I am Mike Parker @iammikeparker - Tumblr Blog

PHP Linting and Drupal Errors

I love it when you find an error, stress out over it and Stack Overflow it to pieces, only to find out you failed in cutting and pasting a line of PHP.

Here was my error `Fatal error: Call to undefined function cache_get()` which led me to this Drupal.org page here.

The upshot was that: 1. I wasn’t the only person with this issue. (Not mentioning any names, but it made me feel better seeing there were a fair few...!) 2. It was caused by human error. 3. There was a simple PHP linting line that showed the error more clearly than a UV light in a motel room in movies. That line, which I’ll place here because, well, I’ll be back (I just know it) is: find . -name "*.php" -exec php -l {} \;

See you soon, future Mike...

#Drupal #PHP #linting #errors

SELinux and Drupal can’t write files

As with a lot of these posts, I’m writing this here to save me *literally* hours (well, minutes) of searching the internet. So, in order to help future Mike (and anyone else watching) out..... so, you installed Drupal... and your reports page is showing ‘cannot access the file system’ when you know full well you can because you checked...

Then, you remember SELinux is installed... You try turning it off (setenforce 0) and you see it works fine! (So you turn it back on with setenforce 1 because you don’t want hackers!)

Here is what you need to run as root: chcon -R -t httpd_sys_rw_content_t files/

and then - hey presto - it works... boom.

#selinux #drupal #files

Easily add a MySQL user

I always have to google this... but I basically want to add a user and then add them as a db admin. So, here’s how we do it...

CREATE USER 'user_name_here'@'%'; CREATE DATABASE db_name_here; GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON db_name_here.* To 'user_name_here'@'%' IDENTIFIED BY 'password_here';

My ‘Simple Alert’ Drupal Module

I recently needed to find a way to simply display a drupal message - which could be simply changed by a user, in Drupal. After some searching - I realised there was nothing that did what I needed... so I did what many Drupal devs have done before me and many will do after me - I wrote a module to do it and fed it back into Drupal Contrib.

The module’s here if you want to take a look, https://www.drupal.org/project/simple_alert/

It’s currently only in Drupal 7 (that’s all the client needed at this point... I may port it to Drupal 8 when I get some free time).

Here’s the details of the module:

Provides a simple way to display a drupal alert on a site, can be customised to:

Use a cookie to display either every n minutes, or once per browser session.

Use various Drupal alert types (i.e. warning, info etc).

Can easily be turned on and off, or have options changed on the admin page.

Utilises permissions for displaying and editing the alerts (i.e. only show to anon users.)

I would as you to do 3 things... First, please use the module if it solves a need you have! Second, please let me know how it can be improved and third, please write your own modules and keep feeding back into the community!

Two IT / DevOps New Year’s Resolutions

There’s 2 things I resolve to do this year - which I’ve learnt about over the past 12 months... Here they are... 1. Distrust Jenkins’ SUCCESS message Yeah, it’s usually right... but I will not trust the success means there were no errors... but - still look over the console log - in case there were issues in the build... Just a glance, that’s all that’s needed - you might even pick up a missed ‘}’ in a PHP file... (just an example... I mean...) 2. Never restart Apache Well, yes, of course I’m going to ‘restart apache’ BUT I will always use ‘graceful’ in case there’s any config errors - you wouldn’t want to totally break Apache because of a small config bug that you can fix in 2 mins...! Do you have any geeky new year’s resolutions? (and no, 4k isn’t a new year’s resolution...)

Drush database backup and restore

Often, when working on client sites, you need to quickly restore a database to the same state as production. Here’s a couple of quick commands for that: 1. Backup the database:

drush sql-dump > ~/location-of-backup.sql

2. Restore the database:

drush sql-drop drush sql-cli < ~/location-of-backup.sql

The great thing here, is you don’t need the database username and password - you simply need drush working. It’s really quick and simple... (just don’t go deleting your production database by accident...)

Drush Help and sql-sanitize

So, 2 very overlooked commands in Drush that I’ve needed to use for a project recently.

