Harecoded

Migrate Posterous without losing the images

alombarte — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 20:54:00 +0100

It might seem very obvious to you that if you migrate from Posterous blogs to another service your images should be transitioned as well.

If you want a free service (as Posterous was) there are only two options where you can migrate your Posterous to without writing all your posts one by one again:

1) Wordpress.com (but losing all the images)
2) Obolog.com (and keeping all the images)

So, if you want your blog back including images the only option you have is Obolog. There are no other free services in the net (or at least I didn't find other) where you can bring back to life your Posterous blog. If you have already migrated to wordpress go and see where your images are pointing to. You'll be disappointed because all the posts reference posterous server, and they will be shut down in a few days.

If you still wonder what Obolog is, you are just reading one right now. Harecoded is powered by Obolog and it has been running smoothly for several years so far.

If you want to try it all you have to do is to upload your ZIP backup file into the Posterous migration script. But remember, on April 30th if you don't have the ZIP everything will be gone for good.

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Best web-based alternatives to Google Reader

alombarte — Thu, 14 Mar 2013 10:09:00 +0100

If you are a Google Reader reader you have certainly seen the message that is going to disappear by July 1st 2013. If you read from mobile then plenty of cool apps like Flipboard you can use, but when it comes to a web-based interface these are the alternatives I found worth using.

The first thing you should do before it is too late is to download a copy of your Google Reader feeds using Takeout

Then take your time to pick another service, there are plenty.

Prismatic

If you log in using your Google account then there is nothing you have to import. All your feeds will be there in a fashion way with big images and a nice presentation. I like it way more than Google Reader, but if you have hundreds of places you are subscribed to maybe you'd prefer something that does not display all the images and shows as a list instead. It looks more like a new sites than a RSS reader, but it is pretty cool.

Find it here: http://getprismatic.com/

The Old Reader

Subscriptions are presented quite similar to Google Reader. You need to download your Google subscriptions if you want to import them here. But it seems that right now, the site is under a lot of load:
This is how it looks like:

http://theoldreader.com/

Feedly

Finally Feedly seems to be the on of the most commented in the Twitter timeline so far, and looks very nice too. They claim that the transition will be transparent for the users if you connect to Google Reader with a project they are working on called Normandy. What I like the most is that you can select how you want to display the information, a list, a mosaic, anything :)

http://www.feedly.com/

Configure Compass,Sass,Less... in PHPStorm

alombarte — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 16:33:00 +0100

PHPStorm 6 bundles a new feature called "File watchers" which enables Sass, LESS, SCSS, CoffeeScript, TypeScript transpilation. This option will compile your compass/scss/whatever files when the source file is saved (this is when you lose the focus or manually save).

So, for the basic stuff you can stop using external programs and watchers likeCodeKit or LESS.app now. But of course unexpensive software like CodeKit is a must have if you are a frontend developer.

Our frontend guy decided to use Compass using SCSS source files so, the following example illustrates how to configure Compass in PHPStorm under Mac OS X, but this is something reusable for the rest of the languages supported by watchers. The procedure is basically the same for the others.

First of all, you have to install Compass. To do so open the Terminal and type:

sudo gem install compass

Then go to PHPStorm and open any of the SCSS files in your project and you'll see after a second or two a message inviting you to use File watchers. This is going to add under Preferences -> File Watchers a new entry that you can edit as follows:

Program: /usr/bin/compass
Arguments (If you compile files one by one): compile $FilePath$
Arguments: (If you have SCSS in groups with ruby configurations):
compile $ProjectFileDir$/relative/path/to/css/

Now save the settings and every time you save one of these files you'll have the compiled SCSS file. Of course you can pass all the parameters you want in the section arguments to fit your needs.

Ah, and this black theme is the Darcula theme that comes now bundled with the version 6.

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Features in PHP 5.4

alombarte — Thu, 07 Mar 2013 12:19:00 +0100

We had to create a file upload form that allows a user to upload big files. In order to keep a good experience for the user we decided to show the progress bars.

There are several ways of doing that but it came to my mind that PHP 5.4 had an improvement on file upload, making it easier now and wondered if I had the last excuse to upgrade the servers from 5.3 to 5.4.

This is a list of some of the features PHP 5.4 comes with. There are more, but I came here with the intention of speaking about the ones that they care to me. This is not a 5.4 review, but examples.

Session upload progress

I already mentioned it, PHP 5.4 will be handy because now you can ask the server in realtime how the upload progress is going. Mixed with HTML5 you can have a kicking-ass upload form.

Speed

It seems that PHP 5.4 is faster than its ancestry, and I say that it seems because even there are plenty of sites claiming that I still have not run any benchmarks with my app.

