$ git mv old/ new

fatal: source directory is empty, source=old/cookbooks/apache2, destination=new/cookbooks/apache2

Like i said. This seems to work for normal folders. But submodules are a bit more complicated because of paths set in various files. So let’s try just moving them on the filesystem.

$ mv old/ new
$ git status

# deleted: old/VVagrantfile.example
# deleted: old/cookbooks/apache2
# deleted: old/cookbooks/apt
# deleted: old/cookbooks/beanstalkd/.travis.yml

That’s not what we’re looking for. We want to move the files. Not remove them. At this point i was at a loss and spend some time looking around stackoverflow. Which has multiple solutions available from other developers. But none seemed to fit the bill. So i ended up combining a couple.

First create the new location and add it to the git index.

$ mkdir new
$ git add new

In my case i had normal folders and submodules in the same directory. So first i moved the normal folders to the new structure.

$ git mv old/[some folder] /new

Now it’s time for the submodules. We need to update the paths in each submodule’s .git file. And the paths in project .gitmodule file

$ find . -name .git -type f -print0 -type f | xargs -0 sed -i 's|old|new|g'
$ find . -name .gitmodule -type f -print0 -type f | xargs -0 sed -i 's|old|new|g'

After that add the .gitmodule file to the git index and checkout the status

$ git add .gitmodule
$ git status 

fatal: Could not chdir to ‘../../../../../new/cookbooks/apache2’: No such file or directory
fatal: ‘git status –porcelain’ failed in submodule old/cookbooks/apache2

So we’re not there yet. As it turns out the git config file also contains the submodule paths. And the .git/modules folder contains a submodule mapping as well. So let’s fix that

$ find . -name config -print0 -type f | xargs -0 sed -i 's|old|new|g'
$ mv .git/modules/old .git/modules/new
$ git status

That looks good

modified: .gitmodules
# renamed: old/Vagrantfile.example -> new/Vagrantfile.example
# renamed: old/cookbooks/apache2 -> new/cookbooks/apache2
# renamed: old/cookbooks/apt -> new/cookbooks/apt
# renamed: old/cookbooks/beanstalkd/.travis.yml -> new/cookbooks/beanstalkd/.travis.yml

Now we can remove the old folder from the git project and commit the changes.

$ git rm -r --cached old/
$ git commit -a -m "Moved old to new folder"
$ git push

It seemed as if the settings from the config page were completely ignored when calculating the clover status. This was really bugging me. So i checked out the clover plugin source from github. And browsed through the code for a while. When i found the beauty below inside CoverageTarget.java

public Set<CoverageMetric> getFailingMetrics(AbstractClassMetrics coverage) {
    Set<CoverageMetric> result = new HashSet<CoverageMetric>();

    if (methodCoverage != null && coverage.getMethodCoverage().getPercentage() < methodCoverage) {
        result.add(CoverageMetric.METHOD);
    }

    if (statementCoverage != null && coverage.getStatementCoverage().getPercentage() < statementCoverage) {
        result.add(CoverageMetric.STATEMENT);
    }

    if (elementCoverage != null && coverage.getElementCoverage().getPercentage() < elementCoverage) {
        result.add(CoverageMetric.ELEMENT);
    }

    return result;
}

So it seems as if somewhere in the plugin it’s actually calculating the average of the coverage per setting. The strange thing in the method above however is the elementCoverage setting. Which is not available in the Jenkins config interface. And causes issues because we have no influence over this setting.

So i added the setting to the config manually

$ vi /var/lib/jenkins/jobs/[project]/config.xml

<org.jenkinsci.plugins.cloverphp.CloverPHPPublisher plugin="cloverphp@0.3.3">
...
      <healthyTarget>
        <methodCoverage>20</methodCoverage>
        <statementCoverage>20</statementCoverage>
        <elementCoverage>20</elementCoverage>
      </healthyTarget>
...
</org.jenkinsci.plugins.cloverphp.CloverPHPPublisher>

And voilà. I nice sunny forecast. Now let’s see if i have some time to write a patch for this.

But how does it work when you have need access to multiple repositories using multiple keys yourself? I had to set this up a couple of times. And it turns out to be just as easy. But if for some reason it’s not that obvious these steps might help.

Let’s pretend we need some key first.

$ ssh-keygen -t rsa -b 4096

Generating public/private rsa key pair.
Enter file in which to save the key (/home/user/.ssh/id_rsa): repo1_rsa
Enter passphrase (empty for no passphrase):
Enter same passphrase again:

Your identification has been saved in repo1_rsa.
Your public key has been saved in repo1_rsa.pub.
The key fingerprint is:
03:b5:da:08:3b:6f:9a:29:3f:f5:4c:ee:5d:14:cb:41 user@host
The key’s randomart image is:
+–[ RSA 4096]—-+
some output
+—————–+

This will generate the public and private key for repo1. Now repeat the same thing for repo2. Make sure the keys reside in ~/.ssh

Now let’s say we have access to two repositories under two different users / companies. We will use github.com/repo1 and github.com/repo2 as examples. The only thing we have to do is add some entries to ~/.ssh/config to make this work. They key is to use the Github sub-domain mappings

$ vi ~/.ssh/config

Host    repo1.github.com
    HostName github.com
    PreferredAuthentications publickey
    IdentityFile ~/.ssh/repo1_rsa

Host    repo2.github.com
    HostName github.com
    PreferredAuthentications publickey
    IdentityFile ~/.ssh/repo2_rsa

Save the file and we’re done. Now to checkout a project in one of the repositories. Do the following.

