sudo password is ok, but maybe not super safe and not nice having to type it on each pacman, systemctl, etc, why not use a Yubikey FIDO2 as your sudo password, it is nice only have to touch your key each time you need install/update your system 🦖

Step 1:

Install pam-u2f:

sudo pacman -S pam-u2f

Step 2:

create config folder to store your keys setup:

mkdir -p ~/.config/Yubico
touch ~/.config/Yubico/u2f_keys

Step 3:

Enroll your yubikey, run below command, connect your yubikey and touch it:

pamu2fcfg > ~/.config/Yubico/u2f_keys

Step 4:

Edit your auth configuration for sudo commands:

sudo nvim /etc/pam.d/sudo

Add/Update the below line

auth required pam_u2f.so

🎉 That's it now you only need to connect/touch your key instead of type your sudo password

This really short post is to show you how to set up correctly the scaling factor for retina displays (like mine Macbook pro late 2025) with Arch linux and hyprland.

Update hyprland.conf

Scales Qt apps by 130% with below config in your hyprland.conf

env = QT_SCALE_FACTOR,1.3

above's config works perfectly for qt apps (firefox, thunderbird)

Electron Apps

as Slack installed via flatpak you could update the zoom with CTRL + (plus) + or Decrease the zoom with CTRL + (less) - keys and the settings will remain trough sessions.

Note

I didn't need of this but worth to know there are some environment variables for both GTK and QT apps:

🗒️ Updated summary of environment variables

When you install Hyprland - Arch you get the default cursor, and it is ok but... boring, so to spice things up why not change it to have some sugar eye efect?

Future-Cyan

Future-Cyan is a nice cursor you could found it here (plus some others)

Clone the repository

git clone https://gitlab.com/Pummelfisch/future-cyan-hyprcursor.git ~/.config/future-cyan

Copy the theme

cp ~/.config/future-cyan/Future-Cyan-Hyprcursor_Theme ~/.local/share/icons/Future-Cyan

Edit your hyprland.conf

ensure update/add:

env = XCURSOR_THEME,Future-Cyan
env = XCURSOR_SIZE,64
env = HYPRCURSOR_THEME,Future-Cyan
env = HYPRCURSOR_SIZE,64

Reload the config

hyprctl setcursor Future-Cyan 64

Above configuration examples uses a size of 64 (best for my retina display) is likely you wanna use 24 or 32.

Enjoy!! 🎉

Oh my posh is "A prompt theme engine for any shell." you could install it and set it up in you fish shell 🐟 here I will show you how.

Install

By following the documentation you could install oh-my-posh via homebrew on manual installation, as I don't use homebrew I will do the manual installation:

curl -s https://ohmyposh.dev/install.sh | bash -s

once done you should add a new entry to your path in fish it is easy to do with fish_add_path

fish_add_path /home/<user>/.local/bin/

don't forget to change <user> section.

Set up

Once you install it you should set up you config.fish to use oh my posh:

oh-my-posh init fish | source

Using a theme

There is a lot of themes you could use a theme, check the complete list here, to set a theme you could do it via config.fish

oh-my-posh init fish --config ~/.cache/oh-my-posh/themes/atomic.omp.json | source

Short post to talk about how to install non Latin font in Arch Linux with:

sudo pacman -S noto-fonts-cjk

this package provides all fonts needed to show non Latin characters like Chinese or Japanese.

Emojis

Also to show emojis you will need a different font, some options could be:

• noto-fonts-emoji
• ttf-joypixels

In my case I like joypixels emojis, so I installed them with sudo pacman -S ttf-joypixels

Nerd fonts are an amazing way to customize your terminal by using almost all glyphs needed to end up with an stunning environment, but adding an nerd fond was not easy task untill now, as most of all nerd fonts are already availables in Arch extra repository, you could find a full list of nerd fonts available in `NerdFonts Arch Extra repository,

Installing a new font

It could be accomplish by pacman, for instance sudo pacman -S ttf-victor-mono-nerd

Usage

In my case I use kitty terminal, so I should update my kitty.conf file in ~/.config/kitty to set the font-family to:

font_family ttf-victor-mono-nerd

That's all, never has been more easy to enjoy nerd fonts in Arch 😎

In a previous blog entry I shown how to set up Joplin cli in Arch Linux:

Install Joplin CLI in Arch

Joplin is a free, open source note taking and to-do application, which can handle a large number of notes organized into notebooks, I installed in my arch via npm, with nvm setup first, read the entire post for more details :)

Fullstack | Nicoandres' blogNicoandres Rodriguez

Now I will briefly show you how to sync with Dropbox:

Step 1

establish the sync method with :config sync.target 7 , you could see which other options of sync there are with config --help

Step 2

You will asked to open the URL and authorize the Dropbox app in you browser,

Step 3

copy and paste the Dropbox token into Joplin.

