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Cron bug in Magento2 causing server to crash periodically

Magento 2 uses the database to monitor cron jobs running or completed. When job fails, it will try to run them again.... and something is wrong here... causing a lot of jobs to be started again and again... and new jobs start before the previous jobs are finished...

Quite interesting bug and it was difficult for me to find it.

Temporary workaround is available at GITHUB.

Magento 2 bugs are all over the place

Yesterday I encountered 3-4 Magento 2 core bugs.

Minify / css bundling doesn’t work: Once I turned it on, css / js didn’t load anymore. Neither could I go in the admin to change it back. There are a couple of thread on github related to this. The workaround is to turn it back off again, by enabling developer mode.

minicart doesn’t work (can’t click on it, products added doesn’t show up in it). A bit tricky this one. It turned out that javascript breaks due to special character in welcome message. Solution was to remove any such chars.

Static content deploy. I removed all static content due to some other error. After that, css or js, didn’t load. It turned out, I got a 404 on certain resources. Looking deeper into it, my custom theme didn’t have any static content in the pub folder. This is a widely known bug, if a theme only has layout update. The solution was to put some dummy content in some theme folders (such as an image). Still magento didn’t deploy my language, and I had to instruct it specifically, with the different options on the deploy command.

This is the day of a Magento 2 part time-worker. 3-4 bugs. A day.

Removing product_list_toolbar in Magento with Layout Update XML - why it isn’t possible

I’ve spent hours trying to figure out why the below code doesn’t remove the product_list_toolbar. Thinking there is something I don’t understand. Reading different stackexchange Q&A (and similar stuff), there is nearly always a solution, but there has been few explanations to why it isn’t working.

It turns out Magento2 (and 1) doesn’t care about above. If you disable above, Magento will initiate a new one. Gaah. Thanks to Alan Storm, I figured it out.

Below is an extract from Alan Storm’s excellent explanation of why this isn’t working.

#File: vendor/magento/module-catalog/Block/Product/ListProduct.php public function getToolbarBlock() { $blockName = $this->getToolbarBlockName(); if ($blockName) { $block = $this->getLayout()->getBlock($blockName); if ($block) { return $block; } } $block = $this->getLayout()->createBlock($this->_defaultToolbarBlock, uniqid(microtime())); return $block; }

We see that, if Magento can’t fetch toolbar block, it instantiates a new one via code.

#File: vendor/magento/module-catalog/Block/Product/ListProduct.php $block = $this->getLayout()->createBlock($this->_defaultToolbarBlock, uniqid(microtime()));

Should it really be like this? Unclear. But there is an issue raised.

Now, the question is instead, how should you get it removed? I may come back on that.

#Magento2 #layout update #layout update xml #product_list_toolbar

Is this Magento love?

GAAAGH. MAGENTO. Why do you need to be so difficult?

Time, time, time. And more time spent.

I try to understand you, Magento. I read the documentation. I read different tutorials. I Google. And Google. And Google again. But I’m left more confused than before.

There is something with you that I don’t understand. You say it is me. Yes, it is me. I can’t let you be. Our love is deep. Its been seven years. But you hardly give me a beep.

I should know how to move your gears, but I’m left in tears.

Letsencrypt/Certbot with Bitnami Magento image on Google Cloud - linking the certificates to a specific site - with multiple domains

I managed to install Certbot/letsencrypt on my instance. Furthermore, I manged to get certificates served. Pretty good.

For me, the two tricky points were:

Enable listening to the SSH-port: Edit /opt/bitnami/apps/magento/conf/httpd-vhosts.conf. There is an example for a 443. Copy it, but replace it with your servername and serveralias.

Linking the certificates to the server: Again, go into the same file, there are two / three lines (see below). Edit them according to your domain. The tutorial / FAQ (from BITNAMI, on their Apache) recommends to link the generated certificates with the location that is expected by the virtual host configuration. This will maybe work if you only have 1 domain. SSLCertificateFile "/etc/letsencrypt/live/example.com/cert.pem" SSLCertificateKeyFile "/etc/letsencrypt/live/example.com/privkey.pem" SSLCertificateChainFile "/etc/letsencrypt/live/example.com/fullchain.pem"

Another tricky point was that I created a test-certificate. Then thought I went about and created a live one (yes, I did, but for another domain). Spent some hours thinking of why my padlock was broken / not green / not locked. A good tool to have in mind is the developer tools in Chrome, and the security tab, as it will show all the details about the certificate. (In Chrome, press the menu (three dots, like a hamburger) >> more tools >> developer tools >> security tab)

Now, the question is only, does the auto renewal work? (Which really is the point with this kind of setup). In the get-started instructions at cerbot, it says it should be configured in such a way, so... I hope it does :)

Using the web setup wizard to update Magento2 - impacts index.php

For the last six months or more, I’ve been working on updating Magento. (GOSH! That’s a long time.) This update is about getting some new features from Magento2, improving security and securing smoother upgrades in the future.

