Saurabh Anand

@sawrubh

[sawrubh]

Using MongoDB with PHP and installing on an Ubuntu AWS EC2 instance

I recently wanted to use MongoDB with PHP which would be running on an Amazon (AWS) EC2 instance with Ubuntu on it. This post basically describes the process of installing the MongoDB PHP driver in Ubuntu since I faced a few errors while doing it and had to search around for a solution.

The easiest way to install the MongoDB PHP driver is using PECL. So you can basically run the following command on your Ubuntu instance:

sudo pecl install mongodb

However you need to do a few things before doing this. You need to install PEAR which you can do like this:

sudo apt-get install php-pear

Then install php5-dev, which provides the necessary PHP5 source files to compile additional modules, like this:

sudo apt-get install php5-dev

You’ll also need to install pkg-config if you have just spun up a brand new instance and not installed a lot of packages on it, otherwise you’ll most likely get the error “configure: error: Cannot find OpenSSL's libraries“. You can do this by:

sudo apt-get install pkg-config

Finally you’ll have to install the libpcre3-dev package otherwise you’ll get the error “fatal error: pcre.h: No such file or directory“. You can do this by:

sudo apt-get install libpcre3-dev

That’s it. Now you should be good to go ahead and install mongodb using pecl.

Let me know if you face any issues and I’ll be sure to help.

[sawrubh]

Spotify Y U No Play (Routing Your Traffic Through A Remote VM)

So while checking out Du Tonc I landed on this article and saw the Spotify playlist at the end. So obviously I wanted to listen to it. Being in India, I decided to use a Koding VM to route my traffic. I used the same steps as mentioned in this blog post of mine to be able to ssh into the Koding VM behind the IIT Delhi proxy connection (it basically involves my remote VM to be able to accept ssh connections on another port besides 22). The only difference was that I removed the ‘IdentityFile‘ line from the configuration I put in my .ssh/config. So this is what I put in:

Host Koding-Proxy         Hostname <domain>         Port 443         User <username>         ProxyCommand /usr/bin/corkscrew 10.10.78.61 3128 %h %p

The <domain> is basically something which Koding provides you, it normally looks like username.koding.io and <username> is simply your username which you might have set.

Once you’re able to successfully ssh into your Koding VM (you will have to follow the instructions here to add your local machine public keys to the Koding VM), simply run this on your local machine:

ssh -D 8080 Koding-Proxy

This is very well explained at this blog post by Daniel Stenberg. Then simply go to your browser (or system internet settings) and set the SOCKS proxy IP as 127.0.0.1 and port as 8080. Now simply use the applications you want.

I got Spotify to work  after changing the country in my Spotify profile to Singapore (which was earlier set to US) because Spotify was giving an error that the country in my profile and from where I was accessing didn’t match (turns out Koding hosts their VMs for Indians at Singapore). It’s working a bit now but still has issues (that blue box on top right) :/

[sawrubh]

Mozilla Code Sprint, August 2014

We organized the Mozilla Code Sprint on 23-24 August, 2014 at three location throughout India which were Delhi, Bangalore and Hyderabad. We also had Sankha doing a local code sprint in his college, IIT Jodhpur.

Mixing it up a bit

We decided to change the event format, where earlier we used to have events in colleges which were attended by people from that institution only. Instead we decided to host city wide events by asking people to register for attending the event and then tried to accommodate as many serious contributors at the onsite venues as possible. For the rest of them, we hosted a remote event using IRC, email and other forms of communication so that those participants get our full support as well. Remotely, at home and on our own is how most of conducting this event got started. So we knew it was totally possible. We wanted to get quality people who were passionate about doing things, even though that number might be lesser (than when we host institute specific events). This was partly encouraged by our learning from the past, doing developer events in India and has recently been echoed by David Boswell from the Community Building Team.

On to some numbers

We got a tremendous response from the community! We invited 23 at Delhi, 18 at Bangalore and 28 at Hyderabad to attend onsite at the respective venues. Out of them, 13 in Delhi, 11 in Bangalore and 14 at Hyderabad could attend onsite (others either couldn't come or had to backout at last moment due to various reasons). I'm really excited and proud to say 10 patches in Delhi, 16 patches in Bangalore and 6 patches in Hyderabad were submitted. In Jodhpur, 3 people were able to successfully submit a patch. That means almost everyone submitted a patch (some even submitted multiple patches) and the others were well on their way to get one done really soon! These are contributors who had mostly no familiarity with the Mozilla projects a few days back :) For a 16-hour overnight event, I think this is really good output.