That's all now you will see how Joplin starts the process of sync.

TL;DR

Flatpak great to instll apps in your system with out affect the core OS files it makes perfect to install any app you want with not do a mess in your OS, it could be simple but anyway I will show you how to getting started with flacpak.

📦 Install required packages

Install needed package and some dependencies (required at least for me to do SSO in apps like zoom, slack, etc)

sudo pacman -S flatpak xdg-desktop-portal-wlr xdg-desktop-portal-gtk

After install do a reboot to have all in order prior to install any app.

🔢 Install your first App

I needed to install zoom in my work machine, first you could try search:

flatpak search zoom

It will show you the available apps in flathub repo.

🪩Install command

To install an app you could use install command, below example you could install zoom

flatpak install us.zoom.Zoom

🪀 Run command

To run an app use run command as below example:

flatpak run us.zoom.Zoom

🐼 Conclusion

Flatpak is portable and distro agnostic way to install any app, great to use as option if you don't wanna mees up your system by installing apps.

TL;DR

ChatGPT is the boom nowadays, it have a large compressive knowledge base of information accessible to you, how do you could use it to improve and power up your daily workflow? here I will show you how it make it for me 😎

Identify the liar 👮

First of all always treat this tool as the impostor.

ChatGPT is not the source of truth, it is most like an impostor, always making you think it is genuine, but most of the time it will bring you false answers, so you will need to have knowledge to identify the correct answers from the false ones.

Install ChatGPT in your terminal

In a previous post I talked about install ChatGPT in your terminal:

Powering your terminal with AI

Do you wanna try your terminal powered by AI, here I will show you how to it is easy and useful!

Fullstack | Nicoandres' blogNicoandres Rodriguez

Raise your questions

So now you are ready to raise your questions, let's see a comparison between ChatGPT Vs Search Engine (DuckDuckGo, Google, etc)

I needed to change podman-compose instead of docker-compose when I execute commands via podman compose (by default it uses docker-compose) so I did a try:

DuckDuckGo 🦆

Above you can see on the first 3 search results there is not a clear answer to the question, so you will need to go through official docs, or Q&A web sites like Stackoverflow, etc, so, good luck my friend.

ChatGPT 🤖

Above image shows you the same question but with a more precise answer, after follow it, it works well, but with some highlights:

1. The name of the field is compose_providers
2. It should be put as compose_providers=["podman-compose"]

That's it, after restart the podman service the change works as expected 🎉

Conclusion 🥉

ChatGPT definitively is a tool to have in your hands, if you use wisely it will save you precious time of your day 💪.

TL;DR

Podman is the alternative to docker, but why we will need an alternative to docker? first of all docker is great or not? well it is but... in Linux it should be executed as root, and by giving root access to docker service it makes possible in theory that maybe a container could execute malicious code in host environment, that doesn't sounds great no?

📜 Introduction to Podman

Podman is an open source tool alternative to docker, originally developed by Red Had 🔴🎩 Podman architecture is different to docker and it allows run containers as rootless user.

📥 Installing Podman in Arch Linux

you could install Podman with:

sudo pacman -S podman

after install it you should be able to execute podman container ls 🎉

🧌 Troubleshooting

Error: overlay fs

If you run into below error:

Error: kernel does not support overlay fs: 'overlay' is not supported over xfs

As me you're using xfs system, and you will need install fuse-overlayfs package as mentioned in Podman's Github issues here.

so install it with:

sudo pacman -S fuse-overlayfs

after that you will be able to get the correct output for podman container ls

Error: /dev/net/tun: No such device

As mentioned in this Github issue in Podman's repository here, a reboot should solve this error.