Traits

Kids deserve a candy sometime. We have regret many times using PHP because unlike other languages there has never been multiple inheritance. Now PHP gives us a sugar-free candy to mitigate this. Traits are not the multiple inheritane but might help you out sharing common functionallity between classes. And traits can use traits. This is an example of how a simple trait would work:

<?php
namespace Mammal\Primate;

trait Feeding
{
        public function getDiet( $age )
        {
                if ( $age < 3 )
                {
                        return [ 'breastfed' ];
                }
                else
                {
                        return [ 'fruit', 'leaves', 'flowers', 'buds', 'nectar', 'seeds', 'insects', 'bird eggs' ];
                }               
        }
}

Then your trait can be attached to any class like this, no matter if your class already extends something else:

class Gorilla extends VertebrateKingdom implements Animalia
{
        use \Mammal\Primate\Feeding;
        // ...
}

Now you can use the trait methods directly:

$gorilla = new Gorilla();
$gorilla->getDiet( 5 );

Python-alike stuff: lists and anonymous functions

Being a former pythonist I'm glad to have these two back in town:

Anonymous functions

Create functions on the fly:

$dump = function( $var ) { var_dump( $var ) ; };
$dump( $gorilla->getDiet( 5 ) ); // Array containing 'fruit', 'leaves'...

Short array syntax

This is the same format than python lists, and the ability to get rid of temporary variables:

// Before: PHP < 5.3:

function getMammals()
{
        return array( 'monkey', 'zebra', 'dolphin', 'cat', 'John' );
}

$mammals = getMammals();
echo $mammals[0];

// Now: PHP 5.4+
function getMammals()
{
        $mammals = [ 'monkey', 'zebra', 'dolphin', 'cat', 'John' ];
}

echo getMammals()[0]; // Look that you don't need the temp variable anymore

Webserver

Finally, now you can run a debugging server without the need apache:

 php -S localhost:8080 -t /var/www/tests

Not very useful in my case scenario where I have a full virtual environment with puppet and so on, but maybe for running temporary scripts might be useful. With earlier versions remind that you can always execute inline PHP from command line like this:

php -r "phpinfo();"

Yeah!!!

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Mails perdidos en Gmail por redireccionamiento [Solucionado]

sergiambel — Mon, 25 Feb 2013 09:52:00 +0100

El problema

Seguro que no soy el único que tiene más de una dirección de correo electrónico. En muchas ocasiones, por orden o por practicidad, configuramos nuestras múltiples direcciones de correo electrónico para que podamos recibirlo en un mismo buzón.

Cuando alguna de esas direcciones está configurada en Gmail, en ocasiones, podemos experimenter pérdida de mensajes.

El motivo

Gmail pasa todo el correo entrante por un motor de detección de correo sospechoso de ser no deseado. Esta carpeta siempre la tenemos accesible para, (recomendable), poderle echar un ojo de vez en cuando y corregir el filtrado de Google. De esta forma vamos haciendo el filtro más efectivo.

El problema viene cuando, por tener el correo redirigido desde una cuenta a otra, el filtro de la primera es el que descrimina el mensaje. En ese caso ni nos enteramos del mensaje y solamente podemos actuar en consecuencia entrando a la primera cuenta. Cosa que... no solemos hacer.

La solución

Debemos entrar al buzón de la cuenta de correo donde se envían los mensajes, es decir, la que está configurada para reenviarlos a nuestro buzón final.

Accedemos al menú de configuración de opciones y filtros.

Una vez ahí creamos un filtro y, en el campo "Tiene las palabras", escribiremos "is:spam" (sin comillas).

Pulsamos en "Crear filtro con esta búsqueda".

Y, en la pantalla dónde nos preguntan cómo actuar marcamos la casillas "Nunca enviar a Correo no deseado".

Con este pequeño truco, todo el correo se nos enviará a la dirección final donde esperamos recibirlo y podremos filtrarlo, de forma automática, según nuestras preferencias.

Fotos de stackexchange.com

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A life explained in HTTP status codes

alombarte — Mon, 04 Feb 2013 15:47:00 +0100

This is a made-up story of a life explained with HTTP status code. It was written up to down at once without much thinking, feel free to improve it!