Learnings

We had a lot of learning from this event. What worked was :

Attendees going through What Can I Do For Mozilla and interacting with us about their interests, what they feel passionate about, what they have prior experience with, setting up their systems with the code base of the project they decide to hack on during the event BEFORE coming to the event.

We had shortlisted and found out some of the easier bugs among the ones BugsAhoy shows, so that contributors don't spend time going over bugs in BugsAhoy which are blocked due to various issues.

What also worked is having the event overnight. We had folks from India, who had expertise in different areas, from mozilla-central to gaia to Thunderbird to Kuma. We luckily also had folks online sometimes (which might be probably due to letting them know beforehand about the event) from other countries, mentors some of them, who came in at the right time to review bugs or provide help/quick feedback. The time of the event (from 6pm IST Sat to 10am IST Sun) was also during the daytime of western countries which was helpful sometimes.

I also thought of documenting the work contributors do during the event because a lot of time is spent in setting up system, fixing the issues while doing this, then finding a good bug to work on, understanding it or figuring out the blocker and then moving on or lack of enough information in the bug to fix it. All of this takes time, a lot of time. It's not just the final number of fixed bugs which matters. So we decided to document all of this so that we can draw inferences and do a better job next time.

What didn't work or could've worked better :

The event being on a weekend, because of which not everyone was online on the IRC channels.

Since there was so much enthusiasm, we had a couple of times multiple people submitting the patches for the same bug or having spent time fixing the same bug.

Next steps

As David aptly points out, retention is a very important key and now we also need to focus on it. We've documented the details of all of the participants and intend to follow up with them periodically to make sure they aren't stuck anywhere.

Pictures

Here are the pictures from the Hyderabad event. Pictures from Bangalore and Delhi are here!

Acknowledgments

In Delhi, we had a lot of fun, food and obviously contributions :) Thanks to Akshay, Akshay, Santosh, Rishab, Pankaj, Sudheesh, Girish, Galaxy and so many others, basically the entire team to pull this event off so well. In addition, we are really thankful to ThoughtWorks for providing an awesome venue (with all the infrastructure) and free food and drinks!

[sawrubh]

GSoC Progress Report

It's been quite a long time since I blogged about my GSoC work.

Here's what I've been working on :

I have the patches on the adding file transfer support in js-xmpp bug in a pretty good state now (and hopefully should be ready to land). This took quite some time, with me learning more about Promises and Task, which I didn't have any experience from before. It took me quite some time getting a hang of it.

I also worked on integrating the Firefox Downloads Panel in Instantbird. I'll have a WIP soon.

I rebased my FileLink patch and am now trying to fix some issues with the signing in.

I've not had a lot to show in this time, with various things coming in like the World Cup, issues in patches which tool unexpectedly more time to debug and breaks on a few days. I'm planning to ramp up the work and get back on track with my schedule.

[sawrubh]

BugStrips: Bitstrips but about Bugs and with cute Dinos

The problem

The problem I recently noticed was that my work related to Mozilla was so specific that I couldn't share it with my non-technical friends even though my work might be something they ended up using (like the Per-Window Private Browsing feature in Firefox). So I needed a way to share what I'm working on or what I've worked on, easily and in a fun manner, which appeals to both my technical and specially my non-technical friends.

The possible solution

BugStrips, bitstrips but about bugs and with cute dinos. Bitstrips as some of you might know and/or have used, is this quite popular means of sharing a comic about your friends and you, using these hilarious illustrations showing various scenes you might have yourself into, like eating a pizza, or watching World Cup.

The idea of bugstrips is instead to share what bugs or features you're working on, on the social networks of your choice and having little cheeky, funny dialogues between characters. Right now, I think the dialogue between the kid and the dino (like in Sean Martell's art) would be awesome. The costume of the dino and/or the kid, the background and other things could be customized based on the bug we're talking about. For example when we're talking about privacy, the dino might be wearing a Domino mask or when we're talking about freedom, the dino and the kid could be flying, something like that.

