Note: The native support for including files from other non-public repositories was added in Gitlab 11.7, so this workaround is no longer needed.

Gitlab added new include statement for the CE edition of their product with the 11.4.0 release, which is great news. However there's this one minor thing mentioned in the documentation:

Note: The remote file must be publicly accessible through a simple GET request, as we don't support authentication schemas in the remote URL.

This makes it a little bit tricky to use the functionality if you want to fetch the file from private repository. Here's how I got it working. (TL/DR at the end)

Introduction🔗

The sad fact about online shopping in Ireland is, that many sellers will ship to UK only. It often makes very little sense as they'll happily ship the parcel across Europe to northern Ireland just fine, but that's the status for now.

Personally, I'm trying to avoid such sellers to sort of vote with my wallet, but sometimes UK-only seller is the only option or the price difference is just way too big. Fortunately we now have couple services available that can give us "virtual" address in UK and then forward any received packages to Ireland.

I've been trying them out over the years and here's some comparison of Parcel Motel, Parcel Wizard and AddressPal.

This could've been called "Learning Kubernetes the hard way", because that's basically what I was trying to achieve here. It wasn't so much about learning how to use Kubernetes via its ingenious API as it was about learning about its individual components. If you want to just run Kubernetes locally, there's Minikube, that will give you nice VM with everything already set up.

What I've wanted to achieve is to have a set of components, all nicely isolated with a well defined connection between each other so I can add them, remove them and break the connections and see how this affects the cluster. To put it simply I was interested in Ops side of running Kubernetes. This is why I took Hyperkube and mixed it with docker-compose and tried to stand up Kubernetes "from scratch".

Let's get started..

So our build is now done. I'm still thinking about making some improvements, like a proper ports panel or some air circulation control, but it's already very usable NAS box. The only missing part is installing something like freeNAS or some other user friendly NAS OS, but there's a ton of howtos out there, so I'm not going to create another one.

Feel like building your own NAScrate? Here are all the files you'll need.

Finally there🔗

I pinky swear it doesn't take 4 months to build the NAScrate. I actually had it done and dusted in couple weeks - most spent waiting for the components with couple evenings spent with Onshape trying to figure out how to fit everything in a small crate. I just didn't have enough time to properly document it, hence the delay in updates.

This last step only took couple hours at most - and that's including re-designing and re-printing some of the parts. Building next one with all the parts ready is 30 minute job easily. So let's give it a go.