Oliver Davies

Fixing typos in my previous command

Thu, 11 Jun 2026 14:13:00 GMT

TIL that you can easily fix typos in your previous terminal command and re-run it.

This is my original command that I typoed, where I misspelt the word upstream:

$ git help upstreasm

No manual entry for gitupstreasm

Typing and running ^easm^eam fixed and re-ran the incorrect command - replacing the incorrect letters easm with eam to get my original intended result:

$ ^easm^eam

git help upstream

'upstream' is aliased to 'rev-parse --abbrev-ref --symbolic-full-name @{u}'

Writing books and live streaming

Thu, 11 Jun 2026 00:39:00 GMT

It's been a while since my last live stream, but I'll be spending a couple of hours tomorrow morning working on my Test-Driven Drupal eBook and decided to live stream it on my YouTube channel.

I really enjoyed being on the Talking Drupal podcast again this week which was recorded live, and made me think again about doing more live streams of my own.

If you're interested in learning about Drupal, automated testing or test-driven development, feel free to join the stream and ask any questions in the chat.

How to easily get back to the root of a Git repo

Thu, 11 Jun 2026 00:21:00 GMT

Have you ever been in a directory within a Git repository and you needed to get back to the top level?

To find the path, run git rev-parse --show-toplevel.

For example, when I'm within the repository for this website:

Code/oliverdavies.uk/app/config > git rev-parse --show-toplevel
/home/opdavies/Code/oliverdavies.uk

I have this set as a Git alias called root:

$ git help root

'root' is aliased to 'rev-parse --show-toplevel'

Now, anywhere within a repository, I can run cd $(git root) and easily get back to the top level.

Talking Drupal again

Fri, 05 Jun 2026 22:11:00 GMT

I'm excited to be a guest on the Talking Drupal podcast again next week.

I recently converted my free 10-day automated testing email course to an eBook - which is what we're going to be discussing during the episode.

This will be the fourth time I've been a guest on the podcast, and it's great to be invited again.

Here are the previous episodes:

This episode is going to be live on the Talking Drupal YouTube channel.

The current version of the eBook is available to view online and download.

4,000 dotfiles commits

Tue, 26 May 2026 18:06:00 GMT

I made the first commit to my dotfiles repository in July 2015, adding my .gitignore and .gitconfig files.

In 2022, I started to use Nix and, soon after, NixOS.

Yesterday, I made my 4,000th commit to the repository, which is now called nix-config and contains my laptop and homelab NixOS configurations, my Home Manager user configurations, and my Neovim configuration.

To learn more about Nix and how I use it in development projects, watch my Nix for PHP Developers (and everyone else) talk.

Nixing splitsh/lite

Wed, 06 May 2026 20:57:00 GMT

I'm a fan of monorepos and use them for my presentations and books rather than creating a new Git repository for every book and presentation.

I've done the same for the Drupal Gather project - a Drupal distribution that I've started building for meetup and user group websites that contains an example project, an installation profile and several recipes - all stored and developed in the same Git repository.

For deployment and consumption via Composer, I want each sub-project to be available in its own standalone repository, so I need a way to split each project from the monorepo when needed.

Git has the subtree split command, but it is slow and although it's improved by the --rejoin option, it creates additional commits in the repository for both the split code and a merge commit containing the metadata.

I've also had several caching errors when trying to perform a split - even from a fresh clone - that have prevented me from deploying changes, so I wanted to look for other options.

splitsh/lite

Fabien Potencier - the creator of Symfony - has spoken about how Symfony uses a combination of a monorepo and many-repo strategies and has open sourced a tool based on the one used by Symfony.

It's written in Go and uses libgit2, but has some versioning challenges.

From the README:

First, you need to install libgit2, preferably using your package manager of choice.

If you get libgit2 version 1.5, you're all set and jump to the compilation step below. If not, you first need to change the git2go version used in the code. Using the table on the libgit2 repository, figure out which version of the git2go you need based on the libgit2 library you installed.

This seemed like a great use case for Nix and its reproducible build system.

Adding a Nix flake

The current version of libgit2 in nixpkgs is 1.9.2 - too new for the tool to use and for git2go.

