Troubles pasting ritch-text content from CLI to Confluence

Using some custom script I'm generating some markdown (because it is easy to write) content, maybe it is status report or something. fOR EXAMPLE this:

$ cat /tmp/report.md
# Monday
* Watching cat videos
* Fixing what I broke at Fry

Now you want to paste it to, say, Google Document. First step is to convert to HTML:

$ cat /tmp/report.md | multimarkdown
<h1 id="monday">Monday</h1>

<ul>
<li>Watching cat videos</li>
<li>Fixing what I broke at Fry</li>
</ul>

Or using Pandoc:

$ cat /tmp/report.md | pandoc --from=markdown --to=html
<h1 id="monday">Monday</h1>
<ul>
<li>Watching cat videos</li>
<li>Fixing what I broke at Fry</li>
</ul>

Now to transfer it, very convinient way I was using is to copy it to the clipboard (and then just paste in in the editor with Ctrl+V):

cat /tmp/report.md | multimarkdown | xclip -sel clip -t "text/html"

When I needed to paste into Altasian Confluence WYSIWYG editor, it did not worked for me for some reason - only plain text was copied and the formatting was lost. But copying from normal web page worked. What is the difference? Thanks to this great answer, I have examined how clipboard looks like when I copy snippet from a web browser and noticed this:

$ # Selected and copied something from the web browser
$ xclip -o -selection clipboard -t TARGETS
TIMESTAMP
TARGETS
MULTIPLE
SAVE_TARGETS
text/html
text/_moz_htmlcontext
text/_moz_htmlinfo
UTF8_STRING
COMPOUND_TEXT
TEXT
STRING
text/plain;charset=utf-8
text/plain
text/x-moz-url-priv
$ xclip -o -selection clipboard -t text/html
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"><ol>
<li>copy something from you web browser</li>
<li>investigate available types</li>
</ol>

So looks like I need that <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"><ol> string, so let's add it:

$ (echo '<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">'; cat /tmp/report.md | multimarkdown) | xclip -sel clip -t "text/html"

And here we go, pasting to Conflence works now!

Note: For some reason I do not understand, it seems to work the old way now once I pasted the new way for a first time :-/ Maybe above is not needed at all, YMMW.

Dumping my notes on Jenkins shared library use in declarative pipeline

Recently I have tasked myself to work on how we organize our Jenkins jobs code. We are using Jenkins declarative pipeline (officially that is "simplified and opinionated syntax on top of the Pipeline sub-systems", but basically it is "nicely structured, but they forbid you to use mostly anything fancy in you Groovy code").

In our case we have lots (and it is slowly growing) of jobs which are running tests from different directories in a same way, but with different parameters. Also we have another set of jobs that are checking something and in some case they trigger the test jobs. This all loudly calls for sharing the code, so I wanted to take a look at how to do it.

Here is list of tabs I'm closing now once I'm done :)

• Shared libraries - Create another git repo with vars/ directory and share the code there
• Defining Declarative Pipelines - You can define function that implements whole declarative pipeline (you can also define custom step, but you can not define shared stage)
• Groovy Maps - If you want to pass lots of parameters to the function, passing a Map is very handy and easy to read - in Python equivalent would be passing a dict I think
• Cannot define variable in pipeline stage - In declarative pipeline you can not define variable directly, use this workaround
• sh: Shell Script - Jenkins help for sh step
• Catching both output and error code - spoiler: try { ... } catch ( ... ) { ... } is also forbidden in declarative pipeline, use script { ... } again
• when - this is way how to skip a stage in declarative pipeline based on something
• Writing file in groovy - This would probably work, but Jenkins was giving me lots of security related warnings
• Library variable in jenkins shared library - how to get variables from vars/someVariables.groovy in vars/someFunction.groovy

Changing Slack status from command-line

I'm used to track mine working time with a custom script and I have keyboard shortcut for start and stop actions. One thing the script does is that when I "stop" my work, it sets mine IRC nick to "jhutar_afk" and when I "start" my work it sets the nick back to plain "jhutar". This is e.g. handy taking a launch break or going for some errands. The same is possible with Slack:

I have started with How to set a Slack status from other apps article. It is very easy.

1. Create a legacy token (I know, it is legacy - need to investigate how to use current way :-/) and put it to the variable token='xoxp-0000000000-000000000000-000000000000-00000000000000000000000000000000'
2. Construct a json to send: profile='{"status_text": "Away from keyboard", "status_emoji": ":tea:"}'
3. Send that to the API: curl -X POST https://slack.com/api/users.profile.set --silent --data "profile=$profile" --data "token=$token"

This way I can set various statuses. Then I have realized that what I really want is to set mine presence (that green or empty/black dot next to your nick). That is easy as well:

1. Again (see above), prepare your token token='xoxp-0000000000-000000000000-000000000000-00000000000000000000000000000000'
2. Use the Slack API: curl -X POST https://slack.com/api/users.setPresence --silent --data "presence=away" --data "token=$token" (to set yourself away) or use presence=auto (for a normal mode when Slack decides based on your activity)

Given how long I was avoiding to actually add it to my script, it was very easy at the end :-)