$ git clone git@repo1.github.com:repo1/project.git

Cloning into ‘project’…
remote: Counting objects: 86, done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (66/66), done.
remote: Total 86 (delta 27), reused 64 (delta 17)
Receiving objects: 100% (86/86), 34.83 KiB, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (27/27), done.

Fatal error: Allowed memory size of xxxxxxxxx bytes exhausted (tried toallocate xxxxx bytes) in

After some hacking and optimization tricks. The script’s memory consumption seemed stable enough to deploy it to production. However. Each time we deployed it. We were hit by memory exhaust issues almost instantly. Time to do some debugging and code tracing.

And we’re able to narrow it down to a single mysql* (don’t get me started on the mysql* functions, so let’s ignore that for now) call. Namely mysql_fetch_field. Why on earth would this generate a memory exhaust issue on the server you might think. And that’s exactly what we were thinking.

The problem was. That the offset passed in as the field offset was incorrect. And resulted in a notice. These notices however were suppressed with the @ symbol. And therefor never noticeable during development. But that’s no reason for memory exhaust issues… right?

@mysql_fetch_field($result, $offset);

Right! Further inspection showed that in production PHP’s APM extension was loaded and active. And this was the real problem behind the memory exhaust issue. Thousands of queries were executed. And almost all of them were throwing an error notice for the fetch field function. Which was ignored by the @ symbol. But APM was still logging them. And apparently had a very hard time keeping up.

It looks like a bug in APM. But that’s another story. The issue was fixed by passing in the correct offset of course. Another nice example of logging bringing down a production server.

I’ll just outline some of the new and exiting features, deprecated notices and removed functions.

Simplified password hashing API

Hashing passwords with md5() and sha1() just isn’t enough anymore. So a new, secure and easy way to hash passwords has been added. And besides hashing includes some other useful functions.

$password The password string to hash

$algorithm The hashing algorithm to use of which two are available at the moment

PASSWORD_DEFAULT which uses bcrypt
PASSWORD_BCRYPT which uses blowfish

$options makes it possible to add a salt or set the cost for the hashing algorithm

$password = 'test-password';
$hash = password_hash($password, PASSWORD_DEFAULT);
var_dump($hash);

string(60) "$2y$10$qGv1q5nT4F7HCtKSPPME2usrdJRcRpk9lEUMQsE8mqyDIy3fbJ4I."

$hash = password_hash($password, PASSWORD_BCRYPT);
var_dump($hash);

string(60) "$2y$10$XtpNO/tFjtkq4u3ghcpqXeSwbHZxDQDTXRHfWBnZsmowUVl/MQys2"

$salt = mcrypt_create_iv(22, MCRYPT_DEV_URANDOM); 
$hash = password_hash($password, PASSWORD_BCRYPT, array("cost" => 14, "salt" => $salt));
var_dump($hash);

string(60) "$2y$14$6ZtnYJ0CyqCUx.vJu3MZEuUGgIN.ryxMa0Yh8BnCrbBDVnd3Me30i"

Verify if a hash and password match. Return true if they do and false if they don’t

$hash = password_hash($password, PASSWORD_DEFAULT);

if (password_verify($password, $hash)) {
  echo 'Password is correct';
} else {
  echo 'Password is incorrect';
}

Password is correct

Get information about a valid hash created with password_hash(). The function returns an array with the use d algorithm and options

$info = password_get_info($hash);

array(3) {
  ["algo"]=>
  int(1)
  ["algoName"]=>
  string(6) "bcrypt"
  ["options"]=>
  array(1) {
    ["cost"]=>
    int(10)
  }
}

Check if the supplied hash was generated by the provided algorithm and options. This might come in handy when the hash needs to be updated

if (password_needs_rehash($hash, PASSWORD_BCRYPT, array('cost' => 8))) {
  // Update the password hash
}

Support for constant array/string dereferencing

If you work with objects you might have worked with object dereferencing. This Is used to chain method calls. Or the so called fluent interfaces

$obj->method()->returnObjMethod();

Now the same is possible for arrays and strings

echo array(1, 2, 3)[0]; //output 1
echo "foobar"[2]; //output o
echo "foobar"["foo"][0] // output f
 
echo [1,3,4][2]; //output 4

Class Name Resolution As Scalar Via “class” Keyword

An easy way to get the full class name

namespace Vodka\Crypt;

Class HashBuilder {}

use Vodka\Crypt\HashBuilder;
         
var_dump(HashBuilder::class);

string(23) "Vodka\Crypt\HashBuilder"

Support for using empty() on the result of function calls and other expressions

Normally empty() and isset() could only be used on variables. In 5.5 it’s possible to test expression and return values from functions

5.3

var_dump( empty(function() {}) );

PHP Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_FUNCTION in

        
function foo() {}
var_dump(empty(foo()));

PHP Fatal error: Can’t use function return value in write context in

5.5

function foo($val) { 
  return $val; 
}

var_dump( empty(foo([])) );
var_dump( empty(foo(true)) );

bool(true)
bool(false)

Support for list in foreach

List has been added for foreach loops. Great for eliminating unused variables.

