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Our Tools

The DevOps division have created tools to speed up workflow for day-to-day tasks and other operations having wider scope.

The canonical source of these tools is on gitlab > Information Services > DevOps > Tools

Ansible Role Fetcher

When an ansible playbook relies on shared ansible roles held elsewhere the ARF can be used to set up your Ansible environment to automatically refer to a local copy of this(-ese) role(s)

See the Ansible Role Fetcher project on the Developers' Hub for instructions on use.

Google Cloud SQL Backup

We host many of our databases in Google's Cloud SQL product. We have written a tool to scan all of our Google Cloud Projects and back any Cloud SQL databases found to a Google Cloud Storage bucket in a central backup project.

See the tool's Developer Hub page for more information.

Mailtrap

For testing application which deliver email, we use Mailtrap.io.

Most users will be using Mailtrap as a 'sandbox' SMTP server, however an API is available. Mailtrap also allows users to separate test mails in to project reducing clutter and making is easier to identify your test mails.

If you require an account for mailtrap.io, please contact cloud@uis.cam.ac.uk.

You can get more information about mailtrap.io from their help pages or their API documentation.

Mailhog

Warning

This service is being decommissioned. Please use Mailtrap. Mailhog may still be used as part of a docker compose environment. More information on this is available in the tour of our development environment.

For testing applications which deliver email, we have a Mailhog instance at mailhog.devops.uis.cam.ac.uk.

Mailhog is a mail server that only receives mail sent to it no matter who it is sent to or from and makes the mail available to view through via a web fronted. The mail is never delivered to it's supposed recipient. This is very useful for testing.

The web frontend is protected by raven to only members of the UIS lookup group (ID: 101611)

Mail can be sent to this from any app for testing by using

  • Host: mailhog.devops.uis.cam.ac.uk
  • Port: 9025

The web frontend is available at https://mailhog.devops.uis.cam.ac.uk.