Status Code	Event	HTTP meaning
100	You are curious about her	Continue
101	First time sex	Switching Protocols
200	Love	OK
201	She's pregnant	Created
202	And you are the father	Accepted
203	Were you looking forward it?	Non-Authoritative Information
204	Think of a name	No Content
205	Baby is born. Your life starts again	Reset Content
206	Changing diapers	Partial Content
300	Kids education	Multiple Choices
301	New place to live	Moved Permanently
302	Your relation is elsewhere	Found
303	She has an adventure	See Other
304	At least is not pregnant	Not Modified
305	They used condom	Use Proxy
306	Your toolbox remains...	( Unused )
307	Back to your parent's	Temporary Redirect
400	Call your old girl friends	Bad Request
401	Shit, all married	Unauthorized
402	Maybe Hookers?	Payment Required
403	You are bankrupt	Forbidden
404	Reconsidering sexuality	Not Found
405	In your ass	Method Not Allowed
406	Confused	Not Acceptable
407	Back to your wife's	Proxy Authentication Required
408	Too late to say I miss you	Request Timeout
409	I want the kids!	Conflict
410	Custody trial	Gone
411	Penis enlargement	Length Required
412	That was not the problem	Precondition Failed
413	That does not fit in	Request Entity Too Large
414	Too long	Request-URI Too Long
415	Try the other gender	Unsupported Media Type
416	Not a good idea	Requested Range Not Satisfiable
417	Not enjoying it	Expectation Failed
500	You feel like crap: Psychiatrist	Internal Server Error
501	No cure found yet	Not Implemented
502	Bingos, hookers and alcohol	Bad Gateway
503	You are getting old	Service Unavailable
504	Viagra	Gateway Timeout
505	Mental institution	HTTP Version Not Supported

HTTP specification can be found here

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Apache RewriteCond -f check file exists solution

alombarte — Sat, 02 Feb 2013 19:44:00 +0100

If your Apache virtualhost or htaccess configuration uses a rewrite condition (RewriteCond) in order to allow nice URLs, you should be aware that since Apache 2.2 the "check if file or exists" works a little bit different. Any of the following examples might have stopped working for you:

   RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
        RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
        RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-s

The solution to correct it is very simple, but I couldn't see it documented. All you have to do is to add the variable DOCUMENT_ROOT before the REQUEST_FILENAME

The following example redirects all non existing files to index.php, here is the difference.

Before Apache 2.2:

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule ^/(.+) /index.php [QSA,L]

Apache 2.2 and later:

RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}%{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule ^/(.+) /index.php [QSA,L]

The Apache 2.2 documentation is here: http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/mod/mod_rewrite.html

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Convertir de ISO a UTF-8 por línea de comandos

sergiambel — Mon, 10 Dec 2012 11:00:00 +0100

Esta mañana he tenido que utilizar un .CSV generado desde Excel.

Al acceder a él desde la línea de comandos me he encontrado que se perdían todos los acentos. Un problema ya clásico este de "los carácteres especiales".

Gracias al comando 'file' he podido descubrir la codificación que Excel le da a nuestro fichero en el momento de hacer la exportación.

>file nombre_fichero.csv
nombre_fichero.csv: ISO-8859 text, with CRLF line terminators

Lo único que he tenido que hacer es convertirlo en la misma terminal a UTF-8. Conviene fijarse en que, iconv utiliza ISO-8859-15 en lugar del ISO-8859 que me ha devuelto file:

> iconv -f ISO-8859-15 -t UTF-8 fichero_origen.csv > fichero_convertido.csv

Con esto ya tengo en fichero_convertido.csv los datos con el formato esperado.
Suerte.

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Textos grandes a partir de caracteres básicos en terminal

sergiambel — Wed, 14 Nov 2012 10:19:00 +0100

Estaba haciendo un script para automatizar el proceso de conexión a una base de datos, en producción.

Uno de esos scripts que conviene usar con cuidad así que pensé en poner un aviso que se mostrara al ejecutarlo:

[user~]$ cat prod_mysql.sh
echo "CUIDAOOOOOOOOO!!!!!" mysql -h localhost -u user_prod -plucksoytuhijo main_data

Pero al ejecutarlo pensé que ese aviso no era tan visible com me gustaría así que recordé una herramienta que usaba hace muchos años. Su nombre es figlet y, casualidades de la vida, todavía está disponible para correr en mi CentOS 6.3 http://www.figlet.org/

La instalación de figlet en CentOS es muy sencilla:

cd /tmp
 wget http://pkgs.repoforge.org/figlet/figlet-2.2.2-1.el6.rf.x86_64.rpm
 sudo  rpm -U figlet-2.2.2-1.el6.rf.x86_64.rpm

Y ahora sólo me queda adaptar mi script:

[user~]$ cat prod_mysql.sh
 figlet "CUIDAOOO!"
 mysql -h localhost -u user_prod -plucksoytuhijo main_data

Mucho mejor:

[user~]$ ./prod_mysql.sh
  ____ _   _ ___ ____    _    ___   ___   ___  _
 / ___| | | |_ _|  _ \  / \  / _ \ / _ \ / _ \| |
| |   | | | || || | | |/ _ \| | | | | | | | | | |
| |___| |_| || || |_| / ___ \ |_| | |_| | |_| |_|
 \____|\___/|___|____/_/   \_\___/ \___/ \___/(_)

Reading table information for completion of table and column names
You can turn off this feature to get a quicker startup with -A

Welcome to the MySQL monitor.  Commands end with ; or \g.
Your MySQL connection id is 18432
Server version: 5.1.61 Source distribution

Copyright (c) 2000, 2011, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.

