Courtney Miles

I am a Web Developer and this is my tech-blog for handy tips and essential readings.

[courtney-miles]

pthreads - Threading for PHP - Share Nothing, Do Everything :)

I need to remember this package for when I get onto PHP7.

There is also a very good article on the PHP Pthreads extension at madewithlove.

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Auto-launching and resuming SSH-Agent

If you use SSH Keys to authenticate with servers you can use ssh-agent to save you having to enter your passphrase on every connection.

https://gist.github.com/courtney-miles/9751f5a1ff0a4b71106b

This will work great for your current terminal session, and even when you close your terminal ssh-agent will continue to run. But despite that ssh-agent still running, your next terminal won't have access to it because none of the necessary environment variables will be set.

You could put the above command in your .bashrc file, but you will still be prompted for your passphrase everytime you opened a new terminal and you may end up with a lot of ssh-agent processes running in the background.

The following script can be added to your .bashrc file which will instead resume the use of an already running ssh-agent so you only have to enter your passphrase once, until you logout.

https://gist.github.com/courtney-miles/135752bfb382afffcb43

This script is adapted from the Github documentation, Working with SSH key passphrases. Their copy of this script has mistakes, but you may like to refer to that page for additional tips and advise.

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Enable Mouse Pasting for Vim

I run Windows on my Desktop, but still enjoy that "Linux feeling", so I have used Cygwin and more recently Babun to get that.

By default Vim under Babun does not allow pasting the clipboard content on a right-click.

I keep forgetting the command to make this work, so here it is:

set mouse-=a

This disables all mouse modes, which for some reason makes it work under Babun.

You can have it applied automatically by adding this line to your .vimrc file.

echo "set mouse-=a" >> ~/.vimrc

You can read more about mouse mode and other modes at the Vim Options Documentation.

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Why Passwordless Authentication Works

The premise of passwordless authentication is that passwords are unnecessary when the majority of users have secure personal messaging accounts such as email and SMS.

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PHP Master | Versioning Your Database with Liquibase

Most of the code we write is managed using some sort of version control system, but what about the database schemas? More often we make the changes to our development, test, and production databases manually. With a large team, it becomes difficult to share the changes with everyone. In this article you'll see how Liquibase, an open-source tool for managing and versioning database schema changes, can help.

My workplace currently uses Phinx to manage database changes, but Liquibase sound very comprehensive.

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... To solve these problems we need to delve into the realm of process control: the art of spawning child processes and controlling them, and also the ability to take advanced control over the original PHP process.

At work we have been using Process Control to get faster results from some PHP CLI scripts. I'm new to Process Control so this article help me with the fundamentals of signalling.

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SmartPower is a Windows application that saves energy and money by hibernating and resuming your computer according to configurable rules.

I use this to keep my PC awake during times that I'm streaming media and downloading.

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How I develop Symfony2 applications with CoreOS and Docker on Mac OS X.

This article demonstrates how simple it can be to produce a distinct development environment for each of your projects.

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PHPUnit offers the possibility to perform tests based in database fixtures. The common way is like described in the PHPUnit documentation. But what if you just want to have a small and different da...

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My own, highly irresponsible, sloppy test to rate the quality of a software team.

[courtney-miles]

SmartGit is a Git client for Windows, Mac and Linux. It is free for non-commercial use, provides a graphical access to Git or Mercurial repositories and can access Subversion repositories.

SmartGit a nice alternative to Atlassian SourceTree that is available for Linux.

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Many of the API design opinions found on the web are academic discussions revolving around subjective interpretations of fuzzy standards as opposed to what makes sense in the real world.

[courtney-miles]

Build APIs You Won't Hate

Everyone and their dog wants an API, so you should probably learn how to build them.

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Many people hack together shell scripts quickly to do simple tasks, but these soon take on a life of their Read More...

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Identify which Version of Ubuntu your Linux Mint Relates to

I run Linux Mint on my laptop. Mint is based on Ubuntu, so when downloading software can use packages intended for Ubuntu.

