Posts in "cloud-software"

About the Author

Alan is a hobbyist Game Developer and a Software Engineer at Autodesk.

Posts in July 2018

ISO Country Code to Unicode Flag in C# on the 22nd

Posts in January 2018

Serverless Git LFS for Game Development on the 6th
Adding Custom Map Checks in UE4 on the 3rd

Posts in December 2017

Building and Deploying a React App Using AWS Lambda on the 24th
Git HTTP Username and Password in Environment Variables on the 22nd
Capturing and Uploading Screenshots in UE4 on the 20th
Using Capsule Shadows on Large Objects in UE4 on the 8th

Category "cloud-software"

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ISO Country Code to Unicode Flag in C#

Posted on July 22nd, 2018 in cloud-software

The Unicode 6.0 spec defines Regional Indicator symbols, which includes a set of flags. Here are the founders of NATO, if your system supports the flag characters (Windows 10 doesn't yet):

🇧🇪 🇨🇦 🇩🇰 🇫🇷 🇮🇸 🇮🇹 🇱🇺 🇳🇱 🇳🇴 🇵🇹 🇬🇧 🇺🇸

To create a flag, take the country ISO code (for example GB), and offset it to the flags Unicode block. See here for the JavaScript implementation, which I translated to C#.

Code

public static string IsoCountryCodeToFlagEmoji(this string country)
{
    return string.Concat(country.ToUpper().Select(x => char.ConvertFromUtf32(x + 0x1F1A5)));
}

Usage

string gb = "gb".IsoCountryCodeToFlagEmoji(); // 🇬🇧
string fr = "fr".IsoCountryCodeToFlagEmoji(); // 🇫🇷

Serverless Git LFS for Game Development

Posted on January 6th, 2018 in cloud-software

For Estranged, I needed a simple, cheap way of storing binary files. All solutions I tested required me to host a server, or me to pay someone to host a server. I wanted to avoid the flat fee for a constantly running server, and use something completely serverless with a pay-for-what-you-use model.

I settled on using a BitBucket private git repository (free) and an LFS (large file storage) backend using Amazon Lambda, Amazon S3 and Amazon API Gateway.

This write-up is a follow up to my older YouTube video covering the manual setup. This guide uses a template for a 1-click deployment of all resources mentioned in the video.

Building and Deploying a React App Using AWS Lambda

Posted on December 24th, 2017 in cloud-software

If you use React with a static frontend web app, the deployment steps may comprise of the following:

Run npm install
Run npm test
Run npm build
Deploy build folder to Amazon S3 & invalidate CDN cache

The first part of the build only requires node.js & npm, and the second part can be written in JavaScript too as a package.json script (I'll go into that more below).

Since node and npm are both available on Lambda, we can write a Lambda function invoked using a post-commit webhook (from GitHub or BitBucket), which builds and deploys the React application.

A few advantages to doing this:

You don't need any orchestration infrastructure (Jenkins) or cost overhead of BitBucket pipelines and similar solutions
Since the environment is completely managed, the only changes you may need to make are updating the Node.js runtime version as Amazon release newer versions
Access to the S3 bucket is controlled using IAM roles, no access key/secret

Git HTTP Username and Password in Environment Variables

Posted on December 22nd, 2017 in cloud-software

Sometimes when automating the use of the git command in scripts against GitHub or BitBucket, you may need to supply a username and password using environment variables.

One example is when using a Jenkinsfile groovy script in a Jenkins pipeline build, where you'd like to use credentials from the Jenkins credentials store.

Fortunately this is possible using a custom git credential helper, in this case a simple bash script (however you can use whatever language you like).

Credential Helper Shell Script

The shell script simply needs to echo a username and password back to git. The below script takes the $GIT_USERNAME and $GIT_PASSWORD environment variables, and prints them in a format git understands.

#!/bin/bash
echo username=$GIT_USERNAME
echo password=$GIT_PASSWORD

Save this as credential-helper.sh