Advantages of such a project

Brand Awareness: We will be able to increase awareness about the new features we implement or bugs which new contributors help fix.

On boarding of new contributors: There might be people who find out about Mozilla, Open Source and it's projects, in the social networks that these strips are shared in and eventually end up as contributors.

Contributor recognition: Appreciation is an important factor, I believe in sustained contribution. We try and appreciate, recognize the efforts of volunteers. If this appreciation comes from the contributors own circles, that would be even more great. I personally feel delighted every time someone likes something I post (I know what you think about me now ;) ) and I think others do too so this might appeal to them.

Things to keep in mind

The art should be good.

The text should be cheeky, hilarious, fun, anything which has appeal, like for example we have on What Can I Do For Mozilla.

In the User Centered Design session at MozCamp, Holly told us to define the audience and success metrics for such a project.

Audience

Developers who would use this to share BugStrips to their social networks.

People who would view the BugStrips on the social networks.

Success Metrics

Developers keeps fixing bugs or fixed more bugs because of this.

Number of views or clicks or comments on these strips.

Number of people who end up on our getting started resources or BugZilla because of these strips.

Implementation Details

It makes sense to implement this as a separate site where you could see the list of bugs you've fixed and the bugs you're currently working on, instead of trying to integrate it into BugZilla in the first go.

UX Prototype

Here's a really raw UX prototype of how the entire thing would flow: Click Me!

Appendix

Cute Dinos: I really love Sean Martell's art, specially his dinos. (You can download a wallpaper of these here).

Awesome Art: You can make something so interesting as BugZilla, moar interesting by such beautiful art. Other such beautiful art are always an inspiration.

Acknowledgement

My brother for pointing out that he didn't understand what I was working on all this time. Larissa for brainstorming on this idea with me during MozCamp's UCD session. Holly for teaching us the framework on which to evaluate and think about ideas/apps/products.

Got any feedback, suggestions, snide remarks? Feel free to comment here, email me or let me know on twitter. Now let's build this thing, shall we?

[sawrubh]

On MozCamp Beta 2014 - Bangalore, India

So I attended the MozCamp Beta that took place from 20th-22nd June, 2014 in Bangalore, India. This was a different experience compared to the Mozilla Summit 2013 in Santa Clara(there was no bacon being served or giant roller coasters) and the MozCamp Europe 2012 (people here spoke Kannada instead of Polish).

On a serious note, the agenda was altogether different. We were focused much more on Evangelism, Design and Engagement, since the launch of FirefoxOS phones in India is right around the corner (yay!).

Day 1

We started with some icebreaker exercises by Amira and which were really helpful to get everyone to come out of their shells and get the juices flowing. Then we talked about AppMaker and I found out quite a few good things about it. I really like the colored pipes being used for events listeners, which just makes it so intuitive. We gave feedback on AppMaker, then had a brainstorming session about what we wanted to build with it. Me and Rishab came up with the idea to create a brick for plugging in geolocation in your apps built using AppMaker. We started with implementing geobrick but couldn't get much further due to all the sessions and interactions, but we plan to work on this. The teaching kit for the AppMaker session is available, feel free to remix it and use it for your local events. During dinner I interacted and discussed quite a few interesting things ranging from the new proposed Volunteer Agreement to Texas cowboys to Music and so on.

Day 2

We started early on Day 2 with a discussion on story telling and how we need to be more clear about explaining what Mozilla is, going forward. We had some exercises which led to quite a few interesting discussions. We then headed on with our showcase of local experiments/formats/ideas which had worked and feedback on that. Then came the obligatory awesome group photo (and other "extended" selfies which shall not be shown here). Throughout these sessions we had these little exercises which made it interactive and acted as nice icebreakers. 

We then headed to the various sessions. I decided to attend the User Centered Design session by Holly since that's something I've been interested in. We learned about the importance of user study, the kind of insights it can give us, how to go about interviewing them, prototyping ideas and defining success metrics for them. Due to the shortage of time we had to wrap this up pretty quickly but it was a lot of fun and learning. A blog post about the ideas we came up will be up soon :)

The day ended on a sober merry note. Onto day 3.