Yesterday, I had the opportunity to upgrade my Magento2 for the first time using the web setup wizard. Besides some minor dependency issues in composer and permission issues, it went smooth. OR? When accessing some of the domains, I was redirected to the default store.

It turns out that the update process replace the index.php, in which the MAGE_RUN_CODE was handled to decide which store gets loaded. With this removed, Magento only knows the default store.

I had a consultant involved and questioned this specific setup (using index.php over .htaccess). The consultant argued, being the expert, that he preferred this setup as Magento was contained fully in its folder. At least, I now know that this complicates the update process.

What is your preferred setup to manage multiple domains in Magento - index.php or other solutions? Why?

Permissions in unix... with APACHE

One of the things I’ve found most difficult with unix and apache is file permissions. I feel bad about it because setting wrong permissions will create vulnerabilities.

Three kinds of permissions for owner, groups and other users : Unix allows you to give different permissions to owner, group and other users. When reading shell command chmod, the following letter may sometimes be u,g and / or o, e.g. chmod ugo. This is then followed by the kind of permission to grant or revoke, it then becomes chmod ugo+rwx, which is followed by the file or directory to which change of file mode bits* should be applied. Sometimes, there is an a, this means all and is same as ugo.

Three kinds of permissions: Unix differentiate between read, write and execute permission. Those are represented by r, w and x.

What about 644, 777, ... and other three digits used in connection to chmod: the digits represent a specific permission type and its position represents the class to be granted that permission.

0 – no permission (000 in binary, and --- in permission)

1 – execute (001 in binary, and --x in permission)

2 – write (010 in binary, and -w- in permission)

3 – write and execute (011 in binary, and -wx in permission)

4 – read (100 in binary, and r-- in permission)

5 – read and execute (101 in binary, and r-x in permission)

6 – read and write (110 in binary, and rw- in permission)

7 – read, write, and execute (111 in binary, and rwx in permission)

Heck, it is 4 digits in my chmod, e.g. 0777: this is details... and I’m not yet fully fluent in it. Anyhow and in short, there are three additional settings, SUID, GUID and sticky bits (?). For files, SUID and GUID set, and the file will execute as owner. In folders, this has different meaning. Sticky bits is about who is allowed to delete the files, change names and change permissions.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/File_permissions_and_attributes

on SUID / GUID: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Setuid

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chmod

I guess this is some basic. Next step for me, is to 1) read the great wikipedia article about chmod and 2) better understand who should be the owner/group/other user of different files in the www-directory.

* chmod - change of file mode bits

HTTPS in AWS EC2 with certbot and letsencrypt, for free

Internet safety is moving into everyone’s mind. In some countries, being secured is, or will soon be, required by law. Technology wise I don’t see much of a change (although constantly being refined), but revolution is happening in the usage, application and integration of technology.

Hence, it has been on my mind to implement HTTPS. A stopping parameter has been that it seemed to cost a lot of money! With certbot and letsencrypt, that is not true.

This post contains some hints on how to enable https in AWS EC2 that I would have found very useful in my process:

Read and follow step 1 of the AWS tutorial: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/SSL-on-an-instance.html

Go to Letsencrypt and read the get started guid, https://letsencrypt.org/

You will be redirected to the https://certbot.eff.org/

Select your system and follow the instructions, should be noted that I used the Fedora22, meaning the below commands was applicable:

wget https://dl.eff.org/certbot-auto

Comment: This means there is no available package, so we need to download it.

chmod a+x certbot-auto

I runned these commands from the usr/local/bin-location (don’t know if it matters)

Somewhere in this process, I encountered some error codes, saying not enough memory or similar. I was thinking about upgrading my EC2 image, but in order to do that, I had to stop it, and it seemed like a hassle. Instead, I added a swap-file.

To figure out my memory, the command free -m can be used.

To add the swap file, below command was what I used:

sudo /bin/dd if=/dev/zero of=/var/swap.1 bs=1M count=1024

sudo /sbin/mkswap /var/swap.1

sudo chmod 600 /var/swap.1

sudo /sbin/swapon /var/swap.1

Then I runned certbot-auto --apache --debug, and select the relevant options.

Voila! HTTPS!

You should NOW automate the renewal of the certifications, as those expires after 90 days. Those two resources helped me:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10472173/cannot-get-cron-to-work-on-amazon-ec2

pointing out how to use the vim editor

pointing out that starting crontab is done with crond (don’t know if it was already running before, or if it had any impact)

https://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/how-do-i-add-jobs-to-cron-under-linux-or-unix-oses/ explaining the logic of crontab

Still don’t know if I would have been better off to put the job in cron.d-folder. Now, I just added it with cron -e to the current user. When I added in separate file, it didn’t appear when running cron -l

Re-installing Magento on EC2

I re-installed Magento2 on my AWS EC2. Once again, I stumbled upon some issues.

