I wanted to create a personal website, but a classic design was too boring to keep me excited enough to build it. When I saw a portfolio site designed like bash, I knew this was the type of site I want and started working on this project.
Since I work every day with PowerShell, I decided to replicate its design and syntax.
The commands return information about me.
| Command | Description |
|---|---|
| Get-Help | Returns all available commands and information about them |
| Get-Hobby | Returns a list of my hobbies |
| Get-Certification | Returns a list of all my acitive certifications |
| Get-Skill | Returns a list of my skills and how proficient I am in each of them |
| Get-Education | Returns information about my formal education |
| Get-WorkExperience | Returns a list of my last jobs |
| Get-PersonalInformation | Returns personal information about me |
| Open-GitHubRepo | Opens the projects repository |
| Open-SoundCloud | Opens my SoundCloud page |
| Open-LinkedIn | Opens my LinkedIn profile |
| Show-Welcome | Opens the welcome message, that is opened when the page loads the first time |
| Clear-Host | Removes all text inside the shell. The command history will not be deleted. Alias: 'clear'. |
I also tried to make the experience as close to working in an actual PowerShell as possible. That's why I implemented the following features:
- Complete a command using the
"Tab"-Key. - Interrupt the current input with
ctrl+c. - Navigate through the command history by using the
arrow keys up and down.
In my job I design and deploy Azure Infrastructure using IaC (Bicep and Terraform). So I decided to host the app in Azure and deploy it as code over GitHub Actions.
- User interacts with site.
- Command gets send to Function App.
- Function App authenticates against CosmosDB with managed identity and gets the .json, in which the command is defined.
- CosmosDB returns the json content.
- Function App responds with a json object and Frontend renders the command output for the user.
For the frontend I used a Static Web App, as it has a free sku, which has almost no limitations that were relevant to my plan (except only allowing managed functions and no managed identity).
As I didn't want all my information and especially no secrets in the frontend code, I decided to create an API that connects to a database, in which the command responses are defined. To authenticate against the database, I use the managed identity of the function app.
When I started my bachelor (early 2024), the first course used Go. I liked the language a lot (I tried Python and Javascript before) and decided to build the API in it (which made the automatic deployment to Azure Functions a bit of a pain though...).
Since I wanted the API to respond with the commands in json format, I decided to use a NoSQL database. Though it is quite overkill for the project, I used Azure CosmosDB, since it has a free sku and I wanted to try it. Azure Storage for Tables would have been enough too though.
Deploying the Infrastructure and Static Web App was pretty staight forward. From my job I am more used to Azure DevOps Pipelines, but lots of the knowlege also applies to GitHub Actions.
When trying to automate the deployment of the Go-API to Azure Functions, I found out that it is not possible with the "functions-action". The solution I came up with was to use a self-hosted runner and install the Azure Function Core Tools. After that, the deployment worked very well using the command func azure functionapp publish "function-app-name" --custom.