Oracle is a registered trademark of Oracle Corporation and/or its
affiliates. Other names may be trademarks of their respective
owners.

Type 'help;' or '\h' for help. Type '\c' to clear the current input statement.

mysql>

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Llamadas cURL a través de distintas interfaces

alombarte — Tue, 13 Nov 2012 07:50:00 +0100

Si tu servidor web dispone de varias interfaces de red y quieres que ciertas peticiones que haces con cURL salgan a través de una IP específica puedes modificar el flag CURLOPT_INTERFACE de cURL pásandole la IP.

Un ejemplo tonto podría ser:

...
// Todas mis interfaces de red:
$interfaces = array(
        '91.121.157.41',
        '178.33.161.225',
        '188.165.128.67',
        '178.33.166.125',
        '178.33.163.125',
);
// Salir aleatoriamente por una de ellas:
$rand_interface = $interfaces[rand(0,count($interfaces)-1)];
curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_INTERFACE, $rand_interface );
...

Esto te puede servir tanto para balancear carga, como para forzar que una petición venga de un orígen único. Especialmente útil para hacer cosas feas en servidores con IP failover.

En una máquina con IP Failover la lista de interface de red puede ser:

cat /etc/network/interfaces
# This file describes the network interfaces available on your system
# and how to activate them. For more information, see interfaces(5).

# The loopback network interface
auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

auto eth0
iface eth0 inet static
        address 91.121.157.41
        netmask 255.255.255.0
        network 91.121.157.0
        broadcast 91.121.157.255
        gateway 91.121.157.254


auto eth0:0
iface eth0:0 inet static
        address 178.33.161.225
        netmask 255.255.255.255

auto eth0:1
iface eth0:1 inet static
        address 188.165.128.67
        netmask 255.255.255.255


auto eth0:2
iface eth0:2 inet static
        address 178.33.166.125
        netmask 255.255.255.255

auto eth0:3
iface eth0:3 inet static
        address 178.33.163.125
        netmask 255.255.255.255

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Copy/clone/duplicate a mysql database script

alombarte — Thu, 08 Nov 2012 12:25:00 +0100

This is a simple script that duplicates your entire database. There are many ways in which you can take advantage of having an exact replica of your production database.

In short, the behaviour of the script is the following (in this order, all piped):

Delete the COPY database if possible to start with a fresh one
Create the COPY database
Dump the PRODUCTION database
Inject the output of the dump into the COPY database

Any errors during the process will be logged to the file defined as $ERROR. Be aware that the user you you choose to connect to mysql needs CREATE and DROP database permissions. Note that there are some --force parameters. That will make the script continue even if something fails. The first time you launch the script you'll see that cannot drop the copy database.

Copy & paste the following into a new file ~/duplicate_database.sh, and modify the credentials:

#!/bin/bash
# Albert Lombarte
# Docs: http://www.harecoded.com/copycloneduplicate-mysql-database-script-2184438

PRODUCTION_DB=myapp
# The following database will be DELETED first:
COPY_DB=myapp_copy
USER=root
PASS="yourP4ssw0rd"
ERROR=/tmp/duplicate_mysql_error.log
echo "Droping '$COPY_DB' and generating it from '$PRODUCTION_DB' dump"
mysql -u$USER -p$PASS -e "drop database $COPY_DB;" --force && mysql -u$USER -p$PASS -e "create database $COPY_DB;" && mysqldump --force --log-error=$ERROR -u$USER -p$PASS $PRODUCTION_DB | mysql -u$USER -p$PASS $COPY_DB

And launch it:

bash ~/duplicate_database.sh

If you want to do it on a daily basis, you can add it in your crontab. Type crontab -e and write something like this:

# At 7am clone the production database
7 0 * * * bash /home/myusername/duplicate_database.sh

If you want to make this copy in another host you have to add the SSH connection with ssh -C "command" in the first and last mysqlcommands

Like:

ssh -C user@remotehost "mysql -u root -p -e 'create database ...... | ssh -C user@remotehost "mysql -u"

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Varnish allow/reject connections with IPs list (ACL)

alombarte — Tue, 06 Nov 2012 12:29:00 +0100

In a web server you can use directives to deny the unwanted eye to look at your content. This is an example of how Apache would handle a virtual host that only accepts connections from a series of IPs, but in Varnish that won't work.

