Linters, Hooks, and Pipelines — Automation to Save Your Bacon

Speakers: Elliot Jordan

Level: Intermediate, Lecture

Excerpt: I’ll introduce you to three tools from the dev ops world that seamlessly fit into the Mac admin toolkit: linters, pre-commit hooks, and CI/CD pipelines. When used properly, these tools can act as guard rails for your code as it goes from development into production. AutoPkg recipes, Munki repositories, MDM profiles, Jamf extension attributes, package builds: I’ll show you examples of how each of these benefit from strategic dev ops automation.

Description: I’ll show you how to add some dev ops guard rails to three stages of your Mac admin development workflow: linters, pre-commit hooks, and CI/CD pipelines.
Linters help while you’re writing code. Whether it’s Python, shell, Ruby, or Go, linting catches basic syntax errors and gives you style hints while you type. I’ll show you how to integrate linters into popular text editors like Atom and Sublime Text. I’ll briefly cover auto-formatting tools, which allow you to focus less on style and more on substance.
Pre-commit hooks can prevent you from committing your code unless it passes a series of tests you specify. I’ll demonstrate how to distribute these tests to your entire team.
Finally, many hosted Git services can provide continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) automation, and this provides yet another step at which your code can be checked, validated, and sanitized. I’ll walk you through configuration of a pipeline tailored for Mac admins.
You’ll see several real-world examples of these dev ops tools in action, along with instructions for configuring them for your team. Successfully using these three tools can save you from common errors and allows you to focus on the “what” instead of the “how” of being a Mac IT engineer.


About the speaker

Elliot Jordan (Twitter: @homebysix) – – Nordstrom

Elliot has secured and automated Mac management at a diverse range of companies over the past 15 years. A frequent open source contributor and collaborator, Elliot co-created Recipe Robot, led the AutoPkgr development team, and maintains over 1,000 public AutoPkg recipes. Elliot works on the corporate security team at Nordstrom and lives with his wife Jacqueline in Seattle, WA.

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