Network troubleshooting begins with a simple question: can machine A reach machine B? The tools ping, traceroute, and mtr answer this question at increasingly deep levels. ping tests whether a host is reachable and measures round-trip time. traceroute reveals the path packets take through the network, hop by hop. mtr combines both into a continuous,…
When a name resolution fails, the first question is whether the failure is in the local configuration files (/etc/hosts, /etc/resolv.conf, /etc/nsswitch.conf) or in the DNS server itself. The tools dig, host, and nslookup exist to answer that question. They query DNS servers directly, bypassing the local resolution order, and display the raw records returned. The…
When a program on a Linux system needs to connect to a hostname, the kernel does not perform the lookup. A userspace library, the GNU C Library (glibc), does. It reads a configuration file called /etc/nsswitch.conf to determine the order of lookup sources, then consults those sources one by one until it finds a match….
A hostname is the label that identifies a machine on a network. In systemd-based Linux distributions, the concept is split into three distinct values: the static hostname (the persistent name stored in /etc/hostname), the transient hostname (a runtime value that can be set by DHCP or mDNS), and the pretty hostname (a free-form display name…
Package management in Bun follows the familiar add, remove, and update pattern, but the execution engine underneath is fundamentally different. Because Bun is a native binary with a global install cache and a highly optimized resolver, the same commands that take seconds in npm or minutes in Yarn complete in milliseconds. This chapter covers the…
Bun’s package manager is defined by its lockfile strategy. For its first two years, Bun used a binary lockfile named bun.lockb, which was faster to parse but opaque to review, Git diffs, and merge tools. In December 2024, Bun introduced a text-based alternative (bun.lock), and since Bun v1.2, it has become the default. This chapter…
Bun’s project initialization is designed to eliminate the configuration burden that Node.js projects typically carry. Running bun init generates a complete, working project with sensible defaults, and it integrates with package.json in ways that differ from npm and Yarn: it writes a typecheck script, it understands workspaces natively, and it defaults to treating package scripts…
Bun is distributed as a single, dependency-free executable. There is no runtime environment to configure, no virtual machine to install, and no package manager to bootstrap. The installation is one command, and the resulting binary contains everything: the runtime, the package manager, the bundler, and the test runner. Managing versions is equally direct: bun upgrade…
Bun is not a package manager in the traditional sense. It is a complete JavaScript and TypeScript toolkit delivered as a single executable, combining a runtime, a package manager, a bundler, and a test runner into one cohesive tool . The package manager is one component of this toolkit, but it is inseparable from the…
The daily rhythm of package management is a three-command cycle: add what you need, update what has changed, and remove what is no longer used. pnpm’s commands for these operations follow a consistent pattern: they modify package.json, resolve the change into pnpm-lock.yaml, and update the virtual store and symlinks in node_modules. The critical difference from…