        Order Deny,Allow
        Deny from all
        # Barcelona IPs
        Allow from 89.140.xxx.xxx/27
        # Japan IP
        Allow from 222.229.xxx.xxx/32

The reason that this won't work in Varnish is because the IP Apache is receiving is 127.0.0.1. (Varnish is the one connecting to Apache, not the client). The real client IP comes in the header X-HTTP-FORWARDED-FOR. If you want to fix this situation with Varnish in the middle you have basically two options:

Fix Apache (or Nginx) to allow connections by looking into this header (explained here)
Handle the ACL by Varnish

The following recipe handles this second scenario and helps you create a whitelist with IPs that Varnish will serve content to. Any other incoming source will be denied.

Whitelist

So, open your /etc/varnish/default.vcl and add:

acl offices {
    "localhost";
    "11.22.33.44"/32; # You can remove the mask /32 if you need one IP only
    # Add as many IPs as you need here
}

Then put in the beginning of your vcl_recv:

 sub vcl_recv {

     # Ban all requests to domains like xx.myhost.com or xxx.myhost.com
     if ( req.http.host ~ "([a-z]{2,3}\.myhost\.com)$" && !(client.ip ~ offices) ) {
         error 403 "Access denied";
     }

Blacklist

This will discard any request not coming from the list. If you want to create a blacklist (e.g: undesired bots) then you only have to remove the negation of the condition, being:

acl suckers {
    "11.22.33.44"/32; # You can remove the mask /32 if you need one IP only
    # Add as many IPs as you need here
}

And in the vcl_recv:

 sub vcl_recv {

     # Ban all requests to domains like xx.myhost.com or xxx.myhost.com
     if ( req.http.host ~ "([a-z]{2,3}\.myhost\.com)$" && client.ip ~ suckers ) {
         error 403 "Access denied";
     }

I added a regular expression in the virtualhost to make an example a little bit more useful, but you can just write the host as is. Bad news is that the req.http.host does not accept a list like you did with the IPs.

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Evitar que Chrome lance a Google tu url como búsqueda

sergiambel — Fri, 26 Oct 2012 20:09:00 +0100

El problema

Como desarrollador cada vez me siento más cómodo trabajando con Google Chrome pero hay una cosa que muchas veces me hace perder algo de tiempo:

En ocasiones, al intentar buscar una url poco "normal", como puede ser en un dominio típico en un entorno de desarrollo, Chrome detecta que no es una url válida y la lanza contra Google en forma de búsqueda.

Un ejemplo

Queremos acceder a nuestra working copy con una url como ésta: development_area/test_script.php

Cuando pulsamos Enter, Chrome nos lleva a esta pantalla por tratarse de un dominio que, bajo su opinión, es inválido:

La solución

La solución pasa por cambiar el buscador por defecto de Chrome.

Vayamos a chrome://chrome/settings/ y pulsemos en "Administrar motores de búsqueda..."

Ahora, elige cualquiera de los que hay y lo modificamos escribiendo 'null' en el campo del medio y http://%s en el de la derecha. Para poder editarlo sólo hay que pulsar sobre lo que ya hay escrito.

Ahora pulsa en "Establecer como predeterminado".

Lo sé!, es una de esas pequeñas cosas que mejorán tu vida ;).

Fuente: http://superuser.com/questions/354338/force-chrome-to-open-urls-as-urls-instead-of-searching

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Determining the client IP with Varnish in the middle

alombarte — Mon, 15 Oct 2012 11:03:00 +0100

If you implement Varnish in your application one of the early things that you discover is that any IP functionalities you had are now gone. Some examples are:

GEOIP does not resolve the country
Apache logs write 127.0.0.1 as request client IP (or another IP of your LAN)
My own PHP logic cannot longer apply filters by IP

Why? Well, it's easy to answer. That's because your Apache or Ngnix will receive the request from Varnish, not from the real client as it used to be.

But that has an easy fix. All you need to do is to tell Varnish to send the client IP to the backend. This can be easily accomplished by setting in your VLC (/etc/varnish/default.vcl) the following:

sub vcl_recv {

     remove req.http.X-Forwarded-For;
     set req.http.X-Forwarded-For = client.ip;
...

With this change your application will be able to get the client IP and resolve correctly the country using GeoIP. When your application needs the client IP you only have to access to the header X-Forwareded-For.

