

I use a package manager called chocolatey to install/uninstall software when I can. If you have chocolatey setup, just run the following command to install docker:

choco install docker-desktop

Kitematic provides a visual interface to docker, so if you don’t care much for the command line, I’d recommend installing that as well:

choco install docker-kitematic

Starting Docker

After the installation has finished, log out then back in. Run docker desktop by pressing the windows key and searching for docker…

Suppose you just wrote an amazing node module that you want to break off into a package so it can be reused. The problem is that it contains some super-secret company stuff that can’t be shared and you can’t, or don’t want to, create a private npm organization. So what do you do now?

Believe it or not, if you’re using private git repositories then you already have everything that you need.

Installing packages from git

Installing packages with git is actually really easy, if you use github, gitlab, bitbucket. npm install just requires a special package name to install from git. …

I’ve been wanting to try out the Jovo webhook for a while because of the slick debugging view that it provides, but I also need to set breakpoints in my code and I’d rather not use Chrome DevTools. They’re nice, but if I’m developing in VS Code, that’s where I want to set breakpoints too.

It turns out getting this to work isn’t that difficult, it just took a little bit of time reading through the VS Code launch.json documentation.

Setting the launch program to jovo and passing the run and --inspect args is the obvious choice:

However, since…

Telling Alexa to open your skill 500 times isn’t fun, but until recently that was how I went about testing my skills. I’d use the developer console to save my voice, but still copying and pasting the same launch command got old, fast. Then if I wanted to test a specific flow I had to type all of the commands for that 😢

I have come up with a set of tools that make testing very easy. They may not be “the best”, but it’s much better than what I had been doing.