$messages = array(
  array('id' => 1, 'body' => 'test-1', 'code' => 12),
  array('id' => 2, 'body' => 'test-2', 'code' => 12),
  array('id' => 3, 'body' => 'test-3', 'code' => 10)
);

// Before
foreach ($messages as $message) {
  list($id, $body) = $message;
}
         
// After
foreach ($messages as list($id, $body)) {}

Zend Opcache extension and enable building it by default

My short post about Zend Optimizer+ in February this year. Kind of slipped my mind. And i was somehow under the impression APC would be integrated. But this of course has to be Zend Optimizer+. Finally an opcode cacher available be default. And configurable from php.ini

[opcache]
; Determines if Zend OPCache is enabled
opcache.enable=0
opcache.enable_cli=0

; The OPcache shared memory storage size.
opcache.memory_consumption=64

; The amount of memory for interned strings in Mbytes.
opcache.interned_strings_buffer=4

; Max files in OPCode cache, use a number between 200 and 100000.
opcache.max_accelerated_files=2000

; The maximum percentage of “wasted” memory until a restart is scheduled.
opcache.max_wasted_percentage=5

; Append current working dir to script name
opcache.use_cwd=1

How often a file should be validated
opcache.revalidate_freq=2

; Enables or disables file search in include_path optimization
opcache.revalidate_path=0

; Drop all PHPDoc comments
opcache.save_comments=1

array_column function which returns a column in a multidimensional array

Fetching a column from a multi-dimensional array is now possible with a single function call.

$nestedArray = array(
  array('id' => 1, 'body' => 'test-1', 'code' => 12),
  array('id' => 2, 'body' => 'test-2', 'code' => 12),
  array('id' => 3, 'body' => 'test-3', 'code' => 10)
);
$columns = array_column($nestedArray, 'code');
print_r($columns);

Array
(
  [0] => 12
  [1] => 12
  [2] => 10
)

Or fetch status code indexed by id

$columns = array_column($nestedArray, 'code', 'id');
print_r($columns);

Array
(
  [145] => 12
  [20098] => 12
  [34] => 10
)

deprecated

The following mcrypt functions have been deprecated mcrypt_ecb(), mcrypt_cbc(), mcrypt_cfb(), mcrypt_ofb() and will now throw E_DEPRECATED.

The mysql extension has finally been deprecated, and deprecation warnings will be generated when connections are established to databases via mysql_connect(), mysql_pconnect()

use MySQLi or PDO_MySQL extensions instead.

removed

The following (not so useful) functions have been removed from the core php_logo_guid(), php_egg_logo_guid(), php_real_logo_guid(), zend_logo_guid(). And support for the ancient operating systems Windows XP and 2003 has been dropped!

Install 5.5 on Ubuntu (experimental)

If you want to experience the new version first hand and you work on Ubuntu. You can add the experimental PPA and give it a shot.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ondrej/php5-experimental
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install php5

$arr = array('foo' => 'baz');
$obj = (object) $arr;

var_dump($obj);

object(stdClass)#1 (1) {
  ["foo"]=>
  string(3) "baz"
}

Ha that’s cool. It actually works. But wait. What happens when we use a numeric index?

$arr = array(0 => 'bar', 'foo' => 'baz');
$obj = (object) $arr;

var_dump($obj);

object(stdClass)#1 (2) {
  [0]=>
  string(3) "bar"
  ["foo"]=>
  string(3) "baz"
}

WTF? We just created $obj->0 which should not be allowed in PHP as far as i know. So let’s make sure i am not mistaking.

$foo = new stdClass();
$foo->0 = 'bar';

PHP Parse error: syntax error, unexpected ‘0’ (T_LNUMBER), expecting identifier (T_STRING) or variable (T_VARIABLE) or ‘{’ or ‘$’ in foo.php on line 5

But casting the array didn’t complain about a thing. Can we access this property? Well! Not calling it directly. At least not that i know of. But looping over the object’s properties does seem to work.

// Parse error
// var_dump($obj->0);

foreach ($obj as $key => $val) {
  var_dump($key);
  var_dump($obj->$key);
}

int(0)
PHP Notice:  Undefined property: stdClass::$0 in foo.php on line 14
NULL
string(3) "foo"
string(3) "baz"

It’s not that i was planning on ever using this. Or advising other people to use it. In the contrary. But i guess it’s not completely useless. But care is required when doing so.

PHP 5+ has come a long way performance wise without the Optimizer component. But being able to apply opcode cache out of the box is a great addition. And so far the benchmarks look promising. The Optimizer+ component beats APC hands down in all performed tests.

Read more about Opcode caching and the integration process here.

