A colleague of mine just sent me a couple links that were great tips if you work with git often. lifeon.biggerplanet.com talks about how to take advantage of customizing the prompt and using git-completion.bash script to auto-complete things like git branches and also display the branches in the prompt.
Points of interest…
export PATH="$HOME/bin:$PATH" source ~/bin/git-completion.bash PS1='[\u@\h \w$(__git_ps1 " (%s)")]\$ '
I wish I had a list of what to start with when first digging into Drupal, so I’m going to use this post as a place to list out a good starting point for users that have never used Drupal before.
Note: It’s geared towards a Drupal 6 project, BUT I believe most if not all of these will work the same on a Drupal 7 project.
First DON’T ALTER CODE OR PUT STUFF IN A FOLDER IF IT’S NOT UNDER THE ‘sites’ FOLDER. Just don’t, it’s tempting as a new-comer but don’t.
Node: Content is generally saved as node, there are different node types, and you can create your own. e.g. Page is a node type thats generally default. Nodes usually also have urls.
User: users are core to the site. Separate from nodes, users can own nodes.
Module: A folder containing php files and other things like css or js files to add functionality. Modules can be installed by placing them in the sites/all/modules folder, and
Also: I’m going to skip the basic ‘download drupal and get the site installed’ stuff, this is after you get the site downloaded and you can see the first drupal page.
1. Set up 2 sites to run off a Drupal install locally.
Understanding the basics of multi-site Drupal installs is important. In our development team, we use it to allow multiple developers to commit their own local database connection settings at times to their own sites/ folder subfolder.
Use your hosts file to mimic this, pointing something like site1.local and site2.local to your apache server, then using a virtual host with a couple server alias’s settings to drive both urls off one site.
Doing that will force you to understand how the sites/url/settings.php is configured. Read the documentation in the settings.php file in the sites/default folder of a fresh Drupal download, and it will tell you how to name folders to do so.
2. Install and become familiar with Drush.
Drush is awesome because it allows you to update / install modules and do stuff like clear cache via the command line. It’s also a great way to interact with Drupal via the cron, if ever you need to do specific thing via cron.
Drush is not something you install per drupal build, it’s installed per computer. It just lets you use the command line to type “drush” and get the following to show up. From there you also see all the commands you can use through drush. Check out ‘cache-clear’, ‘sql-dump’ and other SQL commands to name a few.
$ drush Execute a drush command. Run `drush help [command]` to view command-specific help. Run `drush topic` to read even more documentation. Global options (see `drush topic core-global-options` for the full list).: -r <path>, --root=<path> Drupal root directory to use (default: current directory) -l http://example.com:8888, URI of the drupal site to use (only needed in multisite environments or when running on an alternate port) --uri=http://example.com:8888 -v, --verbose Display extra information about the command. -d, --debug Display even more information, including internal messages. -y, --yes Assume 'yes' as answer to all prompts -n, --no Assume 'no' as answer to all prompts -s, --simulate Simulate all relevant actions (don't actually change the system) -p, --pipe Emit a compact representation of the command for scripting. -h, --help This help system. --version Show drush version. --php The absolute path to your PHP intepreter, if not 'php' in the path. ... ... ...
3. Handy modules
Install these, they are generally hand. (Note, modules can be found at http://drupal.org/project/modules. And be aware of the version of Drupal you are using when searching.)
- (Drupal 6 only) is the Administration Menu: a handy interface for when your logged in with admin rights. Just adds a black-bar at the top for easy navigation.
- Backup and Migrate: (note the Drush commands added after enabling this.) Allows for very easy database dumps / imports via the Admin interface and Drush.
- Pathauto: Allows for very handy customization of node urls, keeping them automated. A must have for many sites.
- (Drupal 6 only, as it’s included with Drupal 7) Content Construction Kit (CCK): Allows you to add custom fields to your custom content node types.
Thats it for now.
This is very handy, it’s a great way to navigate the site as the admin.
I was introduced to Vagrant at DrupalCampWNY2011 by @darkoantic and crew, and since then I’ve had a goal to really grasp how to best use this tool in my daily process. I already used VirtualBox so it was a shoe-in to replace my existing MAMP setup for development.
The tutorials at the vagrant site use an Ubuntu setup (named lucid32 box,) and while Ubuntu is great, most of my code get’s deployed to CentOS, so I spent a weekend looking into building a base box from scratch. I learned a lot, but I could never get the damn thing to just work. Always a virtualtools problem, or a chef / puppet issue! When I used my base box, Chef or Puppet would always break down unless I did something to the box manually after a vagrant up… which is totally against the point of using this as a tool to version my environments.
Enter Veewee, it’s a promising way to package base-box scripts in a similar way that vagrant’s main purpose is to package the setups that run off base box’s… Plus I found a great walkthrough at Devops.me to get me started. And being that this article specifically talks about CentOS 5.7 I guess it was almost meant to be.