🎟️ Podman + Podman-Compose

For sure you will use docker-compose by luck Podman also offers podman-compose it is not required to work with Podman as podman compose command by default uses docker-compose but I would like to use podman-compose as well so let's install it with:

sudo pacman -S podman-compose

1️⃣ First lets search for a container

for search containers in docker hub you could execute below command:

podman search docker.io/node

It will brings you a list of containers in docker hub that matches with node

NAME                                   DESCRIPTION
docker.io/library/node                 Node.js is a JavaScript-based platform for s...
docker.io/library/mongo-express        Web-based MongoDB admin interface, written w...
docker.io/nodered/node-red-docker      Deprecated - older Node-RED Docker images. 
docker.io/nodered/node-red             Low-code programming for event-driven applic...
docker.io/circleci/node                Node.js is a JavaScript-based platform for s...
docker.io/cimg/node                    The CircleCI Node.js Docker Convenience Imag...

now you could run into node container with:

podman run -it docker.io/library/node

that will bring you into node container 🎉

 ~  podman run -it docker.io/node
Welcome to Node.js v21.7.2.
Type ".help" for more information.
> 

well that's all, enjoy Podman!

TL;DR

If you are a self hosted ghost blog owner that uses docker, maybe you should sometimes to fix any issues with your Mailgun settings, I will show you which steps I follow to fix those issues.

📧 Check your config.production.json

As a self hosted Ghost blog owner, you should be aware this is the main file to setting up your transactional emails in your Ghost instance, you could check if this file is in good shape with the command:

docker exec -it <container-name> cat config.production.js

I previously show you hot to set up your docker-compose to always rebuild this file with the correct information in each container restart here:

Setting up your Mailgun in your selfhosted Ghost

If you’re hosting your own Ghost blog in a docker container you should to know how to setting up your mail settings with Mailgun, if not I will show you how 👍

Fullstack | Nicoandres' blogNicoandres Rodriguez

But what to do when any issue arise?

📃 Check your Ghost logs

You should to check your containers logs with the command:

docker container logs <container-name> --since 10m

The parameter since show logs since timestamp (e.g. "2013-01-02T13:23:37Z") or relative (e.g. "42m" for 42 minutes).

There is useful information to check which could be the issue.

👀 Double check Ghost docs

Double check official docs about Ghost email settings, maybe you missed something important there.

As important reminder you should to set up first your transactional emails before your bulk emails.

🚀 Restart after each change

As rule don't forget to restart your Ghost instance after any change, in a regular self hosted instance it could be achived by running the command ghost restart but as a docker user you could do it by restarting your container with docker container restart <container-name>

I will show you how to create a Nx mono-repo for a for a react-python stack app it is easy to do by CLI and requires little effort.

Create a nx mono-repo with nx cli 🎮

nx official docs to create a react mono-repo recommends this command:

npx create-nx-workspace@latest <app-name> --preset=react-monorepo

I run a more personalized one based on my preferences:

npx create-nx-workspace@latest --name=<app-name> --preset=react-monorepo --docker=true --packageManager=pnpm --bundler=vite --style=@emotion/styled --e2eTestRunner=playwright

above command specific to use pnpm as package manager, playwright for e2e test runner and vite bundler instead of Webpack

after running above command and if you doesn't have any errors you could navigate to the recent folder created for you app in my case musiik with cd musiik and run there nx serve musiik (change the name for a relevant one to you and ensure nx is globally installed with npm i -g)

If everything is going well you should to have something in localhost:4200 similar to:

Nice!

Adding Python project based on Poetry 🎭

lets search for the proper nx plugin in plugins section if you search for Python you will see the poetry plugin by following the link you will land in its github page where you will found the instructions:

1. install it pnpm install @nxlv/python --save-dev
2. update nx.json:

{
  ...
  "plugins": [
    "@nxlv/python"
  ]
  ...
}

3. create project nx generate @nxlv/python:poetry-project myproject
   1. Before that I needed to install pipx and poetry
   2. in Arch in installed pipx with sudo pacman -S python-pipx
   3. ensure pipx is in path with pipx ensurepath
   4. restart terminal
   5. install poetry with pipx install poetry
   6. boom 🚀 ready to go!

This shows it creates a new python project in extractor folder.

Edit:

Above command will create a Python project named Extractor inside a folder named same, which is not convenient, to solve this you could specify the directory name by using the parameter --directory=<directory-name>, the command will be:

nx generate @nxlv/python:poetry-project extractor --directory=python-microservices

This will create the project inside a different folder name, which is more convenient.