The first time i saw the shirt i could not make out what was so offending that people would start blogging about it. Somebody had to point that out for me. So what’s the deal here? Apparently the shirt’s slogan was intentionally created with a slight sexual undertone. The idea comes from the enlarge your penis SPAM we all know!

Some people have perceived this as being sexist. And even go so far as to personally attack the people behind the shirt.

Personally i don’t think the shirt is sexist or offensive at all. And don’t really understand all the fuss. Sex has never been an issue for me in the PHP community. I learn just as much from female developers as i do from the male ones. We are all equal. People that feel the need to defend the opposite sex are probably the ones that see a difference. Even so! Why make such a big deal of something so small? I never seen anybody blog about the programming with attitude poster.

I think the PHP community has just lost a bit of it’s shine and coolness. I’ve always been under the impression the PHP community consisted of free thinking people that do what they love. Develop stuff. And that’s exactly what attracted me to it 12 years ago in the first place.

The community has grown quite a lot in that period of time. The thing with every communities is that it brings forth vocal people. Which is a great thing in general. But not so good when people forget their responsibility towards the rest of the community. And that’s exactly what happened the last few days. Personal issues have become public. To me it seems many of you have missed the boat completely. You don’t have to like the shirt. But there is absolutely no reason to bash the initiative in public.

Here are some of the articles the spawned over the last couple days:

PHPness Gate – raising interesting issues

On Public Outrage And Bad Actors

Sexism in the PHP Community

On Sexism/Racism/Any-other-ism and the PHP Community

Sexism and PHP

Hacker news - Sexism and PHP (calevans.com)

Web & PHP sexist tshirt debate – my 2 cents

On Equality, Sexism and an Even Hand

So let’s all just respect one another. And keep the PHP community a friendly place. This kind of nonsense has no positive impact on anybody.

I never bothered adding this to my blog. But i do like to share. So last night i was trying to figure out how to integrate this with my current blog. I was hoping for an easy implementation. But the information is scarce. So i had to do some digging. I did find a couple of Wordpress plugins. But most of them were not updated for at least a year. And i am not putting code like that life on my website.

After some Googling i came across a couple of feed URL’s that seem to share their shared items in feed form. Using the Google Reader URL and a user id. So the URL for my shared items would look like the one below. Getting your user id by the way is easy. Go to your Google reader page. Click all All items and the UID will show up in the address bar.

http://www.google.com/reader/shared/16525759780220726764

The problem with this however. Non of my shared posts show up on this page. And i have not figured out a way to populate it just yet. So i came up with an other path to get this data on my server.

In the Google Reader pages it’s possible to add sharing functionality. This is done by going to the Send To tab

From here it’s possible to select a service to share data with. Non of these services are any good for what i am trying to do. But the great thing about this page is. You can provide custom URL’s for sharing data. Just incorporate the specified parameters in the URL and your done.

Once configured and saved a custom URL is visible in the Send To panel

That’s it for this part. Actually sharing items is quite easy now. When back in the Google Reader under each post there is Send to link. If you click this link the newly created custom URL will show up. And you can share the post.

The only thing left to do is write some code to process the incoming data. To get you started. Some of the code i used while testing this is posted below

Class GoogleReaderShare
{
  const GOOGLE_REMOTE_IP = '95.97.54.3';
            
  const GOOGLE_REFERER = 'http://www.google.nl/reader/view/';
            
  protected static $_whitelist = array('source', 'title', 'url', 'short');
            
  public static function CheckSource($remoteAddr, $referer) 
  {
    if (($remoteAddr == self::GOOGLE_REMOTE_IP) 
        && ($referer == self::GOOGLE_REFERER)) {
      return true;
    }
    return false;
  }
            
  protected static function _CheckIncomingData($data)
  {
    if (!is_array($data)) {
      return false;
    }
                            
    foreach ($data as $key => $value) {
      if (!in_array($key, self::$_whitelist)) {
        return false;
      }
    }
  }
            
  public static function Process($data) 
  {
    if (!self::_CheckIncomingData($data)) {
      throw new Exception("Unrecognized or no incoming data");
    }
                    
    // process the data
  }
 
  if (GoogleReaderShare::CheckSource($_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'], $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'])) {
    GoogleReaderShare::Process($_GET);
  }

Warning: mysql_query(): MySQL server has gone away in /path/to/some/mysql4/class.php on line xxx

So whats going on here? Well actually it’s quite simple. When my script initializes the database connection it doesn’t use it. It just sits there waiting for incoming data. Once received it will process it and try to store it in the database. But when the waiting period exceeds the time for PHP to keep the MySQL connection open it responds with the warning mentioned above. Now in previous versions of PHP this would not be a big issue. As PHP would just initiate a reconnect when the connection is lost. But from PHP 5.0.3 and up this functionality has been disabled by default. For MySQLI this is no problem at all.