I have an hypothesis that I want to bounce around some, this seemed like a good crowd do to so… it may save someone time and it would be good to hear from somebody that may have had a similar experience.
Long story short, when adding a Facebook Like button to your site, if you want all users to consistently get the Post to Facebook popup after liking the page, you NEED to get an SSL Cert and enable HTTPS on your site.
I’m adding a Facebook Like button to a site, easy enough… I go to http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/like/ and get the code / instructions. Past the code to a page and we’re good.
Now… when I go to test it, the like button works fine, always… the like feature is NOT in question here.
I found in some cases after a user liked the button, they did not get the popup window to also post to their wall. I needed that extra window to show up (client wanted it) so I needed to dig in.
That Post to Facebook popup only appears consistently for users with “Secure Browsing” disabled (*currently* Account settings > Security.)
IF the user does not have Secure Browsing enabled, it doesn’t matter, the Post popup appears always.
So I would assume the fix is to get an SSL cert … even if you don’t actually transfer any secure data on your own site.
To prove this concept… take the following into account…
http://www.buffalonews.com/city/article588083.ece works.
https://www.buffalonews.com/city/article588083.ece does not work.
http://mashable.com/2011/10/10/facebook-friendly/ works.
https://mashable.com/2011/10/10/facebook-friendly/ works.
Because mashable has https enabled, the like button works despite the users Secure Browsing preference. However, for buffalonews viewers, the Post popup only shows up if the user has NOT checked the enable Secure Browsing preference.
I just wish that was documented with the like button.
I use MAMP on my Mac daily for most of my web development. It’s a nice sandbox’ed environment but also very easy to maintain. MOST of the libs that I need are pre-bundled with MAMP, but sometime its required that I need something thats not pre-bundled.
Here’s how to configure PEAR to work properly with MAMP on the Mac, so you can use it via the command line to add PEAR stuffs.
First open up terminal and make sure that you’re PATH is set to use the correct pear binary, that being the pear in the MAMP directory. If you don’t want to alter your pear path, you can manually call the pear binary. Anywhere you see “pear somethingoranother” below, just replace it with /Applications/MAMP/bin/php5.2/bin/pear somethingoranother” or cd into that bin dir and use “./pear somethingoranother”.
Also note: some older versions of MAMP did not have 2 versions of PHP installed, so take that into consideration. Newer versions have 2 php folders, and 2 builds of pear and other libs. I generally still use PHP5.2 daily, so thats what I’ll reference.
### # setup the php5.2 vars for the mamp pear # !! it is ASSUMED that before these are run, the users PATH is # updated to use /Applications/MAMP/bin/php5.2/bin/pear before /usr/local/pear !! # in your ~/.profile or ~/.bash_profile or somewhere... ### # MAMP binaries should override others for Apache, PHP and MySQL export PATH=/Applications/MAMP/bin/php5\.2/bin:/Applications/MAMP/bin/apache2/bin:/Applications/MAMP/bin:$PATH
Update the MAMP PEAR Configs to reference the proper files.
IMPORTANT: the extensions folder may be different for you, double the ACTUAL name of the no-debug-… folder first.
pear config-set bin_dir /Applications/MAMP/bin/php5.2/bin pear config-set doc_dir /Applications/MAMP/bin/php5.2/lib/php/doc pear config-set ext_dir /Applications/MAMP/bin/php5.2/lib/php/extensions/no-debug-non-zts-20050922 pear config-set php_dir /Applications/MAMP/bin/php5.2/lib/php pear config-set data_dir /Applications/MAMP/bin/php5.2/lib/php/data pear config-set php_bin /Applications/MAMP/bin/php5.2/bin/php pear config-set test_dir /Applications/MAMP/bin/php5.2/lib/php/test pear config-set sig_keydir /Applications/MAMP/conf/php5.2/pearkeys ### # these were already set, but may need to be set manually still (if not already pointing to the correct place) ### pear config-set Filename /Applications/MAMP/conf/php5.2/pear.conf pear config-set www_dir /Applications/MAMP/bin/php5.2/lib/php/www pear config-set cfg_dir /Applications/MAMP/bin/php5.2/lib/php/cfg
That should be it!
Just to test it out, here’s what I was able to do to get PHPUnit installed. You SHOULD see the files installed in /Applications/MAMP/bin/php5.2/lib/php, e.g. after this you should see /Applications/MAMP/bin/php5.2/lib/php/PHPUnit exist.