Day 3

We started with the lightning talks. I gave one about #introduction, the importance and effectiveness of helping someone remotely over IRC and best practices for getting started. I had never given a lightning talk before so it was a new experience and me getting to play Hotel California in the end just sweetened it. (Note: if you want to watch an epic lightning talk, watch this).

We then swapped sessions. I had the option to choose between Developer Relations and Engagement. I wanted to attend both but ended up choosing Engagement since with the upcoming launch, it made quite a lot of sense. We started with discussing ideas that other launch countries had used for promoting and brand awareness during and after the launch. We then divided ourselves into 4 groups and brainstormed about possible local solutions and ideas to do this in terms of Social Media, Community Events, Students and FSA's and Developer Events. There were quite a few interesting ideas that came up like banners behind auto-rickshaws for promotion, street plays etc.

What I <3'ed about this MozCamp

I loved the amount of brainstorming that we did, the kind of hands on session design that we had which gave us space to think, ideate and collaborate. I also really appreciated the icebreaker exercises which were really important for the brainstorming sessions to be productive.

What I didn't like about MozCamp

The lack of time, because of which we had to wrap up some really cool sessions.

[sawrubh]

Report: 23 June - 27 June

So I had gone to attend the MozCamp Beta India 2014 from 20th - 22nd June because of which I didn't work much on my GSoC. Coming back on 23rd, I was still a bit occupied with post event followup so not much work has been done this week.

I addressed Patrick's comments on my first patch.

I found out a DOS issue with my patch and fixed that.

I'm working on getting the error messages to the UI as notificationbar items instead of throwing them to the console.

I have also clarified with Patrick on how to write the xpcshell tests required for my XMPP implementation. I'm working on that too.

[sawrubh]

Tips and Tricks For Fixing Your First Bug

So this weekend, while at the MozCamp Beta in Bangalore, I came across a lot of contributors who had tried to fix their first bug but had gotten stuck at various stages of the process. So here are some of the tips and tricks I used to be able to fix bugs when I started.

Your first point of contact: IRC

First of all, don't be afraid or embarrassed to ask your questions. When I started I had the feeling what I used to ask was really stupid, but if you've tried finding the answer for some time and haven't yet found it, it's certainly NOT trivial so please ask your questions. I have wasted quite some time and been stuck for days just because of not asking for help. Trust me, we're really sweet folks and love to answer questions :)

Once you decide to ask the question, go ahead and ask it. Don't just say hi and wait for someone to reply to you and only then will you ask your question. Also ask the question directly instead of asking whether people would be able to answer, we won't know if we'll be able to unless you ask it right? Basically don't ask to ask your questions.

Be patient. People on the IRC channels are mostly from different timezones so everyone might not be awake when you post your questions.

Extending the first point, use persistent IRC clients, like IRCCloud or Waartaa so you don't miss the answers which people give when you sleep. Or you could just check the IRC logs later.

Try and read the instructions in the topic that we have, like on #introduction we have links to What Can I Do For Mozilla and BugsAhoy which are great resources to find bugs and projects to work on.

Comment on the bug stating your interest to work on it, try and find the person listed as the mentor there on IRC and ping him or just tell us on #introduction so that we can find him/her for you.

Let's get building

When you're having issues with building the project, pastebin the exact output you get so that we can more information to find out the reason and help you. Similarly when you're writing a patch and it's not working, pastebin the code instead of simply stating that you're working on something and it's not working, so that we might be able to spot a silly mistake you might be overlooking, if that might be the case. This last part has been stressed a lot by the people I'm working with in #instantbird and I think it's a great tip. You could also use |./mach pastebin| after you get a build error.

Where is da code

We try to mention the relevant code for fixing the bug in the comments or it might be inferred from the component the bug is filed in. If it isn't clear, I follow the steps Josh mentioned so beautifully in his blog post.

Gimme moar

If you're looking to do long term contribution, what worked for me was finding a project or a feature being worked upon and having some bite-sized dependency bugs which I could fix. That way, I felt responsible for the implementation of the project, I had a sense of accomplishment and progress when I fixed each dependency and also I didn't have the overhead of jumping between very different parts of the code which improved my efficiency.