MySQLi:

mysqli.reconnect = Off to On

Unfortunately i am working with PHP’s core mysql_* functions (don’t get me started) and there doesn’t seem to be an easy way to resolve this. According to the MySQL documentation

mysql_options(&mysql, MYSQL_OPT_RECONNECT, &reconnect);

Should do the trick. But passing MYSQL_OPT_RECONNECT in anyway to mysql_connect didn’t give me the result i was looking for. So what now? Porting the database code to make use of the newer and better PDO or MySQLi is no option. As it would consume way to much time. Fortunately the mysql_* core functions come with mysql_ping. I never had to use this before. But in this case it comes in quite handy.

From the PHP manual:

bool mysql_ping ([ resource $link_identifier = NULL ] )

Checks whether or not the connection to the server is working. If it has gone down, an automatic reconnection is attempted. This function can be used by scripts that remain idle for a long while, to check whether or not the server has closed the connection and reconnect if necessary.

Note: Automatic reconnection is disabled by default in versions of MySQL >= 5.0.3.

Adding the mysql_ping function call was rather straight forward. And didn’t require all that much work to be done. I extended the database class to include a ping method. That would simply throw an exception when it failed to reconnect.

public function ping()
{
  if (!mysql_ping($this->db_connect_id)) {
    throw new Mollie_Database_Exception("Connection was lost");
  }        
  return true;
}

And after that i started poking around the userland implementation. The worker is running inside a while(true) loop. A first test with ->ping() being called inside this loop proved to resolve the issue at hand. But running the ping function that often is overkill. And who knows it might actually result in DoS of the database server. So i decided to ping the server every one minute or so.

$start = time();
while (true) 
{
  $this->_keepConnectionAlive($start);
}

And the keepConnectionAlive method looks something like this

protected function _keepConnectionAlive(&$start)
{
  $passed = (time() - $start);
  if ($passed > 60)
  {
    $start = time();
    $this->_db->ping();
  }
}

I’m not a big fan of this solution. And would rather be implementing MySQLi functions. But this functions well. And will do for now.

So to make sure rebasing is done by default. You can run a simple git command or modify the .git/config file manually.

$ git config branch.autosetuprebase always

or do

$ vi .git/config

Make sure [branch “master”] has rebase set to true. It should look like the snippet below.

[branch “master”] remote = origin merge = refs/heads/master rebase = true

Starting to really like git. A couple of more quirks and things will be running fine.

I use this machine daily. And i can’t afford to lose work due to system crashes. So i could spend numerous hours trying to figure out what’s going on. But that’s probably something better left for the Ubuntu devs them selfs. Besides that there are plenty of bug reports floating around that describe this behavior. And one of those posts seemed to resolve the issue for me.

Apparently the bug that causes these crashes is fixed in 12.10. But the changes will only be backported when 12.10 is released. So that leaves me in quite a pickle. But according to the thread. Upgrading the kernel should do the trick. So that’s exactly what i did. The kernel packages i used can be found here http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/v3.4-precise/

• $ wget http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/v3.4-precise/linux-headers-3.4.0-030400_3.4.0-030400.201205210521_all.deb
• $ sudo dpkg -i linux-headers-3.4.0-030400_3.4.0-030400.201205210521_all.deb

• $ wget http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/v3.4-precise/linux-headers-3.4.0-030400-generic_3.4.0-030400.201205210521_amd64.deb
• $ sudo dpkg -i linux-headers-3.4.0-030400-generic_3.4.0-030400.201205210521_amd64.deb

• $ wget http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/v3.4-precise/linux-image-3.4.0-030400-generic_3.4.0-030400.201205210521_amd64.deb
• $ sudo dpkg -i linux-image-3.4.0-030400-generic_3.4.0-030400.201205210521_amd64.deb

This comes with a downside of course. All modules compiled for the current kernel need to be recompiled. And i haven’t figured out how to rebuild all of them at once. So i just ran the command below for VirtualBox and the NVidia drivers.

$ sudo dpkg-reconfigure package-name

It’s probably a better idea to keep the stable kernel for now. But if system crashes are really bugging you. Then this might resolve the issue. Just be careful.

Wordpress is replacing characters in my posts. The most annoying being the replacement of – is with - . Which makes no sense at all. Specially when creating code samples. Or command line parameters. My thought is why on earth would you do that? But it probably has something to do with typography…

Anyways. Searching for it today made me stumble onto this post from 2007 by Paul Betts. And believe it or not. Wordpress is still doing that. The code has changed slightly tough. So i created a quick patch as a temporary solution. And need to figure out if this can be circumvented by a plugin or something. If that doesn’t exists already :)

The patch will replace the following lines

$static_characters = array_merge( array( '---', ' -- ', '--', ' - ', 'xn-', '...', '``', '\'\'', ' (tm)' ), $cockney );
$static_replacements = array_merge( array( $em_dash, ' ' . $em_dash . ' ', $en_dash, ' ' . $en_dash . ' ', 'xn--', '…', $opening_quote, 
  $closing_quote, ' ™' ), $cockneyreplace 
);

With

$static_characters = $cockney;
$static_replacements = $cockneyreplace;

Patching the file is easy.

This patch was created for v3.4.2. And will most likely fail on other versions of Wordpress.

$ cd wp-includes/ $ wget https://raw.github.com/tlenss/misc/master/patch/wordpress-charreplace.patch $ patch -p0 < wordpress-charreplace.patch patching file formatting.php

That’s all.

