Category: devops

orange and black metal pipe

Renew an Azure DevOps Service Connection’s expired secret

    

We ran into an issue this morning where we needed to renew our Azure DevOps Service Connection’s expired secret but there is no officially supported way to do this. The error was AADSTS7000215 - invalid clientid or secret. Thankfully, it’s not that difficult to solve.

Fake a change

  1. Open your project in ADO (https://dev.azure.com/[GROUP]/[PROJECT])
  2. At the bottom-left, choose Project settings
  3. In the Pipelines section, choose Service connections
  4. Select the service connection you’re having issues with
  5. If you click the Edit Service Principal link, you should see a red warning at the top of the page stating that one or more secrets for this service principal have expired; you can verify this by clicking the Certificates and secrets link on the blade and seeing that the single secret expired in the past
  6. Close this tab
  7. Click the Edit button
  8. You’ll notice there is no visible way to actually refresh the secret, however if you first click Verify (which should fail), make a simple change to the Description (add an extra space, for example; anything to make it different than it was)
  9. Now click Save
  10. Now if you re-open the Edit Service Principal link, you should no longer see the warning about expired secrets, and if you go to the Certificates and secrets link on the blade, there should be exactly one secret and should be valid for 2 years from today’s date

Now, if you ever need to renew an Azure DevOps Service Connection’s expired secret, hopefully you can avoid wasting precious time by trying to figure out how to do it manually and just trick the system into doing it for you.

man in bluee ssweater

How to debug Terraform variable content using this custom module

  

A lot of the time when I’m having to debug Terraform, I find that I want to quickly look at what Terraform may be storing inside a variable so that I can understand where I’ve made a mistake passing data around. After literal years of using the old TF_LOG=debug method – which can get way too unwieldy with any decently sized environment, I realized I could write a simple module to dump out what I was looking for. Hopefully this will help you too.

resource "null_resource" "terraform-debug" {
  provisioner "local-exec" {
    command = "echo $VARIABLE1 >> debug.txt ; echo $VARIABLE2 >> debug.txt"

    environment = {
        VARIABLE1 = jsonencode(var.your_variable_name)
        VARIABLE2 = jsonencode(local.piece_of_data)
    }
  }
}

Just replace var.your_variable_name_goes_here with your actual variable reference and then run your terraform apply. A file should be spit out in the same directory that the .tf file that you inserted this resource lives in, which you can then open up and understand what might be going on.

I don’t know why it took me so long to figure out something so simple, but coming from PHP/Laravel – where you can just dd() or dump() the contents of a variable to the console – the idea of using the local-exec provisioner to debug terraform just never occurred to me.

EDIT [Jan 6, 2020]: Wrapped variable data in jsonencode() to avoid issues with echoing an empty string to a file. Also show how to dump multiple variables to the same file.

How to spam your co-workers with cat facts in 5 easy steps

    

Step 1 – Find a cat facts API

https://catfact.ninja/

Well that was easy.

Step 2 – Build a serverless, Azure Logic App using Terraform that will connect to the API and spam your co-workers with a new fact every 5 minutes

https://github.com/nexxai/cat-facts/

Ok that part was easy too, but come on, it’s gotta be at least a little difficu–

Step 3 – Create an Office 365 connection that your Logic App can use

Open the Azure Logic Apps blade

You have 60 seconds to manually add a step that connects your Office 365 account to this app. ‘Get Calendars’ requires the least configuration.

Step 4 – Wait for your co-workers’ email clients to play their New Email alert sound

Start laughing, and keep laughing every 5 minutes from now until forever, asserting your feline dominance over your team.

“But that was only 4 steps, where’s number fi

Step 5 – Have Senior PM of Microsoft Azure Functions see your stupid app and tweet about it

Sure, no prob–wait, what?

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