the möbius trip – self-referential. technically.

comment line and duplicate snippet for VS Code with keyboard shortcut

June 19, 2025 / abhijit / 0 Comments

Multiple times during the day, I comment a line and then duplicate it with some minor changes. This whole action does not take much time individually but over the course of days and years, I think I’ve wasted a lot of time on this!

This has been overdue for a long time, and I should have created a snippet for this earlier, but never got around to it.

So, I’ll create a snippet which does exactly that and map it to keyboard shortcuts so that the same shortcut works across multiple programming languages.

Run caddy as a non-root user on Ubuntu

June 6, 2025 / abhijit / 0 Comments

Any process can be run as a non-root user service.

The first criteria to have a service as a non-root user is to have the service be kept running even when the user is not logged in.

However, having a web server places an additional challenge – port 80 and port 443 which are basically the http and the https ports need to be bound by a user with administrative privileges because they are lower ports.

Create systemd service on Linux for non-root user

April 25, 2025 / abhijit

To create a systemd service in Linux, we need to create the unit file under /etc/systemd/system/ as myapp.service.

This means that to stop, restart or debug this service we need root access.

I wanted to create a service which a user without root access would be able to start, stop, debug.

Fossil Activity Graph

March 20, 2025 / abhijit

I’ve been a bit envious of the activity graph that Github creates for the checkins happening across all repositories by a developer.

Since I’ve always been using fossil across projects, I thought I could do the same with fossil as well.

Fossil repositories being SQLite databases themselves made things a bit easier.

Restrict access to part of path in Nginx

March 9, 2025 / abhijit

So, I have a site, let’s call it example.com. But I have multiple levels of directories under it. I have directories like /example.com/repositories and the actual repositories at the next level like so example.com/repositories/abcd or example.com/repositories/efgh.

Now, I only want access to example.com/repositories restricted. Everyone should be able to access the root level i.e. example.com and the nested subdirectories i.e. example.com/repositories/*.

Add a confirmation on a rake task

February 21, 2025 / abhijit

Many times on a rake task it’s better to have a confirmation before continuing the task. This is especially required before important tasks like a deployment or a database migration in production.

Adding a gets doesn’t work at all. To overcome this, we can add a confirm task which is run before the actual task is run.

Nginx config for SvelteKit SPA

February 6, 2025 / abhijit

For creating a SvelteKit SPA app, we first need to set up SvelteKit to have all the pages pre-rendered. For this, for every +page.svelte we need to add a +page.server.ts or a +page.server.js with the following –

export const prerender = true;
export const ssr = true;

This will create the corresponding pages for each route. For example, if we have a URL like example.com/about, we will have an about.html page getting created.

However, putting the build folder directly under a simple nginx config doesn’t work. Since the URL does not have an .html extension, even if those pages are there, nginx doesn’t show them.

Talent is pursued interest
Bob ross

Install code-server (VS Code for web) on Linux with Nginx

January 2, 2025 / abhijit

VS Code is the code editor of choice for many. However, when we want to do quick edits on some files on a remote server, and there is no access to VS Code, it becomes a bit of a hassle.

Also, sometimes VS Code is not accessible on a particular system and we might still want to be able to access local files and folders using VS Code.

This is where code-server is invaluable.

Powershell – find alias or function in profile by pattern

August 9, 2024 / abhijit

Since I have lots of aliases and functions in my profile, frequently I need to search them by some pattern.

This Powershell function lets me do just that.

function ff {
  param(
    [string]$Pattern
  )

  # Define the path to the PowerShell profile
  $profilePath = $PROFILE

  # Check if the profile exists
  if (-not (Test-Path $profilePath)) {
    Write-Host "Profile script does not exist at $profilePath"
    return
  }

  # Define the patterns to search for aliases and functions
  $patterns = "Set-Alias.*$Pattern", "New-Alias.*$Pattern", "function.*$Pattern"

  # Search the profile for the specified pattern
  # Select-String -Path $profilePath -Pattern $patterns
  Select-String -Path $profilePath $patterns
}

Now, all I need to do is type this to find the matching line and the actual function in my profile.

> ff <pattern>