O well. My first idea was to just drop the database that i wanted to use for testing. But due to no space available on the system. I could not drop it. I really couldn’t do anything on the system. Even writing config files failed. So where did all the disk space go?

• $ df -h
• Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
• /dev/mapper/debian-605-root 10G 9.8G 0.2G 99% /

That’s really not that much space left. And /var/mysql/ibdata1 for the InnoDB tables was taking up 7 GB. And since i have a couple of InnoDB tables i can’t just delete this file. So need to come up with something else. And after a bit of Googling. I came across this post. Which seemed promising. But the most important part is left out. And instead linked to some horrible garbled page. That is completely unreadable. So i had to do some digging to figure this out on my own. For cloning the disks i followed the steps in the article however. The Virtual Box files are located in the user folder in the following path

$ cd ~/VirtualBox VMs/development_*

The first thing i did was convert the VMDK image to a VDI image so we can actually do some partition resizing.

$ VBoxManage clonehd box-disk1.vmdk box-disk1.vdi –format VDI

So now we have a new VDI image. And we need to resize it so it has sufficient space for what we are trying to do. In my case 20 GB is sufficient.

$ VBoxManage modifyhd box-disk1.vdi –resize 20000

Now that the new disk is created it needs to be attached to the vagrant virtual machine. This is easily achieved by doing right click on the VM in VirtualBox and select Settings

Storage > SATA Controller > Add hard disk (select existing and point to the new VDI image)

Now boot the Vagrant image in VirtualBox so we have a screen to work with. When it has booted up. Login.

First create a new Primary partition in the unused space of type Linux LVM (8e) with cfdisk.

$ cfdisk /dev/sda

When the partition table has been written. It’s time to create a new physical volume on the new partition with the help of pvcreate

• $ pvcreate /dev/sda3
  • successfully created

For the next steps we will be needing the Volume Group name. We will get this by running pvdisplay

• $ pvdisplay

  grep “VG Name”

• VG Name debian-605

So now we have all the bits ready. And its time to extend the root partition with the newly created partition.

• $ vgextend debian-605 /dev/sda3
• Volume group “debian-605” successfully extended

Awesome! next step extending the logical partition

• $ lvextend /dev/debian-605/root /dev/sda3
• Extending logical volume root to 18.84 GiB
• Logical volume root successfully resized

Almost there. The last thing left to do is resize the filesystem to make all space available.

• $ resize2fs /dev/debian-605/root
• resize2fs 1.41.12 (17-May-2010)
• Filesystem at /dev/debian-605/root is mounted on /; on-line resizing required old desc_blocks = 1, new_desc_blocks = 2
• Performing an on-line resize of /dev/debian-605/root to 4937728 (4k) blocks.
• The filesystem on /dev/debian-605/root is now 4937728 blocks long.

It’s that simple really. So let’s check.

• $ df -h
• Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
• /dev/mapper/debian-605-root 19G 8.6G 9.1G 49% /

After this i did not bother to convert the VDI image back to a VDMK image. But if you have to for some reason. You could do that with the commands below. And some manual editing of the VirtualBox xml config.

• $ VBoxManage internalcommands sethduuid box-disk1.vdi
• $ VBoxManage clonehd box-disk1.vdi box-disk1.vmdk –format VMDK

So that’s it really for resizing the Vagrant hard drive. The only thing left for me was to cleanup the large ibdata1 file. And setup Mysql to use separate ibdata files for InnoDB table.

• $ vi /etc/mysql/my.cnf
• [mysqld]
• innodb_file_per_table

Restart Mysql and dump all needed databases except the system tables like (mysql, information_schema).

• $ /etc/init.d/mysql restart

• $ echo ‘show databases;’

  mysql -uroot -p

  grep -v ^Database$

  grep -v ^information_schema$

  grep -v ^mysql$

  xargs mysqldump -uroot -p –databases > dump.sql

When that’s done. Drop all InnoDB database tables. Remove the ibdata and in_log files from /var/lib/mysql.

• $ /etc/init.d/mysql stop
• $ rm /var/mysql/ibdata1* /var/mysql/ib_log*

Now we restart Mysql. And reimport the databases.

• $ /etc/init.d/mysql start
• $ mysql -uroot -p < dump.sql

• Some of the resources i used for solving this issue:
• [1] http://www.turnkeylinux.org/blog/extending-lvm
• [2] http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/37900/gparted-live-cd-cant-resize-a-partition
• [3] http://www.my-guides.net/en/guides/general-software/122-how-to-resize-a-virtualbox-disk-partition
• [4] http://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch08.html#vboxmanage-modifyvdi
• [5] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3456159/how-to-shrink-purge-ibdata1-file-in-mysql

And two days ago i kinda got stuck in rebase hell. And had to take some time to figure this all out without doing any damage. Which resulted in another problem. There simply is no revert command like in subversion. But git is pretty smart about this kinda things. So getting the branch full of failed merges back to it’s original state can easily be achieved with two commands and some concentration.