Some stuff I was struggling with:

modules not installed such as mcrypt.

I tried everything... like sudo yum install php-mcrypt and similar with different php-versions (e.g. php0-mcrypt), got error message of package not available.

The command sudo yum list php70* listed the names of the available packages. I had to add .x86_64 as an suffix.

read / write permission

Grant write permission sudo chmod -R o+w app/etc/

Remove write permission sudo chmod -R o-w app/etc/

create specific database user with privileges only on a new database only for magento

no design on front page and no admin page

this pointed me in the right direction

what I did:

went into my virtual host config file, which I’ve defined for the specific site, and added:

<Directory /var/www/mydomainexample.com> Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews AllowOverride All Order allow,deny allow from all </Directory>

ls -lha

command to check the file permissions in a folder

Virtual host configuration

This provides some insights into how to manage virtual hosts in apache. In simple language, how to put many domains on one web server, served by different folders on the server.

Great link when trying to understand apache configuration.

When figuring out the purpose of a2ensite and a2dissite, this link proved useful. It also provides the logic between the different folders /sites-available and /sites-enabled.

Changing header image in WordPress twentyseventeen theme with a plugin

I’m setting up a blog network using WordPress multi-user / multi-site a.k.a. WordPress network. Each new blog should be looking good from the start and the current header image is a real blotch.

There are a number of approaches to solve this:

Create a child theme

Make changes in the current theme, by editing the code in the relevant files / Replace the bad-looking standard picture in the folder.

Create a plugin

Edit the functions.php file

I had a good time suffering. Mentally. I knew instantly that a plugin would be best for me. But how to make it happen?

The solution that works for plugin, child theme and functions.php is to work with a filter in twenty seventeen.

In inc/custom_header.php the following function is written, to apply custom-header:

add_theme_support( 'custom-header', apply_filters('twentyseventeen_custom_header_args', array(

'default-image' => get_parent_theme_file_uri( '/assets/images/header.jpg' ), 'width' => 2000, 'height' => 1200, 'flex-height' => true, 'video' => true, 'wp-head-callback' => 'twentyseventeen_header_style', ) ) );

The interesting part with this is the apply_filters(’twentyseventeen_custom_header_args’, ...). It means there is a filter added for the header arguments. Let’s use that!

function my_function_that_changes_header_options ($args) { $args ['default-image'] = ''; // Sets the default-image to nothing. return $settings; }

add_filter('twentyseventeen_custom_header_args','my_function_that_changes_header_options');

Before figuring out above, I was struggling with unregister_default_headers and register_default_headers. What these functions do are to add or remove what is seen in the admin interface. You can unregister the header.jpg image, so that it won’t be visible in the customization area, but it won’t change the header.jpg. Likewise, you can add an additional image in the customization area, but it won’t change the header.jpg.

#plugin-development #wordpress #wp-plugin #wp-network #wordpress-mu #twentyseventeen

Wordpress network admin panel for new subsite doesn’t work (and no theme on new site)

I installed the latest Wordpress (late 2016). Activated network, by following this guide. Worked a bit on the main site, and then added a second site to the network /site2.

Problems started. Once I tried to access the new blog, the public front, there was no theme. Once I tried to access the back-end, site2/wp-admin, I got a 500 internal error, a.k.a. too many redirects. I spent an evening and a complete morning trying to fix the error. Almost went on to do a fresh installation. Although, I wanted to avoid that because if it worked, it would just be magic.

Some stuff I did:

Activated specific logs and increased the log level warning in Apache

Re-checked the wp-config.

Re-checked virtualhost configuration, my sites-enabled / default

Checked if the databases were created as they should for the sub-site (Wordpress adds a suffix, table_name_n, where n is the site id (or at least some kind of increment).

Changed the theme and went from static front page to blog front page. (somewhere on the internet, it was stated that the theme could be an issue, but honestly, how could it be?)

Thought I re-checked the .htaccess, to secure it contained the content available in the network configuration page at my wp-install.

Thought is the keyword. I did indeed check it and paste what should be included, but I was editing the wrong file.

How did I solve it, or rather, how did I arrive at the solution?

Besides almost going crazy and doing all of the above stuff hundreds of time to secure it was in order I decided to follow the wp guide again.

Step 1: wp-config.php - everything was in order

Step 2: .htaccess, discoverd the issue... once done, everything worked like a charm.

Learning: secure the basic. follow the process. be strict in checking the steps.

#wordpress #wp-network #wp-mu #hacking #wp-admin #.htaccess

It is time to learn.