If you want more detailed tips, feel free to checkout an excellent post by Manish.

These are my tips, do you have some more in mind? Feel free to comment here, email me or share them with me on twitter.

[sawrubh]

Report: 16 June - 18 June

I chilled out during the weekend and didn't work on much. So here's the report, from this Monday, about what I've worked on :

Native file transfer using XEP-0096 works now! It uses OS.File and In Band Bytestreams, so all the goodness of asynchronous file I/O and reliability and robustness are right there with ya :)

What's next :

I'm now working on adding the UI (a notification bar) to accept or deny the file transfer offer from the sender. I plan to write tests for this feature too.

Then we plan to implement file transfer for other protocols too by writing a purplexpcom wrapper which will leverage libpurple to do all the heavy lifting for us.

After that, integrating the Firefox Downloads Panel to provide you feedback about the progress of download/upload as well as pause and resume features will be looked at.

Sounds fun? Feel free to read my more detailed post about how file transfers in xmpp is done or come talk to us on #instantbird about how you could contribute and make Instantbird even moar awesome, or just take my patch for a spin.

[sawrubh]

File Transfers in XMPP

The traditional mechanism for transferring files was Out of Band protocol but it had various drawbacks like lack of reliability, not working when one of the parties was behind a firewall and providing limited metadata about the files to be exchanged. So Stream Initiation was proposed to fix all this and that is what we're implementing in my project. We make use of In Band Bytestream(IBB) since it has various features like bi-directionality. IBB is useful for any kind of relatively low-bandwidth activity, such as games, shell sessions, or encrypted text.

Just a note, in XMPP the rate limiting is done by the server so we don't need to take care of that :)

These are the steps followed to ensure a successful file transfer:

The Sender starts by discovering if the Receiver supports file transfers using one of the available extensions, namely Service Discovery and Entity Capabilities. Entity Capabilities is a much more scalable, robust and efficient mechanism and hence we decided to use that. Since we don't have that implemented already, I need to work on implementing it, which I plan to do after we get the initial version landed.

Once support is determined, the Sender sends an offer for Stream Initiation, which the Receiver could either accept or reject with details for rejection.

Once the Receiver accepts the offer, we establish an IBB with the Receiver's client. This includes sending an IBB initiation request. The Receiver replies to that request with options like whether it would like smaller size chunks to be transferred, doesn't want to proceed with the transfer etc.

Once we have the acceptance, we start reading chunks (of block size) of the file on the sender, base64 encoding it and send it in a <data/> element. We wait for the acknowledgement of the data element to ensure reliable delivery.

When we want to close the connection, we simply send an IQ-set with a <close/> element.

Implementation Details

I made use sendStanza which has a really cool way of adding a callback to listen to a similar stanza with the same id as the one the sender sent. I also reused the same object for both the Sender and Receiver since most of the functionality is common between them.

[sawrubh]

Report: 12th and 13th June

I worked on getting the notification bar working today. The UX we temporarily decided upon is that once you drop a file, a notification bar will popup, giving you the option to choose the FileLink provider you want to upload the file to, by clicking on it’s button or cancelling the upload. I faced a weird issue with this code, which took some to debug.

With the changes I had made to integrate FileLink in Instantbird, I had to move the FileLink management pane CSS to a new file. I’ve ensured functionality wise the existing providers as well as additional ones (like the Dropbox one) work, but the Dropbox (and most probably the other) addon will break after this change. We’ll need to fix them, which shouldn’t be a big issue.

I then moved back to working on implementing file transfer in XMPP. I started by having a detailed discussion with Patrick about the overall flow. I understood it the next day after some brooding and some spec reading. Implementing file transfer is a mashup of a couple of different specs.

When I finally understood the flow, I found out the need for Service Discovery in XMPP, which Mayank also needs and which isn't implemented yet, so I've started working on that, err we decided to implement XEP-0115 instead, so that's what I'm working on right now.

[sawrubh]

Report: 11th June

I started by writing the pending blog post for the previous week.

