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I've discovered a number of open source tools over the years which have become an essential part of my personal workflow & productivity in my current day job (project manager / business analyst). I can often move from company-to-company and even account/machine (and OS too) and want to get up and running with the minimum of fuss.

What I'm trying to combine:

  • apps/tools (which use a variety of frameworks and languages including python, flask, javascript, node, java etc)
  • config files
  • other misc. files (e.g. fonts)

However, by necessity, I am often behind corporate firewalls and restrictive IT policies which make it time-consuming to get internal license approvals for each tool, download each of the tools individually, keep them up-to-date, blocked external package repos, maintaining & building-upon the associated configuration files over time...

Docker is the obvious solution here, but...

... it is often blocked by these same IT policies, as are its alternatives.

What I've tried

Using a GitHub repository, I've since settled on building/installing everything locally, making it 'portable' (using batch scripts, symlinks and a number of config file tweaks) and then uploading.

Drawbacks of this approach include: the complexity, difficulty maintaining this cross-platform (currently windows-only), working around applications installed via git-clone, working around quirks of 'portable' versions of runtime dependencies like Python, github 50mb single file-size limits...

Another possible approach I considered

Using continuous integration (like Travis-CI and AppVeyor), my main concern here is that I've not actually 'built' some of the apps I use (e.g. emacs-w64, which I download the pre-built binaries for) so wondering if this will just add more complexity than my current solution ... and since Travis-CI doesn't support windows it adds an additional dependency, as well as the overhead of learning the continuous integration world & maintaining build scripts for linux, osx & windows..

I'm not looking to open up discussion here, but an answer that will meet my needs with the minimum of fuss (this is for personal use rather than devops for my company / others after all) from the experts ... even if the answer is simply that I need to put the effort into a CI solution...

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xeijin
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1 Answers1

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For your own personal use, I think a GitHub repository with all of your bootstrap and installation scripts is a great idea. It serves as a portable way to download and distribute any scripts you need where firewalls and restrictions aren't an issue.

As for within your organization, one suggestion that your IT might be open to as a compromise is to create a machine (barebones, VM, etc.) that is solely dedicated to downloading and storing the artifacts that you need. The criteria for this machine would be:

  1. It has access to download artifacts (files, apps, etc.) from a source (preferably either the open internet or from white-listed addresses).
  2. It is able to store the artifacts in a central location.
  3. It is not able to access internal infrastructure
  4. It is has auditing to track any artifacts that it downloads/stores

With this setup, you could download something like the latest version of Python onto the server (via logging in with credentials, API, etc.) and have it store Python in a central location for your other servers to download and install. You could store your artifacts in a multitude of ways (artifact repository, cloud storage, file server, etc.), but only that server should be able to upload to your storage. Your IT team could even set alerts when a new artifact is downloaded on this server or uploaded to your storage so that they can inspect it.

I think this approach demonstrates a few things to your IT department:

  1. These artifacts are important enough to you and your teams that you are willing to go out of your way to establish a safer and more traceable method to retrieve them.
  2. You have given your IT department an automated way to track who and when an artifact was downloaded in the event an artifact is malicious and needs to be deleted and traced to a source (something they probably didn't have in place before).
  3. The method you propose not only gives you more accessibility to the tools you need to be productive, but you are proposing ways to help your IT team be more productive by not having to manage all aspects of downloading artifacts.
Preston Martin
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