First check the reflog for a point where to start from

$ git reflog

From the output pick the point where to revert back to. Which looks something like HEAD{2}. And run

$ git reset –hard HEAD{2}

So back to square one. My main problem was that i had not kept my branch up to date with the remote repository. Which you can do with the pull command while on the master branch. Or with the rebase command while working on a local branch. Rebase is git’s alternative way of bringing changes together. So the idea behind it is that when your local branch is up to date. The final merge will become as straight forward as possible.

I finally managed to get my changes merged in to master. But did not feel very confident about the whole process. So I need to come up with a steady work flow. And stick to it. To not waste time and run into these rebase disasters.

This is what i have so far. And seems to be a solid routine. Start with a nice new checkout of the project at hand. And branch it for the changes to be done.

• $ git clone git://some.repository.url:repos.git
• $ git branch dev-branch

After working on the newly created branch for a while. Some changes are bound to be ready to be pulled into master. Keeping an eye on the build logs or commit messages should work fine. When this happens it’s time to bring those changes into the dev-branch. After pulling them into master.

• $ git checkout master
• $ git pull
• $ git checkout dev-branch

If there is a need to rebase the branch with for instance master. This is the moment. This might cause non-fast-forward issues. But i have not completely figured out why i run into these issues every now and then. A way to solve this might be to use the –force switch when pushing to remote. But i am not a big fan of forcing things like this.

$ git rebase

If everything is fine some more work can be done on the dev branch. Until a new change in master is ready to be pulled in. In which case it’s rinse and repeat the previous part. When the changeset is ready to be merged back into master. Switch to master bring it up up o date with a pull. And merge the changes from the dev-branch.

• $ git checkout master
• $ git pull
• $ git push dev-branch

Again when all is fine all changes will be available in master. If something goes wrong during git-rebase and / or merging. Git will kindly state so. And some manual merging with git’s mergetool will have to be done. But that’s something for another day.

Starting the battle.net agent manually before firing up the WoW launcher solved the launcher crashing.

• wine ~/.wine/drive_c/users/Public/Application\ Data/Battle.net/Agent/Agent.1267/Agent.exe –nohttpauth &
• wine ~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files\ (x86)/World\ of\ Warcraft/Launcher.exe &

And installing vcrun2008 with winetricks solved the problem with the updater hanging.

• [1] http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iId;=25610&iTestingId;=70352
• [2] http://www.codeweavers.com/compatibility/browse/name/?forum=1;app_id=7714;mhl=130618;msg=130314

So to start of we need some packages.

Virtualbox

To create the virtual development image

NFS packages

To make sharing files between host and guest easy as pie

Vagrant

To package the virtual image and manage newly created box

$ sudo apt-get install virtualbox vagrant nfs-common nfs-kernel-server

Now is a good moment to download any Linux distro you want. I chose Debian. As it´s the most common in my day to day work.

$ wget http://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd/6.0.5/i386/iso-cd/debian-6.0.5-i386-netinst.iso

Now launch virtualbox and create a new virtual machine. Just do what you normally do when you create a VM. But make sure to choose VMDK `Virtual Machine Disk´ as the format. The rest should be ok. When the VM is created start it up and choose the freshly downloaded Linux ISO to start the installation.

I only installed the base system + the SSH server. And when that’s all done. And the VM is running. Login as root and install some packages vagrant needs.

$ apt-get install sudo ruby ruby-dev libopenssl-ruby rdoc ri irb build-essential ssl-cert curl rubygems puppet

I won’t be setting up a Chef server to manage the vagrant images. But i will be using Chef-Solo to manage installing packages. So let’s install Chef.

install chef

Setup the opscode package repositories for APT

• $ echo “deb http://apt.opscode.com/ lsb_release -cs-0.10 main”

  tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/opscode.list

• $ gpg –keyserver keys.gnupg.net –recv-keys 83EF826A

• $ gpg –export packages@opscode.com

  tee /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/opscode-keyring.gpg > /dev/null

And finally install the opscode keymanager and and of course Chef.

• $ apt-get update
• $ apt-get install opscode-keyring
• $ apt-get install chef

The installer will ask for the chef URL. I used none because i will be using chef solo

Now we need to add a user for vagrant to connect with.

• $ adduser vagrant
• passwrd : vagrant
• $ groupadd admin
• $ usermod -a -G admin vagrant

Make sure the admin users can sudo without a password.

• $ visudo
• %admin ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: ALL

Disable DNS for the SSH server. This should be a performance gain.

• $ vi /etc/etc/ssh/sshd_config
• UseDNS no

Change the MOTD to something nice

• $ bash -c “echo ‘Sweeet! A Vagrant box cooked by Chef!!’ > /etc/motd”
• $ chmod 0777 /etc/motd

Switch to the vagrant user to setup the insecure vagrant public SSH key.

• $ su vagrant
• mkdir -p ~/.ssh
• chmod 0700 ~/.ssh
• curl -o ~/.ssh/authorized_keys https://raw.github.com/mitchellh/vagrant/master/keys/vagrant.pub
• chmod 0600 ~/.ssh/authorized_keys

That’s it for the VM. Now it’s time for vagrant to do some magic. First we need to create a vagrant package from the newly created VM.