Now, you might want to see the original IP in the apache logs too. To do that you have to use a custom log that prints the X-Forwareded-For header. Just add inside your Virtualhost declaration:

LogFormat "%{X-Forwarded-For}i %l %u %t \"%r\" %>s %b \"%{Referer}i\" \"%{User-Agent}i\"" varnish
CustomLog /var/log/httpd/access_combined_SOMEDOMAIN.log varnish

You should also have in mind that this configuration is appended, so it might happen that you vcl has already a line like this, so you are doing it twice. See the commented code in the default.vcl file.

The latest VCL file includes already the client.ip, just that it might appear twice! Copy all the file and tune the lines you like

Mine looks like this

sub vcl_recv {

     remove req.http.X-Forwarded-For;
     set req.http.X-Forwarded-For = client.ip;

     # Ignore all requests from Working Copies
     if ( req.http.host ~ "([a-z]{2,3}\.development\.lan)$" )
     {
        return(pipe);
     }

     unset req.http.Cookie;

#Copy paste...

     if (req.request != "GET" &&
       req.request != "HEAD" &&
       req.request != "PUT" &&
       req.request != "POST" &&
       req.request != "TRACE" &&
       req.request != "OPTIONS" &&
       req.request != "DELETE") {
         /* Non-RFC2616 or CONNECT which is weird. */
         return (pipe);
     }
     if (req.request != "GET" && req.request != "HEAD") {
         /* We only deal with GET and HEAD by default */
         return (pass);
     }
     if (req.http.Authorization || req.http.Cookie) {
         /* Not cacheable by default */
         return (pass);
     }
     return (lookup);

 }

After that Varnish will shine again.

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Puppet Syntax highlighting under Textmate

alombarte — Thu, 11 Oct 2012 16:55:00 +0100

Add some color to your puppet scripts opened in TextMate! Fire this in a terminal:

mkdir -p ~/Application\ Support/TextMate/Bundles
git clone https://github.com/masterzen/puppet-textmate-bundle.git Puppet.tmbundle
mv Puppet.tmbundle/ ~/Library/Application\ Support/TextMate/Bundles/
rm -fr Puppet.tmbundle

And voilà!

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Varnish VCL: Delete ALL cookies and other magic

alombarte — Tue, 09 Oct 2012 14:48:00 +0100

This morning Javi Callón gave me a great introduction in few minutes to the Varnish in steroids world, I really appreciate it. I'd like to share this snippet which might be very interesting for you if you are new to the Varnish magic too.

This has been my first contact with Varnish ever, and I have to say I am quite amazed on how the application is responding now in terms of performance. Do not take this snippet as a definitive solution to your problems.

I wrote an article yesterday on how to install Varnish. Truth is that if you install Varnish and you do not tune the VCL file chances are that Varnish is not caching anything because of the cookies. In a dynamic application there are a lot of factors that have to be taken (headers, user-agents, variations...)

This sample VCL tries to address the following problems:

Ignore a specific host (do not cache)
Remove ALL the cookies in the caching (the application does not need any of them)
Change the varnish cache of the images to 5 minutes
Special case when the URL contains a GET parameter ?rev=
Add in the response headers number of hits and if was a HIT or a MISS

Open the file/etc/varnish/default.vcl and add the following. It is recommended to leave the rest of the comments as they are for future reference of what Varnish does by default.

The code is commented so you properly understand what it does and you can remove any pieces you don't need.

# You already have a block like this one when you installed Varnish, keep it safe:
backend default {
  .host = "127.0.0.1";
  .port = "8080";
}

# ADD THE FOLLOWING
# -----------------

# 2 things are done here:
# First, ignore any request to a specific host. For instance, you don't want Varnish on a specific host.
# Second, remove cookies, because my application does not rely on cookies at all.
sub vcl_recv {

     # Varnish will Ignore any request to this host  (e.g: xx.mydomain.com)
     if ( req.http.host ~ "([a-z0-9]{2}\.mydomain\.com)$" )
     {
        return(pipe);
     }

     #Goodbye incoming cookies:
     unset req.http.Cookie;

}


sub vcl_fetch {
    # Remove cookies that destroy cache:    
     unset beresp.http.Set-Cookie;

     # 5 minutes (300s) cache for images
    if ( req.url ~ "\.(jpg|jpeg|png|gif)$" )
     {
        set beresp.ttl = 300 s;
     }

    # This is very specific of SIFO.me framework, but you can recycle it:
    # Any static URL containing ?rev= (this is JS and CSS) cache it almost forever.
    # The following regexp will find urls like http://.../file.js?rev=1747c3872495221156287e2000a0d110
    if ( req.url ~ "\?rev=[a-f0-9]{32}$" )
    {
       set beresp.ttl = 600000 s;
    }
}

# Add some debug info headers when delivering the content:
# X-Cache: if content was served from Varnish or not
# X-Cache-Hits: Number of times the cached page was served
sub vcl_deliver {

        # Was a HIT or a MISS?
        if ( obj.hits > 0 )
        {
                set resp.http.X-Cache = "HIT";
        }
        else
        {
                set resp.http.X-Cache = "MISS";
        }

        # And add the number of hits in the header:
        set resp.http.X-Cache-Hits = obj.hits;
}

Try if the configuration syntax is OK with:

/etc/init.d/varnish configtest

And then restart the service (also wipes the cache).