My list:

JavaScript

AngularJS

MPV model

RubyOnRails

Two goals:

Authentication / login with Facebook

User handling

Learning JavaScript

I went to Mozilla, and what they call MDN. Google also directed me to W3C schools, which I used some 11-12 years ago when I initially learned web programming. W3C schools said JavaScript was easy, and thus, I didn’t trust them. Mozilla pointed out that one need to secure the basic in HTML and CSS first as JavaScript is more complicated.

This is where I started: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn/Getting_started_with_the_web

This is where I’m right now: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn/Getting_started_with_the_web/JavaScript_basics

#learning #web services

Blog network with Wordpress MU?

WP MU, as in Wordpress multi-user.

I’m about to install a couple of blog networks. This should allow writers to create a blog belonging to the main site.

Some features of WP MU:

Size limitation on a network level (both total size and item size) - with possibility to change for specific accounts in site settings.

Auto sign-up : turn on settings to allow to create a new page.

Platform wide update : one click and everything updates.

Limitation of plugins.

What more I look for:

Page on blog network main page indicating popular or selected posts of the network (+ possibility to add external rss-feeds).

Network wide menu.

Network wide ads / network wide posts.

Safety and back-up: without traction and a solid business model, I will not invest in this.

There seems to be a lot available from wpmudev.org, available with a premium membership (14 days free trial). I will approach this without WPMUDEV, at least to start with.

#wordpress #wp-mu #wordpress mu #wordpress multi user #social #blogging

New products are not visible in Magento2

I made a fresh install and added some products. Visited the store and no products! It turns out the product must be in stock to be visible. For me, this behavior is not natural. The short term workaround is to set the products in stock...

The better solution for me, was to visit Stores > Configuration > Catalog > Inventory and edit “Display Out of Stock Products” from NO to YES.

#magento2 #stock

multistore setup in magento2

How could I make sense of below? Instead of below mumbo jumbo, I added the web sites, the stores and the store fronts, went into the virtual host configuration section of the domain, added the relevant SetEnv-parts and (after a apachectl restart) it just worked. I did change the base url and so of the new site, but nothing much more.

I feel stupid everytime I work in Magento and *nix environment. Obviosuly, I lack some basic knowledge. I acknowledge. But still, I read the different manuals / “how-tos” / stack exchange answers and do everything to understand. Even so, I’ve got trouble understanding. My conclusion is that the Magento-community by intention makes it difficult to understand (because, I’m not stupid?!).

Here is the magento-instructions for setting up multi-store.

I really tried to follow and understand. I didn’t. Surprise. Furthermore, if you google on this, there are many ideas on how to setup different folders (which I presume is what the Magento2 instructions means), but why? I don’t see the point.

What to do?

in vhost.config, add the domains and for these, set some environmental variables using SetEnv. E.g. see here.

SetEnv MAGE_RUN_CODE "store2" SetEnv MAGE_RUN_TYPE "website"

In index.php, there is a need to somehow secure that the variables that were set are taken into account. I could belive it should be taken into account without changing anything at all, actually... but it seems no to be the case?

Some of the original content of index.php:

$bootstrap = \Magento\Framework\App\Bootstrap::create(BP, $_SERVER); /** @var \Magento\Framework\App\Http $app */ $app = $bootstrap->createApplication('Magento\Framework\App\Http'); $bootstrap->run($app);

The suggested way of modifying according to Magento

$params = $_SERVER; $params[\Magento\Store\Model\StoreManager::PARAM_RUN_CODE] = '<code>'; $params[\Magento\Store\Model\StoreManager::PARAM_RUN_TYPE] = '{store|website}'; $bootstrap = \Magento\Framework\App\Bootstrap::create(BP, $params); $app = $bootstrap->createApplication('Magento\Framework\App\Http'); $bootstrap->run($app);

Where ‘<code>’ then should be replaced by ‘store2′ and ‘{store|website}’ with ‘website’. Working like this, you would have to create a new folder and add the store code to each index.php file, and some symlinks (I don’t know the details of this, becuase it felt completely wrong). You also have to point the vhost to the new folder created. Instead, in the index.php, in the magento2 root folder, I did:

$params = $_SERVER; $params[\Magento\Store\Model\StoreManager::PARAM_RUN_CODE] = isset($_SERVER['MAGE_RUN_CODE']) ? $_SERVER['MAGE_RUN_CODE'] : ''; $params[\Magento\Store\Model\StoreManager::PARAM_RUN_TYPE] = $mageRunType = isset($_SERVER['MAGE_RUN_TYPE']) ? $_SERVER['MAGE_RUN_TYPE'] : 'store'; $bootstrap = \Magento\Framework\App\Bootstrap::create(BP, $params); $app = $bootstrap->createApplication('Magento\Framework\App\Http'); $bootstrap->run($app);

It seems to work.

#apache #vhost #magento2 #frustration

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