I then started trying to fix the CSS I had broken in ThunderBird which was causing styling issues. I started by spending around an hour building ThunderBird (had to build 2 times because of clobbering). With the help of Mic, I found out that there was an issue with the skin-chrome registration of the CSS and images. I spent quite a lot of time trying to debug it, Mic was finally able to figure it out and it works now. Now only the styling for the Dropbox addon is broken, which I’m trying to fix.

In between compiling ThunderBird and trying to debug the styling issue, whenever I was able to context switch I tried to read the file transfer spec for XMPP. I discussed with Patrick what needs to be done and started reading the existing IDL’s. I’ll start working on writing the interface and implementing it in xmpp.

[sawrubh]

Report: 31st May - 10th June

It's been more than a week since I last blogged. These are the things I've been working on :

Last time I blogged I was trying to get the preference pane for FileLink to work in Instantbird which presented quite a few issues since there were quite a lot of moving parts. The exact details are very patch specific, but it ranged from the CSS not working to some bindings getting applied which shouldn't be to preffing it off to adding the notificationbox. The bindings getting applied took quite some time to debug and I was able to fix it with the help of aleth. I realized in the process what a helpful tool the DOM Inspector can be. Some time has been also been spent in the review cycles.

We also figured the setting the topic bug would be easier to fix once bug 1018771 lands since the right now the code initializes the MUC, once I've tried to join it. Hence the first time I'm getting that error. We also found out that certain servers like pidgin aren't complying with the spec so we won't be showing the topic change message as good as we could.

Next up :

We are very close to landing the FileLink bug, I just need to fix a CSS issue that seems to be there in ThunderBird because of my patch. The mozmill tests pass which give a little assurance about the things not being *functionality* wise in Thunderbird.

I'm moving to now implementing the XMPP support plus the interface required for that.

In other things besides GSoC, I helped the Mozilla User Research Team which was in Delhi which was a lot of fun and learning.

[sawrubh]

Report: 15th May - 30th May

I've been working pretty regularly for the past week and a half. This is what I've done during that time :

After support for seeing the topic set by others in js-xmpp landed, I started working on support for setting the topic in js-xmpp. In the process I learned quite a few important things like how to generate the message packets required in XMPP according to the spec, how to debug messages being sent and received using the debug console and other things which made me much comfortable with how things happen in the Instantbird codebase. It's nearly working except that it was failing in a case, where Patrick has helped me. I stopped working on it around 24th. I need to address Patrick's feedback and write tests and this should be good to land.

I then started working on integrating FileLink with Instantbird. In order to start a file transfer, you simply need to drag and drop the file onto the text area of the conversation window. Once you do that, you'll be prompted to login to a FileLink provider like Box or Hightail, if you're not signed in already. Once you have signed in, the file will automatically be uploaded in the background and a message with the link will be sent. Getting this to work involved copying the cloudfile code to Instantbird and resolving all the dependencies. Through this process I've learnt quite a few things like how to work with resources, 'chrome://' urls and jar.mn's.

Next up :

I've been trying to get the Preference Pane to work too, but it's been giving me some issues. I've been fixing those issues one by one since yesterday and a half.

Adding a notification box, so that it ask for your permission before starting the upload and giving you an option to choose the FileLink provider. We can also add a preference to always allow upload and set a default provider, but that can probably be done in the next version of the patch, once this lands.

Adding a preference in about:config so that we can turn this off by default and land. This will also ensure Thunderbird works after the code movement.

The much larger picture :

Once we get FileLink landed (behind a preference), we'll start thinking about how to provide feedback to the user about the upload progress of the file. We are primarily looking at the Firefox Downloads Panel for this.

Work out how it will be chosen to use FileLink vs. a protocol's file transfer, and work out the interfaces required for file transfer.

Implement basic file transfer support in JS-XMPP (XEP-096).

Implement a purplexpcom interface for IM file transfers using the libpurple API.

Add UI to accept file transfers from others.

Work on handling FileLink downloads internally to Instantbird.

[sawrubh]

Report: 12th May - 14th May

I finally started working on my GSoC'14 project. My mentor, Patrick and I had decided on the breakdown of my project and I started by taking a look at what I was supposed to do for the Community Bonding period.

I started by taking a look at previous year's attempt at the same project but couldn't find it much helpful due to the confusion between BugZilla and Bitbucket.