/etc/init.d/varnish restart

The new headers should appear and you will be able to see what Varnish is doing with a simple CURL or with any browser Inspector. Example:

[root@mnm1 mnm]# curl --head http://yourhost,com
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: Apache/2.2.15 (CentOS)
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.3.3
Cache-Control: public, must-revalidate, max-age=30, s-maxage=43200
Vary: Accept-Encoding
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Date: Tue, 09 Oct 2012 13:38:41 GMT
X-Varnish: 1572155458 1572155457
Age: 12
Via: 1.1 varnish
Connection: keep-alive
X-Cache: HIT
X-Cache-Hits: 1

Have in mind that all these functions are appended to the default behaviour. So they are adding extra things, but not preventing the default Varnish workflow take action.

In the cases where the time to live of the cache (TTL) is not set ,Varnish will cache it for 2 minutes (look for "120 s" in the deafault.vcl code).

All in all, it seems to me that for the huge benefit that Varnish adds to a project, the investment of time and resources you have to put on are ridiculous (half morning if your dynamic app doesn't have excessive magic). Do not be scared and try to add Varnish at least in your static files, then move to the dynamics.

Read Web development, systems, linux and Mac OS X in Harecoded

Simple Varnish Installation

alombarte — Mon, 08 Oct 2012 19:18:00 +0100

The first thing to do is to make sure your application is passing the headers properly. At least you'll need this (in PHP):

// Let's say Varnish caches for 12 hours:
$cache_max_age = 60*60*12;
header( "Cache-Control: public, must-revalidate, max-age=0, s-maxage=$cache_max_age" );

Varnish installation (CentOS/Redhat):
RPM taken from https://www.varnish-cache.org/installation/redhat

rpm --nosignature -i http://repo.varnish-cache.org/redhat/varnish-3.0/el5/noarch/varnish-release-3.0-1.noarch.rpm

After adding the package:

yum install varnish

If you have another Linux see in the link, is more or less the same.

Now Varnish is installed. What we want to do next is to configure Apache to listen in another port and let the port 80 for Varnish. Varnish will be the one requesting to Apache the html and saving it in the memory for later accesses.

We will use as example the port 8080 for Apache. The first thing is to tell Varnish, where Apache will be listening to:

vi /etc/varnish/default.vcl

# Change the port to 8080, like this. Leave the rest of file as is:
backend default {
  .host = "127.0.0.1";
  .port = "8080";
}

Then we have to change Varnish to make it listen in port 80:

vi /etc/sysconfig/varnish

# Change VARNISH_LISTEN_PORT variable to 80, like this:
VARNISH_LISTEN_PORT=80

And now in the Apache settings make it listen to 8080:

vi /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf
# Change the Listen variable to 8080:

Listen 8080

If you use Named Virtualhosts using the port number (e.g: You declare them with NameVirtualHost *:80) you'll need to change them to 8080 too. I usually store my virtual configurations under this file, use yours:

vi /etc/httpd/conf.d/virtual.conf

# You can replace all the 80 by 8080 easily with vi with (take care there aren't other things changed):
:%s/80/8080/g

And now hold your breathe. Stop both services and start them again to make changes effective:

/etc/init.d/httpd stop
/etc/init.d/varnish stop
/etc/init.d/httpd start
/etc/init.d/varnish start

Your application should be served by Varnish now. Check in the "Network" tab of your Google Chrome or Firefox that the headers are properly passed:

Read Web development, systems, linux and Mac OS X in Harecoded

Smarty: Concatenation of variables inside block parameters

alombarte — Tue, 04 Sep 2012 11:37:00 +0100

In Smarty sometimes you need to concatenate 2 variables and pass it as a single variable inside a block. But the placeholder won't allow any expected PHP syntax

You want to accomplish something like:

{assign var="MYVAR" value=$variable1.$variable2}

But, the dot in smarty is for array access, so, what about...

{assign var="MYVAR" value=$variable1+$variable2}

No. It does not work either. Ah! Let's try a modifier:

{assign var="MYVAR" value=$variable1|cat:$variable2}

Aha! That's the solution!

