the padded cell

Things I've Learned (TIL)

02 August, 2025

Drone CI has special handling for ${VAR} and will replace it itself instead of letting the shell do it. So if you have export PATH=${GOPATH}/bin:$PATH and have $GOPATH defined in your global environment key, then it’ll become a blank value. But if you do export PATH=$GOPATH/bin:$PATH it’ll work.

This is different from normal shell where ${VAR} is the same as $VAR and it exists to make sure you can concatenate strings without issues, i.e.

[… more]
til • • 1 min read • #drone-ci

Drone CI will not smartly skip subsequent steps if you have a when on the very first step in a depends_on chain, so you have to repeat the when condition for each step because it doesn’t realize that the first dependency is gone.

til • • #drone-ci

Drone CI’s when for deciding in which cases to run steps/pipelines targets the merge target branch for PRs and not the actual PR’s, also it pulls from refs/pull/<num>/head instead of refs/heads/<branch> so you can’t target the branch itself using the pull_request event (use push on the pipeline and then branch for the step instead).

til • • #drone-ci

In shell scripts if you do "$@" it will actually expand “quoted sentences” correctly, and if you just do $@ it will always unwrap them into single words, I thought that if you did "$@" it would combine all arguments into a single argument, and what it does is do what I thought $@ alone did.

I.e., with "$@" the arguments "one two" three will be 2 arguments, the first being "one two", and without it will become three arguments, all separated by space.

[… more]
til • • 1 min read • #shell-scripting

The <link rel="canonical" href="…"> is a bit like a correlation ID between services and I need also to have it on my canonical page, because if someone sends it with ?utm_source=foo it could be a different page than the one without the query string.

til • • #html

The scripts inside a shell script inherit access to STDIN when you call them, so if you have a shells script that only has cat and you do ./script.sh < script.sh then it’ll output the content of itself

til • • #shell-scripting

You can view the webhooks that GitHub sends in your project settings, so for example Drone CI getting notified and exactly what information that goes into the payload, and when/if it was sent, is available there.

Go to Settings -> Webhooks and then click on the integration you want to look at.

til • • #github

01 August, 2025

You can enable the fingerprint reader for sudo on macOS, and pressing my finger on a button beats having to type the password, steps:

  1. cp /etc/pam.d/sudo_local{.template,}
  2. Edit /etc/pam.d/sudo_local and uncomment auth sufficient pam_tid.so.

The reason for doing this in sudo_local is that this file will not get reset with system changes from Apple.

til • • #how-to, #macos