Fixing Docker and docker-compose named pipes error (code2)

I had to retrieve a list of users from an Azure Active Directory B2C instance today. I thought I could just go through the Azure UI but that’s limited to short pages of data and limited attributes.

There is a CSV export provided on the UI but you won’t get the required identity objects in the csv output if you need a user’s signin email address.

I had to use the Microsoft Graph Api to get what I needed. This is a bit hacky but it does the trick!

Sometimes your Azure App service host will need to be restarted. You can do this but it’s hidden away in the Azure resource manager site. Here’s how to find it!

I use launch darkly to toggle features on an app. There is one third-party dependency that has regular scheduled maintenance and I need to toggle the feature on and off on schedule.

Launch Darkly has built in scheduling to handle this scenario but you have to be on the enterprise plan to use it. The enterprise plan is too expensive to upgrade to for scheduling alone so I needed to find a different way to automate this.

If you have a react app you can use env vars like REACT_APP_MY_ENV_VAR in your application and React will automatically pull them in to your app when you build the production application.

This is very useful but if you have variables that change for each environment and your application build takes a long time, you might want to avoid building unnecessarily in CI. For example you might have a QA environment and a Staging environment that have different configuration.

We type-check our code on each build and that was taking 5 minutes+ to build each environment so we had to make it faster. We changed our app from using REACT_APP env vars to using a configuration file that we could quickly write to using CI.

Our CI system is Azure DevOops so the CI scripts here are specifically for Azure DevOps but they apply to most CI systems with small changes.

The real work happens in a Node.js script that would work anywhere.