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reStructuredText (RST) Tutorial

reStructuredText (one word) is a plain-text markup language for writing technical documents, books, websites, and more. It is easy to read and write because it is just regular text and all you need is a simple text editor. Even Notepad would suffice. Despite it being written in plain-text, it is powerful enough to create professional technical documentation, books, and websites.

Walk a Directory in Python

A common task when working with files is to walk through a directory, that is, recursively get every file in every directory starting in some location. The Python 3 os module has several functions useful for working with files and directories. One in particular, os.walk() is useful for recursively going through a directory and getting the contents in a structured way. These examples will show you a couple options for walking a directory recursively.

Import Python Module by String Name

In Python, when building a framework or code generation tool, you might need to programmatically build a string representing the name of a module you want to import. How would you import a module if you have it's name as a string? Here's how to do it with importlib! Note that this feature was introduced in Python 3.1 but there is a 2.7 version of importlib though less featured.

Get Password in Console with Ruby

In Ruby 2.3, they introduced a getpass method on the IO::console class. There are no dependencies since it part of the standard library, but it's only available in versions higher than 2.3. For older versions, we'll look at an alternative method. The getpass method is similar to gets except it will not echo back what you are typing in. This is good for getting a password without printint it to the screen when you type it in. This will demonstrate how to use the method. See the official documentation for IO::console#getpass for more details. We will also look using $stdin.noecho() to wrap Kernel.gets to get a password.

GPG Tutorial

GnuPG is a cryptography tool that helps you manage public and private keys as well as perform encrypt, decrypt, sign, and verify operations. It is an open-source version of PGP. This tutorial will go over basic key management, encrypting (symmetrically and asymmetrically), decrypting, signing messages, and verifying signatures with GPG.

Grab Image from Clipboard in Python with Pillow

Copy and paste operations are most often associated with text, but you can also copy and paste images and other formats. This example demonstrates how to pull an image off of the system clipboard using the Pillow package in Python. It has a convenient method for pulling images from the clipboard. There are a few ways you might get an image in your clipboard. For example, if you used your Grab or Snipping Tool to capture a section of your screen, but you haven't actually saved it yet, you can CTRL-C to copy the image to your clipboard. Or, if you right click an image in a web browser and choose "Copy Image".

Text-to-speech in Python with pyttsx3

This tutorials demonstrates how to use Python for text-to-speech using a cross-platform library, pyttsx3. This lets you synthesize text in to audio you can hear. This package works in Windows, Mac, and Linux. It uses native speech drivers when available and works completely offline. We will walk through how to install, convert text-to-speech, and switch between voices and languages.

Create ASCII Art Text Banners in Python

ASCII art has a long history in the hacker culture. If you check out any Phrack article and there is almost guaranteed to be some form of ASCII art in there. In this example we are specifically talking about ASCII art fonts that can be used to make banner text for command-line applications, network services, documentation, web pages, etc.

Nginx Tutorial

Nginx, pronounced "engine X", is a fast and lightweight web server, that can be used to serve static files, but is often used as a reverse proxy. It has some very nice features like load balancing and rate limiting. We'll cover some common use cases like serving files, creating a directory listing, reverse proxying to pass incoming traffic to a local web server, adding SSL encryption, and how to require https and www on your site. This guide is for someone who needs a quick reference to setting up a simple nginx server. For the latest documentation always check out the official website https://www.nginx.com/ and the source mirror at https://github.com/nginx/nginx.

One-line HTTP servers

If you need a quick-and-dirty HTTP server that doesn't need fancy configuration, try some of these one-line HTTP servers in languages like Python, Ruby, and PHP. Some examples include a small script that allows you to embed the server in to your program and add more customization. These are not intended for production use.

LetsEncrypt Free SSL Certificate Tutorial

Let's Encrypt is "a free, automated, and open Certificate Authority." They provide free signed certificates as a trusted certificate authority. This tutorial walks through the process of installing certbot and requesting new certificates and renewing existing ones wit Let's Encrypt. If you are just looking to generate your own quick self-signed certificates, check out my tutorial on creating self-signed SSL certificates with OpenSSL.

Creating self-signed SSL certificates with OpenSSL

This tutorial will walk through the process of creating your own self-signed certificate. You can use this to secure network communication using the SSL/TLS protocol. For example, to run an HTTPS server. If you don't need self-signed certificates and want trusted signed certificates, check out my LetsEncrypt SSL Tutorial for a walkthrough of how to get free signed certificates.

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