• $ vagrant package –base devbox
• $ mv package.box devbox.box

Done! Let’s test it.

• $ vagrant box add devbox devbox.box
• $ mkdir test && cd test
• $ vagrant init devbox
• $ vagrant up
• $ vagrant ssh

Voila ssh’d into the VM

• $ exit
• $ vagrant halt
• $ vagrant destroy

So that’s all fine and dandy. But a base system with SSH is not that useful. So that’s where Chef comes in. Like i mentioned earlier i won’t be using a Chef-Server. I will be using Chef-Solo. And will be doing a very basic setup.

A Chef install script is called a cookbook. And they can be found all over the place. But the main repository is over here (find more here https://github.com/opscode/cookbooks). So in our vagrant folder we create a folder called cookbooks.

• $ mkdir cookbooks
• $ cd cookbooks

And we install some basic cookbooks. Plus a very simple one i hacked together to install the latest dotdeb package repositories.

https://github.com/tlenss/misc/tree/master/chef/cookbooks/dotdeb

$ git clone https://github.com/opscode/cookbooks

This will be enough for now. And will allow for some basic PHP development. To enable these package we have to edit the Vagrantfile file.

$ vi Vagrantfile

Add these lines for apache forwarding and NFS sharing

config.vm.share_folder “www”, “/var/www”, “/dev/location”

uncomment the :hostonly line so we can acces apache from our local box. And setup a hosts file mapping

• config.vm.network :hostonly, “192.168.164.123”
• $ sudo sed -i ‘$ a\
• 192.168.164.123 dev.box’ /etc/hosts

Configure chef’s cookbook path and add some recipes from the cloned cookbooks.

config.vm.provision :chef_solo do |chef|
  chef.json = {
    "mysql" => {
      "server_root_password" => "somepassword"
      "bind_address" => "127.0.0.1"
    }
  }

  chef.cookbooks_path = "cookbooks"
  chef.add_recipe("dotdeb")
  chef.add_recipe("dotdeb::php54")
  chef.add_recipe("openssl")
  chef.add_recipe("apache2")
  chef.add_recipe("apache2::mod_php5")
  chef.add_recipe("apache2::mod_rewrite")
  chef.add_recipe("mysql")
  chef.add_recipe("mysql::server")
  chef.add_recipe("memcached")
  chef.add_recipe("vim")
  chef.add_recipe("php")
  chef.add_recipe("php::module_curl")
  chef.add_recipe("php::module_mysql")
  chef.add_recipe("php::module_memcache")
  chef.add_recipe("php::module_sqlite3")
end

Time to call vagrant again. And this time the startup takes a bit longer. All the selected packages get installed. And once that’s done. And a fresh development box is waiting.

• $ vagrant up
• $ vagrant ssh

Let’s check PHP

• $ php -v
• PHP 5.4.6-1~dotdeb.0 (cli) (built: Aug 19 2012 08:45:58)
• Copyright (c) 1997-2012 The PHP Group
• Zend Engine v2.4.0, Copyright (c) 1998-2012 Zend Technologies

What about apache?

• $ ps -aux

  grep apache

• root 790 0.1 0.2 5352 2580 ? Ss 23:40 0:00 /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start
• www-data 793 0.0 0.1 5124 1764 ? S 23:40 0:00 /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start
• www-data 797 0.0 0.2 546408 2412 ? Sl 23:40 0:00 /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start
• www-data 798 0.0 0.2 546408 2404 ? Sl 23:40 0:00 /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start
• www-data 811 0.0 0.2 546408 2424 ? Sl 23:40 0:00 /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start

Nice! And Pointing the browser to http://localhost:8080 loads the NFS shared folder up through Apache. That’s it for now. Time to sleep…

• Some sources i used:
• [1] http://vagrantup.com/v1/docs/base_boxes.html
• [2] https://github.com/yevgenko/cookbook-dotdeb
• [3] http://vagrantup.com/v1/docs/provisioners/chef_solo.html

First of it’s probably a good thing to gather some of the available colors. A good resource is available here. Some of the colors and their corresponding codes can be found below.

• Black 0;30
• Blue 0;34
• Green 0;32
• Cyan 0;36
• Red 0;31
• Purple 0;35
• Brown 0;33
• Light Gray 0;37
• Dark Gray 1;30
• Light Blue 1;34
• Light Green 1;32
• Light Cyan 1;36
• Light Red 1;31
• Light Purple 1;35
• Yellow 1;33
• White 1;37

So how do i output colors you ask? Well that’s just plain easy. It’s a bit like setting up colors in your linux PS1 env variable.

Display a line in red for instance can be simply done by ‘echoing’ from the script with some extra formatting for bash to pickup. I will try to explain everything in the line below a bit later.

    echo "\033[31m some colored text \033[0m some white text \n";
    echo "\033[32m some colored text \033[0m some white text \n";

So what’s going on here. First we use an escape character so we can actually define a output color. This is done with \033 (\e). Then we open the color statement with [31m. Red in this case. The “some colored text” will be the text outputted in a different color. And after that we have to close the color statement with \033[0m.

Easy as cake… that’s all!

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