Development

Setting PHP.INI path (or file) for PHP CLI shell scripts

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Running a PHP script from the command-line, or CLI, is quite useful at times and is often used to perform some automated task, like a CRON cleanup script, to send out reminders, etc.

It’s common that these CLI scripts need some, but possibly not all, settings that are similar to the main application’s. I may, for example want to include the database configuration settings shared with the main application. So I often create a separate php.ini file for this purpose.

Running /usr/bin/php -c /my/very/special/path cronScript.php is simple enough, but what if I want to be able to create an “executable” PHP shell script? The obvious answer would be something like:

#!/usr/bin/php -c /my/very/special/path

at the top of the .php file, followed by my PHP code, right? Except that may not do what you want. I could not get the PHP interpreter to load anything in /my/very/special/path by using the above construct, even if it works from the actual command-line. After banging my head against the wall for a while, this turns out to work for these “shell scripts”:

#!/usr/bin/php -c=/my/very/special/path

Note the use of the = (equal) sign between the -c and the path (or file).

Carry on.

Coding for Microsoft browsers like Internet Explorer and Edge

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Having been doing battles with things like Internet Explorer 4 (yes, I’m that old), it seems to me like Microsoft have really gotten themselves into a bind when it comes to Edge.

With a user-agent string like this:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/58.0.3029.110 Safari/537.36 Edge/16.16299

It’s no wonder Microsoft seems to be suffering from a split personality when it comes to its browser(s).

Once and for all Microsoft, please just join either of the Chrome/Chromimum/Opera/Firefox projects. Please?

PHP is_numeric () fails WordPress version string check

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This is, perhaps, obvious to most PHP developers. But it came somewhat as a surprise to me.

Using is_numeric () for validating a WordPress version string, such as ‘4.7’, does not seem to work very well when WordPress introduces minor releases such as ‘4.7.1’.

Since I cannot be bothered to figure out why it behaves in this (erratic, IMHO) way, I have since replaced the call to is_numeric () with a small function using a simple regular expression (regexp):

    function wpVersionStringCheck ($vs)                                                                                                 
    {                                                                                                                                   
        return (preg_match ('/^(\d+\.)+\d+$/', $vs));                                                                                   
    }

I’m sure there is a hole in there somewhere, but on the following strings at least, it gives me the desired result:

1.0 is valid
1.0. is invalid
1.0.1 is valid
1.banana.0 is invalid

Making SimpleXML truly simple using JSON in PHP

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JSON_vs_XML
So using SimpleXML in PHP is possibly one of the worst hells of typecasting and data extraction procedures one can encounter, or close to it 🙂 But more the point, you don’t need to walk down that road alone, enter JSON.

In the simplest of ways, this will typically get you something useful:

    $pvar = json_decode ($xml);

 

(Where $xml is a SimpleXML-type object) This returns a “slightly easier to manage” PHP array.

If you want an associative array, do this:

    $pvar = json_decode ($xml, true);

 

To get it back to JSON, you simply use:

    $json = json_encode ($pvar).

 

You may need to handle XML data, but you don’t necessarily need to work with it in XML form inside your application. The above examples may not work fully for you if you have to deal with “foreign” files or clean the input data prior to conversion, but you get the idea.

This is, obviously, obvious to many. It’s a lifesaver for others 🙂

LinkedIn:
www.linkedin.com/pulse/making-simplexml-truly-simple-using-json-php-joaquim-homrighausen

Hur svÄrt kan det vara att testa nÄgot innan man slÀpper det?

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Dag 1:

[Jag] Hej, det hÀr ni slÀppte i fredags fungerar inte. Jag fÄr inget svar frÄn servern nÀr jag testar.

[MS] Är du sĂ€ker pĂ„ att det inte fungerar?

[Jag] Ja, jag Àr helt sÀker. Jag har testat 10 ggr nu och det blir samma resultat varje gÄng.

[MS] Vi har inte Àndrat nÄgot annat Àn att lÀgga till fixen. Vi fÄr helt enkelt börja felsöka.

Dag 2:

[Jag] Hej, hur gÄr det med felsökningen, kommer ni nÄgon vart?

