Blog Posts

Fixing ctypes ImportError in Azure Pipelines: Missing _type_ Attribute When running pip install in an Azure Pipelines self-hosted agent, you might encounter the following error: File "~\myselfhostedagent\_work\_tool\Python\3.12.3\x64\Lib\site-packages\pip\_vendor\platformdirs\windows.py", line 254, in _pick_get_win_folder import ctypes # noqa: PLC0415 ^^^^^^^^^^^^^ File "ctypes\__init__.py", line 157, in <module> AttributeError: class must define a '_type_' attribute Interestingly, if you manually execute pip install using the same python.exe, it works fine. However, when executed within the Azure Pipelines agent, it fails.

published on Fri, 31 Jan 2025

🚀 Deploying a Blog with GitHub Actions, Docker, and Submodules 📌 Problem Statement If you’re using GitHub Actions to build and deploy a static blog that: Runs inside Docker Pushes generated content to a GitHub Pages submodule Requires Git authentication to commit and push changes Then, you might run into permission issues, especially when pushing to submodules. This guide walks you through setting up GitHub Actions to automatically deploy your blog without permission errors.

published on Fri, 31 Jan 2025

Azure pipelines cross-platform python scripting This post is a continuation of Azure pipelines cross-platform scripts for Self-Hosted Azure agents. If you’ve missed it make sure to read this first, since we’re going to extend on it. I can hear you think, “but Python is already cross platform … ?”. Yes, though this is going to be about how to setup Azure Pipelines to invoke Python in a cross-platform way. The problem The problem that you’re going to face is that not all Python installations have the same executables python and python3.

published on Thu, 01 Aug 2024

Azure pipelines cross-platform scripts To keep things simple when setting up a CI/CD pipeline for a cross-platform application we cautiously have to consider our options for running the steps in what scripting language, because we don’t want to end up with scripts that do the same thing functionally, but are different for each platform, which means extra maintenance and complexity for the maintainers. So we have to consider languages like Powershell, Bash, Zsh or Python for to run on Windows, macOS and Linux.

published on Thu, 01 Aug 2024

How to typed command line arguments in python Creating tools with python is a common practice due to its ease of use and productivity. Now python already has good built-in support for parsing command-line arguments, but we can take it one step further. Let’s take the following example where we would like to create a platform independent build script that should be able to accept the build type and an option to rebuild.

published on Mon, 22 Apr 2024