But often packages are offered for different versions of Ubuntu, so knowing which to get for your version of Mint requires a little digging.

I have found that the easiest way is to run the following command.

cat /etc/os-release

The following is what I see in the /etc/os-release file, which identifies that my Mint relates to Ubuntu 14.04.

NAME="Ubuntu" VERSION="14.04, Trusty Tahr" ID=ubuntu ID_LIKE=debian PRETTY_NAME="Ubuntu 14.04 LTS" VERSION_ID="14.04" HOME_URL="http://www.ubuntu.com/" SUPPORT_URL="http://help.ubuntu.com/" BUG_REPORT_URL="http://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/"

Also, if you want to know what version of Mint you are running, check the /etc/lsb-release file.

cat /etc/lsb-release

DISTRIB_ID=LinuxMint DISTRIB_RELEASE=17 DISTRIB_CODENAME=qiana DISTRIB_DESCRIPTION="Linux Mint 17 Qiana"

[courtney-miles]

Building a Gentoo Vagrant Box with Veewee

I maintain a Gentoo Vagrant box that you can pull from cmiles/gentoo-amd64-minimal. It is produced using Veewee and the gentoo-latest template.

This article describes how you can produce your own Gentoo box using Veewee. It assumes you have Veewee installed. If you don't have Veewee installed, refer to Veewee installation for how.

Set the name of your box in a variable.

You will need to refer to the name of your in a few commands so it's easiest to put this in a variable. I like to include the date of latest Stage 3 in the box name.

export VBOX=gentoo-20150402-amd64

Create the Veewee definition from gentoo-latest.

This step copies files from templates/gentoo-latest to definitions/gentoo-20150402-amd64.

veewee vbox define $VBOX gentoo-latest

Customise the definition for your box.

You are now free edit the configurations and scripts in the definitions/gentoo-20150402-amd64 folder.

The first thing you may want to do is change the definition variation YML file loaded in the definition.rb file for your architecture and for if you want a minimal box or a box with the works.

Open definitions/gentoo-20150402-amd64/definition.rb and change the definitionVariable value to one of the following:

gentoo_amd64.yml – Choose this if you need AMD64 architecture and you want Chef, Puppet and Ruby pre-installed and USB support.

gentoo_x86.yml – Choose this if you need x86 architecture and you want Chef, Puppet, and Ruby pre-installed and USB support.

gentoo_amd64_minimal.yml – The same as gentoo_amd64.yml but without Chef, Puppet, Ruby and USB support.

gentoo_x86_minimal.yml – The same as gentoo_x86.yml but without Chef, Puppet, Ruby and USB support.

Note that the resulting box size between a minimal and regular configuration is not significant. It's only about 30MB.

You may also wish to edit the values in settings_amd64.sh or settings_x86.sh, which contain settings for the kernel version, locale, timezone, etc. And the kernel configuration can be found in kernel.sh.

Build the virtual machine.

With all your customisations to the definition in place, we can now execute the command to build the virtual machine.

veewee vbox build $VBOX

This will take as long as you would expect to install Gentoo into a virtual machines.

Validate your new virtual machine.

When the build is complete you may like to validate that everything you need is installed.

veewee vbox validate $VBOX

If you used a minimal configuration, you can expect the checks for Ruby, Chef and Puppet to fail. Note also, the check for password-less sudo access check may fail even though it is good.

Export your virtual machine to a box file.

When you are happy with the resulting virtual machine, you can then export it to box file for use with Vagrant.

veewee vbox export $VBOX

You now have a Gentoo box you can distribute for use with Vagrant.

Final Thoughts

It can be beneficial to reproduce a new Gentoo box regularly.

With the Portage tree constantly changing, having a base box that is old can cause it to take a long time to provision if your Vagrant provisioning method updates world.

Scripts for provisioning a Vagrant environment can also start to misbehave when dependencies change.

I find it best to build a new box, and then proceed to update my provisioning scripts.

My method for provisioning a Vagrant box pulls an archived snapshot of the portage tree, rather than the latest snapshot, so I don't have to worry about dependencies changing the day after I get everything working.