[MS] Nej, det ser bra ut pĂ„ vĂ„r sida. Är du helt sĂ€ker pĂ„ att du gör rĂ€tt? Vi har inte Ă€ndrat nĂ„got hĂ€r.

[Jag] Du sade det. Nej, det ser inte bra ut pÄ er sida. Jag kommer inte ens fram till er sida.

[MS] Vi fortsÀtter att felsöka dÄ.

Dag 3:

[MS] Vi har hittat problemet. Den hÀr delen av servern som tar emot anrop frÄn er applikation fungerade visst inte sÄ bra. Vi har startat om den och nu fungerar det bÀttre tror jag.

[Jag] Åh vad bra. DĂ„ testar jag vidare.

Dag 4:

[Jag] Det fungerar inte sÄ bra, er server verkar inte gilla vÄrat sÀtt att göra det pÄ.

[MS] Nej, ni gör fel. Ni skall göra sÄ hÀr.

[Jag] Men vi gör exakt precis sÄ.

[MS] Jag kan inte se att ni gör sÄ som ni skall. I vÄra loggar hittar vi bara andra metoder.

[Jag] Men vi gör precis exakt sÄ som ni har sagt Ät oss att göra. Har ni testat det sjÀlva?

[MS] Nu testade jag det. Det fungerar inte. Jag fÄr Äterkomma nÀr det hÀr fungerar.

 

Timkostnad: En bit över 1000kr/tim ex moms.

Antal dagar bortslösade: 4.

Tror du de tÀnker bjuda pÄ nedlagd tid eftersom det var hos dem felet lÄg? Skulle inte tro det.

[MS] Ă€r ett “IT-företag” i Stockholm som utvecklat ett “standardsystem” som Ă€r allt annat Ă€n standard. Man skrĂ€ddarsyr varje sĂ„ld kundlösning och tar betalt tills kunden gĂ„r sönder för allt man gör. Man tar inget ansvar för fel som uppstĂ„r vare sig det rör sig om uppgraderingar av egen kod eller saker man levererat. Allt som behöver korrigeras/Ă€ndras/fixas debiteras kund.

 

Locating older version of MySQL 4, MySQL 5, source code, binaries, rpm, etc.

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Quite some time ago, we needed to move a customer’s MySQL 4 server from one location to another. In the process, we figured we’d update the server to use some moderately modern version like MySQL 5.0 at least. Also, if we were to have any chance of virtualizing and upgrading the actual server environment to something more modern like Ubuntu 10.04.LTS or 12.04.LTS, or Debian 6.0, we’d have to re-compile the sources regardless. Not taking other incompatibilities into account, that line of thinking ran into Chuck Norris because the Windows DLLs supplied with the application using the database were not compatible with anything but MySQL 4.

The particular version of MySQL 4 running on the customer’s server was self-compiled (by us), so I figured I’d at least locate the “most recent” version of MySQL 4. To my surprise, this turned out to be harder than I could possibly imagine. In a world where “nobody” forgets anything, I could not find a single trace of a source distribution for MySQL 4. Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Apple probably know the size of shoes I wear, but they don’t know where MySQL 4 sources are located. This struck me as very odd as MySQL 4 was a) very popular, b) open source, and c) should at least reside on half a dozen servers on the Internet, or so I thought.

Like a core dump out of the blue skies, someone Skyped me a link today. The person had ran into a mirror archive and remembered that I was looking for this “eons ago”. I have now mirrored most of that archive into/onto my own cloud store. I’ll go through that in a few days and remove the things I don’t need, but this may very well turn out to he a lifesaver.

I wonder if Sun and/or Oracle decided that keeping old MySQL versions around was a bad idea …

If you, like me, need to find some odd version of MySQL, for whatever reason, here are two links that may be of good use to you:

http://www.mirrorservice.org/sites/ftp.mysql.com/Downloads/
http://mirror.provenscaling.com/mysql/

jQueryMobile or “Mobile site” selection sets

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Using jQueryMobile for a fairly lightweight “mobile site”, I wonder what all you experts say about selection sets. A (long) list of countries for example. To prevent excessive delays, I now split country selection in two screens. The first one shows A-Ö (A-Z for you English-speaking people), if I tap on B, the next screen shows a list of countries starting with B. Hitting the back button brings me back to A-Ö (A-Z), selecting a country takes me to.