This short post is the first of an series of post about how to build an open source music streaming server to stream you own music collection everywhere anytime and with style 😎

Architecture 🏗️

First lets decide about the architecture for our amazing streaming service:

• Repository mono-repo powered by Nx 🔋
• Infrastructure powered by Docker containers 🐳
• Front-end: React NextJS, Material-Tailwind 💅
• BFF: GraphQL 🧑‍🤝‍🧑
• Back-end micro-service: MP3 metadata extractor. 🏭
• Back-end micro-service: AI to autocomplete missing any MP3 missing info. 🤖
• Authentication with Auth0 🔑
• Translations with React-INTL 🌎
• Redis DB 🛢️

In next posts I will taking a look in each step to build this project from scratch.

Diagram

below a quick diagram of the architecture:

Next steps

In your inbox 📥 you could see coming soon mails to see the progress of this project and each step in the building process.

Resources

• Nx intro link
• Material-Tailwind 🪁 link
• React-int link
• Auth0-NextJS plugin link

Do you like to hear you own music library, but it is local? in that case exist Mstream it is

mStream is a music streaming server. With mStream you can access your music collection from anywhere.

TL;DR

I will show you mStream a music stream server to access your music collection from web, I will show you how to deploy it with Docker 🫙 🐳 🎵

Docker official image 👮

You could find the docker official image from mStream's docker hub, if you wanna do a quick try in your local machine you could do it through docker cli:

docker run -d \
  --name=mstream \
  -e PUID=1000 \
  -e PGID=1000 \
  -e TZ=Etc/UTC \
  -p 3000:3000 \
  -v /path/to/data:/config \
  -v /path/to/music:/music \
  --restart unless-stopped \
  lscr.io/linuxserver/mstream:latest

to best experience let's replace some variables in above command like TZ for your time zone for example Europe/London more examples see here, /path/to/music with the music path where you have your music collection for instance ~/home/<my-user>/music , /path/to/data is where mStream will store config data, so you could point it to an empty folder in your local, and that's it if you run that command you will have your mStream server running in your port 3000:

That's it mstream but lets run it from your VPS 🚀

Create a docker-compose.yml 📄

First you should create a docker-compose.yml with:

services:
  mstream:
    image: lscr.io/linuxserver/mstream:latest
    container_name: mstream
    environment:
      - PUID=1000
      - PGID=1000
      - TZ=Etc/UTC
    volumes:
      - /path/to/data:/config
      - /path/to/music:/music
    ports:
      - 3000:3000
    restart: unless-stopped

Same as previously just take care of change the data and music folders to some relevant paths, and change your time-zone in TZ= line, when you are ready you could put this in a new folder in your VPS (virtual private server) and execute an docker-compose up -d to starting the new container 🚀.

To enable it you should to follow same steps as I explained in previous post about how to enable a new web site in your Apache2 server:

Adding a new website to your VPS via docker - apache2

Quick tutorial about how to enable a website via docker and apache2 using a reverse proxy configuration.

Fullstack | Nicoandres' blogNicoandres Rodriguez

Resources

• Linux server LXF301
• Docker hub mStream link

AI is becoming a rule tool nowadays, in this post I will show you how to power your terminal with ChatGPT AI.

Prerequisites

• A ChatGPT API account where you will generate an API-key.
• Curl package to download the installation script
• JQ package required by the bash script to interact with ChatGPT response

Get a ChatGPT API token 🉐

Go to ChatGPT web site and open a new account at OpenAI, get a new API token, it is free as OpenAI will charge you credits to use their API 5 usd, after that you could top up your account dont worry it is really cheap like 0.001 per request so if you top up 5 usd, that will be enough for you.

Install ChatGPT cli 🤖

You will need to install the script https://github.com/0xacx/chatGPT-shell-cli which will allow you interact with ChatGPT, so run this in your terminal:

curl -sS https://raw.githubusercontent.com/0xacx/chatGPT-shell-cli/main/install.sh | sudo -E bash

Arch users could use Aur 🛺

if you're an Arch user as me you could use Aur, for instance by using paru

paru -S chatgpt-shell-cli

But if you're as me and doesn't like any Aur wrapper just clone it and install it:

# all my Aur packages are in Aur folder
cd Aur
git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/chatgpt-shell-cli.git
cd chatgpt-shell-cli
makepkg -si

Final step add your API Key 🧸

You should now export a variable OPENAI_KEY in your shell, you could do it in your .bashrc by adding

export OPENAI_KEY=<paste-your-openai-key-here>

restart your shell and you're ready to go with your AI at your terminal:

Sources

• chatGPT-shell-cli
• Linux Format LFX305