Background Over the years, the Black Marble blog server has been hosted on many platforms. It's previous incarnation was WordPress, running as a network of sites with an aggregated feed. Of late we had found this slow to serve the first page (due to website start-up time) and there was the constant need to keep the …

I wanted to have a look at some GitHub Enterprise Server (GHES) upgrade scenarios so decided to create a quick GHES install on my local test Hyper-V instance. Due to me skimping on resources, and making a typo, creating this instance was much harder than it should have been. The first issue was I gave it a tiny data …

GitHub's Dependabot is a great tool to help keep your dependencies up to date, and most of the time the PR it generates just merges without a problem. However, sometimes there are issues with other related dependencies. This was the case with a recent PR to update jest-circus to 28.x. The PR failed with the error …

Issue I had an Azure DevOps YAML based pipeline that had been working but was now getting stuck with the message "Job is pending..." when trying to start a stage in which there is a deployment to an environment. Looking at the logs and Azure DevOps UI it was not obvious what the issue was. Solution Turns out …

I have blogged in the past ( here and here) about the complexities and possible areas of confusion with different types of Azure DevOps pipeline variables. I have also seen issues raised over how to access custom variables across jobs and stages. Safe to say, this is an area where it is really easy to get it wrong and …

Yesterday, yet again, I was thankful for my past self taking time to blog about a technical solution I had found. I had an error when trying to digitally sign a package. On searching on the error code I came across my own blog post with the solution. This was, as usual, one I had no recollection of writing. I find this …

I have been doing some work with Azure DevOps multi-stage YAML pipelines using stage dependency variables and conditions. They can get confusing quickly, you need one syntax in one place and another elsewhere. So, here are a few things I have learnt... What are stage dependency variables? Stage Dependencies are the way …

The Azure DevOps CLI provides plenty of commands to update Team Projects, but it does not cover all things you might want to set. A good example is setting branch policies. For a given repo you can set the policies using the Azure Repo command eg: 1az repos policy approver-count update --project <projectname> …

The Issue Today I came across a strange issue with a reasonably old multi-stage YAML pipeline, it appeared to be cancelling itself. The Build stage ran OK, but the Release stage kept being shown as cancelled with a strange error. The strangest thing was it did not happen all the time. I guess this is the reason the …

This is another of those posts to remind me in the future. I searched the documentation for this answer for ages and found nothing, eventually getting the solution by asking on the SonarQube Forum When you link SonarQube into an Azure DevOps pipeline that is used from branch protection the success, or failure, of the …