After I set up a GitHub self-hosted runner on my Synology NAS, it worked great for a while. Then, on a random Saturday morning, I got an error notification. It turned out that the runner was trying to update itself, but it failed to restart at the end.
Although GitHub-hosted runners should usually be your first choice for running GitHub Actions, you sometimes still might want to use a self-hosted runner to save on costs or work around IP blocking. If you own a Synology NAS, you can also use it to host a GitHub runner.
After a long break, I had to do some maintenance work on an old PHP project again and this time I did not like the idea of installing the tooling natively on my new development machine. I decided to rather configure a Docker image and run the project in it.
In enterprise environments, it is not uncommon to use private repositories for distribution, and Docker images are no exception. If these repositories use certificates from an internal certificate authority, trust in those certificates must be established before the repositories can be used.
Although I'm hosting my blog in Azure, I have a local instance of AWStats configured for analyzing the server logs. Since I'm only looking at the statistics a few times a year at most, I don't really need to have AWStats running all the time on my local server. What if I could just run it on demand when I need it instead? Docker seemed a perfect tool for the job.
Tuesday was the Visual Studio 2017 release day. To celebrate this occasion, Microsoft organized an official 2-day launch event. It was accompanied by a large number of local events all across the world. One of them was organized in Ljubljana as well. I had a short session there, presenting the most important new features and improvements in Visual Studio 2017.
Having leftover Azure credit from my MSDN subscription made Azure a logical choice for hosting Docker in a Linux virtual machine. This post documents the steps I took to create a convenient working environment on my Windows workstation.