It feels right, and it doesn’t transfer massive amounts of data that a) isn’t used half of the time, and b) doesn’t take time to render on slower mobile devices.

I’m not too concerned with database performance on the server for this particular selection set since the SQL query is static and resides in the cache 99.5% of the time.

Bye bye NetBeans, still fails on remote projects, cannot detect source file changes

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So NetBeans 7.x is out since a few months. With many new functions, new and updated plugins, a lot of bugfixes, etc. Fantastic! Go NetBeans!

And just because I’m a sucker for punishment, I open up a new PHP project, select a WordPress site where I do some plugin sandbox development, enter all the parameters NetBeans wants, and click “OK”.

And … NetBeans starts doing its normal routine of scanning the remote (via SSH) directories, asks me to confirm that I want to download some 1714 files to my local computer, and when I do (why wouldn’t I, right?), it begins its glorious work.

In the meantime, I set-up a new project using ActiveState’s Komodo 6.13 IDE, I point it to the same server and directory and click “OK”. Three seconds later, I have my project.

NetBeans you ask? Oh, it’s still downloading. My Internet connection is too slow (it’ll max out around 20 mbit/s) of course .. I should have at least 100 mbit/s, or possibly GB/s. Because if you want to do NetBeans development on remote servers and do it the “proper NetBeans way”, you STILL have to download your entire project locally.

I could live with that rather awkward way of doing things if NetBeans could only detect changes to the file(s) on the remote. As it is now, and as it has been for many years with NetBeans, it’ll simply consider itself to be the master, and overwrite whatever is on the server.

Of course I’m doing it all wrong. I should use version control, I should not expect myself to be able to use my workstation as a terminal to the server. I mean, those days are gone, right? We ARE in the MODEM ERA of Internet, where you REALLY wanted to do EVERYTHING LOCALLY due to bandwidth limitations, etc.

Oh no, wait .. this is 2011 .. everyone but your pet is connected 24/7/365.

So, I think now that NetBeans have shown (again), that they have no intention of EVER fixing this problem, I’ll just do rm -r -f and be happy. And what’s more, so will the rest of the NetBeans community, because they won’t need to listen to me whining about it 🙂

Bye Bye NetBeans.

#NetBeans #IDE #PHP #fail #SSH #remote #development

Increasing the phpMyAdmin session timeout

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When phpMyAdmin is installed, the default session timeout value is too low for many users, making your phpMyAdmin session expire too soon. One could argue that a low session timeout value is a good idea from a security perspective. If you do not think this is an issue, here are a few simple steps that’ll let you change how long phpMyAdmin will keep your session(s) alive.

Open config.inc.php in the phpMyAdmin “root” directory. Look for a line that contains this: $cfg[‘LoginCookieValidity’]. Set the value to the desired number of seconds you want the session to stay alive (3600 = one hour, which is reasonable for most users). If you do not have that line in your config.inc.php file, add it like this:

$cfg[‘LoginCookieValidity’] = 3600;

Don’t forget to save the file, and then login again to phpMyAdmin. You may need to close the browser and re-open your phpMyAdmin URL.

This also assumes that the PHP session garbage collection is set-up accordingly. This can be done in a number of ways:

  • php.ini; add a line (or change an existing) that contains session.gc_maxlifetime = <seconds>
  • Apache configuration; add a line to the appropriate <Directory> block that says “php_admin_value session.gc_maxlifetime <seconds>”
  • config.inc.php (phpMyAdmin); after the previously edited line, add a line with “ini_set(‘session.gc_maxlifetime’, <seconds>);”

The <seconds> above is the same value that you set your variable to in config.inc.php at the beginning of this post, “3600” (sans quotes) in my case. (Some of these methods may or may not work on the server you’re using.)

This isn’t the only way to circumvent phpMyAdmin sessions expiring on you in the middle of that important work; you can, of course, configure phpMyAdmin to have appropriate access directly, thus allowing you to access your MySQL database(s) without entering a username and a password. You’ll find more information about this on the phpMyAdmin website.

(phpMyAdmin is, IMHO, one of the best tools ever written in its class. My only gripe is that I’d really like to have a much less bloated visual display theme as the default, but you can accomplish this yourself quite easily.)