I got stuck with a bustage in purplexpcom which was preventing me from building Instantbird. It was fixed, thanks to Florian.

I tried to take a look at how to fix bug 998609. I'm going to send a patch today.

I had a meaningful conversation about how to add FileLink support.

[sawrubh]

GS(h)oC(k) 2014 with Mozilla

Standard Stuff

This came as a shock to me but I've been selected for Google Summer of Code 2014! :D

I'll be working on implementing reliable file transfers in Instantbird (proposal)under Mozilla and will be mentored by Patrick Cloke. If you want to track my progress on this project, feel free to join #instantbird on irc.mozilla.org or follow this blog where I'll be posting weekly updates.

Interesting Stuff 

So I couldn't get through GSoC in 2012 and I would like to thank the organization I applied to for turning me down. It was after the rejection that I decided to see if I could actually contribute to Open Source and sustain without any incentives. It was later I got addicted to this entire code-and-impact-so-many-users philosophy and then there was no turning back.

The point being, for the people who applied this year and didn't get through, don't lose hope. Keep on contributing nevertheless. I've seen so many people who get selected in GSoC but don't sustain. Your contribution without any incentives just earns respect. And trust me this is coming from someone who didn't get selected when they applied.

[sawrubh]

Sending emails using Amazon SES, the SMTP way

I tried to send emails from php using Amazon SES from my Amazon EC2 instance, but took me some time to get it right. This blog is intended to save that time for some other poor fellow. So here it goes.

First of all go ahead and verify an email address from which you'll be sending emails from. You can follow the steps here : http://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/DeveloperGuide/verify-email-addresses.html

Then obtain your SMTP credentials from AWS, mind you the SMTP credentials are different from your AWS login credentials. You can follow the steps here : http://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/DeveloperGuide/smtp-credentials.html

Let's install Postfix now. Postfix is a MTA (Mail Tranfer Agent) which sends your mails for you to the address you specify in say the $to parameter in say the mail() function in php or, if you configure it properly , to Amazon SES so that it can send it on your behalf. Install postfix simply doing

sudo apt-get install postfix

Install stunnel

sudo apt-get install stunnel4

Configure secure tunnel using stunnel following the instructions here : http://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/DeveloperGuide/send-email-smtp-secure-tunnel.html The command mentioned on this page to start stunnel will give you an error so use this instead

sudo stunnel4 /etc/stunnel/stunnel.conf

Then follow the steps in the 'Configure the server' section on this page : http://www.millcreeksys.com/how-to-configure-your-postfix-server-to-relay-email-through-amazon-simple-email-service-ses/

Now you can use the following code to send emails :

<?php $to = '[email protected]'; $subject = "Hello"; $header = "from: [email protected]"; $message = "Hello World"; $sentmail = mail($to,$subject,$message,$header); ?>

But this would still send your emails without using Amazon SES. If you read /var/log/mail.log you'll see that you might be getting 

554 Message rejected: Email address is not verified (in reply to end of DATA command)

in your log file. You need to change your php code to the following to send emails properly from Amazon SES :

<?php function sendEmail($fromName, $fromEmail, $to, $subject, $body) { $header = 'From: '.$fromName.'<'.$fromEmail.'>'.'\r\n'. 'Return-Path: '.$fromEmail.'\r\n'; mail($to, $subject, $body, $header, '-f '.$fromEmail); } ?>

This should get everything working. If you face any problems, let me know in the comments.

Next Up :

You should look at authenticating your emails with SPF, instructions are given here : http://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/DeveloperGuide/spf.html and authenticating them using DKIM following instructions here : http://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/DeveloperGuide/dkim.html Setting up DKIM is pretty simple so let me know if you face any problems in that. I haven't set up SPF yet.

References :

http://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/DeveloperGuide/verify-email-addresses.html

http://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/DeveloperGuide/smtp-credentials.html

http://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/DeveloperGuide/send-email-smtp-secure-tunnel.html

http://www.millcreeksys.com/how-to-configure-your-postfix-server-to-relay-email-through-amazon-simple-email-service-ses/

http://www.oneminuteinfo.com/2013/07/fix-amazon-ses-postfix-send-email-error.html

http://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/DeveloperGuide/spf.html

http://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/DeveloperGuide/dkim.html