By pinning nixpkgs to the 22.11 channel, I was able to get the required 1.5 version of libgit2 and create a package based on it and pkg-config - both of which are needed to build the project.

Now I can easily build the project using nix build or create and use a dev shell with nix develop.

Submitting a pull request

I have created a pull request to add the Nix flake to the main project repository.

If it's not added, I'll create a standalone flake in its own repository.

In the meantime, you can test it from my forked version using either nix run github:opdavies/splitsh-lite/add-nix-flake or nix shell github:opdavies/splitsh-lite/add-nix-flake.

If you need any assistance, feel free to get in touch.

Adding a JSON feed for blog posts

Tue, 05 May 2026 19:10:00 GMT

As well as RSS, you can now read and subscribe to my blog via a new JSON feed - based on the JSON Feed specification.

It was very easy to add to my website by creating this file at source/blog.json.twig:

---
permalink: /blog.json
use: [posts]
---

{
  "version": "https://jsonfeed.org/version/1.1",
  "title": "Blog | {{ site.name }} - {{ site.slogan }}",
  "icon": "{{ site.url }}/assets/images/social-avatar-blue.jpg",
  "home_page_url": "https://www.jsonfeed.org",
  "feed_url": "{{ site.url }}/blog.json",
  "items": [
    {% for post in data.posts %}
      {
        "id": "{{ site.url }}{{ post.url }}",
        "title": "{{ post.title }}",
        "content_html": {{ post.blocks.content|json_encode|raw }},
        "date_published": "{{ post.date|date("c") }}",
        "url": "{{ site.url }}{{ post.url }}"
      }{% if not loop.last %},{% endif %}
    {% endfor %}
  ]
}

It was also easy to configure Caddy to return the appropriate application/feed+json content type:

@blogfeed {
  path /blog.json
}

header @blogfeed Content-Type application/feed+json

I'm a big proponent of the Open Web and people owning their content, so I want to make it as easy as possible for everyone to find and consume my posts, and will probably add more JSON feeds for my presentation content and book updates in the future.

I may also create it as a standalone Sculpin plugin, as it's not specific to my website and would allow others to share their content in the same way.

Configuring Git with environment variables

Sun, 26 Apr 2026 14:41:00 GMT

As well as commands like git config --local, Git can also be configured using environment variables.

Whilst working for client projects, I often need to change my email address or clone repositories using a different SSH key.

With environment variables, I can do this:

export GIT_AUTHOR_EMAIL="oliver@foo.bar"
export GIT_SSH_COMMAND="ssh -i ~/.ssh/foo -o IdentitiesOnly=yes"

This works well when used with direnv - a tool that manages environment variables based on directory.

This means I can create one .envrc file for the directory containing that client's projects, and it will automatically use the correct SSH key and email address.

Test-Driven Drupal re-launched as an eBook

Sun, 19 Apr 2026 18:05:00 GMT

The "Test-Driven Drupal" project has been re-launched as a "perpetually published" eBook, based on my previous Automated Testing in Drupal email course (ATDC).

It is still free and can be viewed at https://www.oliverdavies.uk/books/test-driven-drupal and downloaded as a PDF or EPUB.

As I work on it, it will evolve from the email course content into a more detailed version, including new topics such as testing existing Drupal websites with Drupal Test Traits that I couldn't fit into the email course version.

Using Neovim as a terminal multiplexer

Sun, 19 Apr 2026 16:00:00 GMT

Since watching this video, I've experimented using Neovim as a terminal multiplexer, using terminals within panes and tabs in Neovim with :term rather than tmux.

I can also create a new terminal tab with :tabnew | term and splits with :spl | term and :vsp | term.

I can zoom into panes using <C-w> | or <C-w> _, and reset them to equal sizes with <C-w> =.

Doing everything in Neovim gives me consistent keybindings to move between windows, panes and tabs, and full use of my regular Neovim setup with text objects, highlighting and copying and pasting.

As I'm not using a tmux session launcher, I've added zoxide and use the z and zi commands to get fast access to my directories.

It feels odd not to have tmux installed (It's been in my dotfiles since 2019), but I'm liking this setup so far - let's see if it sticks.