Archive for June, 2015

Software recommendation: MongoDB UI – Robomongo

I’ve been looking a while now for a good way to manage data in MongoDB database servers. The command line tool is OK, but its not really easy to work with, even doing simple stuff like listing the content of a collection.

For a while I’ve been using Genghis, which has an interesting approach to a local graphical interface: it starts a local web server and invokes a web browser to access that server. The UI is pretty nice and very responsive, but it is kind of flaky and lately has stopped working for me entirely. Also the data density you can get from a nice looking web UI is still much lower then you can get in a well designed desktop UI – and when looking at a lot of data records in a database, data density is very important.

Enter Robomongo:

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Fix another ‘curl|sh’ bogus installation – Heroku

The Heroku toolbelt (which I don’t remember if its mentioned in the “curlpipesh” tumbler mentioned by Amir in his response to my “Fix RVM” post), is a CLI to manage applications on the Heroku PaaS platform. As is common (and horrible) in this day and age they also offer a ‘curl|sh’ type install on their home page.

While the Debian/Ubuntu specific installer is not entirely horrible – it basically adds the Heroku Toolbelt debian repository to the APT source list, updates the package list and installs it, the “standalone” version is as horrible as it can get: download an unsigned binary from the internet, get root permissions and then do something.

For users of Fedora and other distributions, or just Ubuntu users who don’t like installing external repositories on their system, here is a simpler method to get the Heroku Toolbelt running on your system without root permissions and downloading scripts off the internet:

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