Dedicated to my friend Sambel, no pun intended!

Read Web development, systems, linux and Mac OS X in Harecoded

Mantener la sesión abierta en iTerm (keep-alive)

alombarte — Wed, 29 Aug 2012 10:12:00 +0100

Similarmente a como explicamos sobre cómo mantener la sesión activa en Putty, si queremos dejar la terminal abierta y que no se nos cierre con iTerm cada vez que vamos a hacer un café, comer, o liberar la próstata, hay que seguir estos sencillos pasos:

Abrir Bookmarks -> Manage Profiles
Desplegar Terminal Profiles y seleccionar Default
Marcar When idle, sends ASCII code

El valor de esta casilla por defecto es 0, pero lo podéis cambiar a cualquier otro código ASCII. Yo lo he dejado tal cual.

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How to setup a remote development environment over SFTP (working copy)

alombarte — Thu, 09 Aug 2012 00:10:00 +0100

This article explains how to setup the server and client to work with a remote working copy.

To properly understand this post you should have read the previous post, When to setup a remote development environment over SFTP (working copy).

To have the enviroment up and running you must setup once the server, and then apply the configuration of the client in every developer machine. But the client side is very simple and requires no installation at all.

Here's how:

Server Side

These are the basic steps you need to do to get the server ready to create the remote working copy:

Create a catch-all DNS

You should point a domain to the development machine. It is recommended to use a different one than the live DNS, or you can use a fake entry in the hosts file of the clients, but it's not very convenient. In this new domain you should configure a cath-all behavior (wildcard).

As example, if your domain is awesomedevelopers.com than you should create a wildcard *.awesomedevelopers.com in your DNS panel so any request goes there.

Limit the access to the server

The idea is to disallow any possible indexation to Google and do not let others see your page while you are working on it. Some methods you can use:

Simple IP control through iptables or similar
.htacces file or apache control
header with www-authenticate

Install all the services you are going to need in this machine.

PHP, Mysql, Apache, Redis... anything that you might need must be installed in the server. A clone of the production machine is recommended. Avoids hearing in the future sentences like "In my working copy worked like a charm".

Configure the working copies

Create the folders where the working copies go, for instance, this creates the working copies structure for the users named jta, api and alo.:

mkdir -p /var/www/wc/{jta,api,alo}

Then create a user and password for each. Set desired permissions and clone the code at this stage if necessary (can be uploaded later):

adduser jta
adduser api
adduser alo

passwd jta
passwd api
passwd alo

Modify the Virtual Hosts

To make every working copy subdomain point to this folder. Example:


   ServerName alo.awesomedevelopers.com
   DocumentRoot "/var/www/wc/alo/htdocs"

    ServerName api.awesomedevelopers.com
    DocumentRoot "/var/www/wc/api/htdocs"

    ServerName jta.awesomedevelopers.com 
    DocumentRoot "/var/www/wc/jta/htdocs"

Client Side

Then in the client, based on the cross-platform PHPStorm IDE the followint steps is all you have to do to start working with the working copy. It is pretty fast and does not involve working copies or service maintenance.

All you have to do is create a new project, or reuse an existing one and then configure the editor to upload files automatically to the server.

In detail...

Configure the deployment settings

The first thing to do is to configure the deployment server. PHPStorm needs to know where the machine is. To do so, go to:

Tools > Deployment > Configuration

Nothing special to say here, except that make sure to set correctly the root path which is the real path in the server. The user should have enough permissions to write in the server.

Then go to the "Mappings" tab and add a couple of slashes if your web has no additional path needed in the URL:

Configure the deployment behaviour

Tools > Deployment > Options

Things you should take care of here are:

Items you don't want to upload, such as the .git repo.
The level of logging. I always set it to Details so I can see what the IDE is doing anytime in the File transfer window
Overwrite files
Create empty directories (if you usually work with git, this is something you already know how to handle)
Automatic upload and external changes, are the 2 most important checkboxes. They make the IDE puts everything in the remote server as you work.
Notify remote changes. This option will show a yellow bar asking you what to do if the file has changed in the remote server. Very convenient.

Upload the code to the server

For the first time. If the code is already in the server and you start fresh then do it the other way around, download it from the server. To upload:

If the Menu "Deployment does not show up" then you need to go back to the deployment configuration and set the remote server as default (a small green tickbox in top of the server name)

Tick automatic upload

And now, PHPStorm will upload everything to the server. You don't need to save because PHPStorm does it automatically when the tab lose the focus (while you switch to the browser)

Hope this seres of articles help :)

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How to setup a remote development environment over SFTP (working copy)

Server Side

Client Side