Drush Help:

First off, drush help which allows you to get a man page about a command in drush.

example: drush help sql-sanitize

this returns a bunch of information about the drush command that you’re asking for. It lists the parameters you can pass in and other useful information. It’s also even quicker than opening Chrome and googling ‘how do I use sql-sanatize’

Drush sql-sanitize:

To start - a HUGE warning. DO NOT run this on a production or live server. The whole purpose of this is to sanitise the the data - i.e. wiping out the passwords, email addresses, and - with some magic - any field that might contain personal data. The purpose of the command is to protect private information and it’s not reversible.

So, now you know the risks... here’s how to use it!

in its simplest form, running drush sql-sanitize in a drupal directory will prompt you to enter ‘y’ to replace all the passwords with the word ‘password’ and change all the email addresses to be [email protected].

This is probably all you need. I mean, if you’re feeling lucky you can add -y to that command so it’ll do it without prompting (probably keep that one for a jenkins job though I reckon)

Drush sql-sanitize on steroids:

So, you could run this command to personalise things a bit:

drush sql-sanitize --sanitize-email="fakeemail+%uid@localhost" --sanitize-password="test123" -y

this changes the email addresses of all the users to be fakeemail+their_user_id_number@localhost and changes their password to be test123 (and due to the -y does it without prompting... hence never get this ANYWHERE NEAR production... like, EVER...)

But... that’s not all!!

You can extend this even further by using hook_drush_sql_sync_sanitize to update other fields such as twitter accounts, linked in etc. There’s a great how to on this here: https://www.codeenigma.com/support/blog/doing-more-drush-sql-sanitize

#drupal #drush #sql

Moving a git repo

So, you want to move or copy a git repo from server 1 to server 2. (Or, server A to B) you get the idea... here’s one of the many ways you can do this - perhaps even one of the simpler ways...

git clone --mirror <URL to OLD repo location> cd <directory where your repo was cloned> git remote set-url origin <URL to NEW repo location> git push -f origin

#git #drupal #repo

A misty, cold, sunny morning in the 'diff #nofilter #iphone7 (at Cardiff city centre)

#iphone7 #nofilter

Best January sale I've seen so far, at Poundland...! (at Cardiff city centre)

Re-syncing new folders with the server, in Vagrant

So, I’ve got Drupal VM up and running, works like a charm - but what happens when you add folders into your config.yml file? Turns out, it’s pretty easy to get things re-synced... simply run the following in your Drupal VM folder:

vagrant rsync-auto vagrant reload

and hey presto!

#drupal #vagrant #drupalvm

Clearing out space on iPhone... Doesn’t work so well on ios10

If you’ve ever got fed up of your iPhone’s space filling up, you’ve probably come across a snazzy little trick in ios9.

This trick was ‘try to rent a big video and it will clear space out before telling you that there’s no room to download it’.

Now, this DOES technically work on ios10... however, iTunes still rents the film and still charges you for it... So, an expensive way of clearing out space.

Not sure if there’s an app that does this yet or not - but there must be a better way, right? In the meantime, best not to use that trick any more...!

#iphone #technology

Loading a node in Drupal, menu_get_object()

If you need to find the node ID of the current node, but - for whatever reason - the node object isn’t available to you, try using menu_get_object() to fetch the node.

i.e.

$node = menu_get_object(); $nid = $node->nid;

#drupal

In this article, we’ll cover Grunt, Gulp, Webpack and npm scripts. We’ll also provide some examples of each one to get you started.

#node.js

Get a node’s URL from its NID in Drupal

This code snippet works nicely in Views if you put it in a PHP field - or, in code elsewhere:

print url('node/'. $data->nid, array('absolute' => TRUE));

#drupal #views

Canonical Landscape - registering clients with a self signed certificate

If you have just set up a new self hosted landscape server to manage your ubuntu boxes, you might not be able to connect your servers to it - because it’s ssl. If you don’t have an ssl certificate on the server, you’ll need to set up a self signed one to get it to work...

The quick start package installs a self-signed certificate that is generated on-the-fly. Get this file from the server: /etc/ssl/certs/landscape_server_ca.crt Copy it somewhere on the client machine: /etc/landscape/landscape_server_ca.crt Update /etc/landscape/client.conf to include this line, pointing at the file you just created: ssl_public_key = /etc/landscape/landscape_server_ca.crt Finally, try to register again.

Trending Blogs

Recently Viewed Blogs

I am Mike Parker