### # Install phpunit/PHPUnit with PEAR (a bit of a test run) ### # need this first (not "stable" yet) pear install channel://pear.php.net/Net_URL2-0.3.1 # need this second (not "stable" yet) pear install channel://pear.php.net/HTTP_Request2-2.0.0RC1 # make sure channels are added pear channel-discover pear.phpunit.de pear channel-discover components.ez.no pear channel-discover pear.symfony-project.com # finally, install phpunit/PHPUnit with non-stable dependancies fulfilled pear install phpunit/PHPUnit
HEADS UP: This is going to be cleaned up sometime soon… just too tired… Mainly, at the end, I kind of slap on the NAT network thing and the note on how to add users to the vboxsf group to properlly use the VirtualBox Shared File auto mount on system boot.
Use VirtualBox to host Ubuntu Server (64 bit) use as a web server. To ease daily / local development, we will need to make sure the files are saved to the host machine (in this case my Macbook) so that there is no need to share files through the network. The idea is that it’s not at all ideal to use a text editor like an IDE over something like AFP or SMB.
So… this is what we’ll be doing.
Stuff you’ll need, so download it all first…
VirtualBox (version 4.0.8 r71778 is used for this walk-through)
http://www.virtualbox.org
Ubuntu (ubuntu-11.04-server-amd64.iso is the version used for this walk-through)
http://www.ubuntu.com/download/server/download
Just download it and follow the instructions.
After you install, it’s a good time to locate an ISO file you’ll need ONLY if your using the server edition (e.g. no GUI.)
- Under your /Applications folder locate the VirtualBox app - Right-click the app, and select Show Package Contents - Copy the file Contents/MacOS/VBoxGuestAdditions.iso somewhere (say next to the Ubuntu iso file.)
Later we’ll need this file, so just remember where it is.
I’m going to use the server edition. It’s a smaller download being that the GUI is not used and it’s not needed for development lots of times. This will however increase the complexity being that later when we go to setup the shared drive (step 4) we need to jump some hurdles a bit to install the VirtualBox Guest tools. BUT… go big or go home!.
Note: If you want the full desktop version of Ubuntu, go ahead and download the desktop version instead, the rest of the steps should be the same, but you will probably be able to figure out how to setup the VirtualBox Guest Tools yourself.
Now, create the virtual machine (this may vary per your hard drive requirements)
- open up VirtualBox and click New, you should be directed to a wizard - name your vm something like "UbuntuServer - 64bit" - make sure Linux and Ubuntu 64bit is selected under "os type" - select maybe 512 or 1024 mb for ram - create a new hard drive (vdi) image for your system, when you click next you'll get a sub-wizard - name your hard drive image (vdi) whatever, I named it to be the same as my vm - eventually you'll get a summary / confirmation page. make sure it's what you want and click Done
Now you could start your new VM, but first make sure you tell virtual box to mount the Ubuntu iso you just downloaded so you can install it. (Just like you would make sure a bootable CD was available to boot when installing an OS.)
To make the ISO available to the cd…
- Select the Ubuntu VM in VirtualBox - Click "Settings" then go to "Storage" - Click "Empty" under the IDE controller - Next to CD/DVD Drive, click the little CD icon next to the drop-down - Select "Choose a virtual CD/DVD disk file" - Locate the Ubuntu ISO file you downloaded. - Click OK
Oh, and it would be good to double-check that in Settings/System the CD/DVD-ROM is above the Hard Disk in the Boot Order!
In the menu under Devices/Network, I’m using NAT. Make sure you tweak your settings so your VM has network access also.
Thats it, the VM is setup, now we install Ubuntu. Double-click / start the UbuntuServer Virtual Machine and read on.
When you first start the VM, you should be prompted to install Ubuntu. I’m going to skim through this for the most part, noting a few things that were important to the process.
IMPORTANT: Note the key you need to use to get out of the guest machine. After you click into Ubuntu, you’ll need to use left cmd button by default to get out of the VM!
- Language: English - Install Ubuntu Server - ... - Hostname: ubuntuserver - Partion disks: Guided - use entire + LVM (use whole disk...) - Full Name of a user: Web Dev - User/Pass: webdev / webdev (or change to a stronger / different password / username) - Did not encrypt the drive - No proxy - No Automatic Updates - Software Selection: I selected [OpenSSH, LAMP server, Mail server] - MySQL pass: root - Postfix Config: Local only, System mail name "ubuntuserver.mail" - Installed Grub Boot Loader
Finally, after that, when prompted to remove the CD and reboot, click the CD icon in the lower right to eject the ISO. Then click “Continue”.
After you reboot, you should be prompted to login. You need to shut down, so just close out / power down the vm.
Go back into the settings of the VM…
- Under Shared Folders click the green "plus/folder" icon to create a new share - I'm using a folder in my Sites directory (/Users/chris/Sites/ubuntuserver), but you can use any folder. - Name the folder and click OK, then OK (get back to the VM list)
IMPORTANT: The web server or other programs will probably need to write to that folder, so be careful to make sure you don’t select your whole drive or something. If something goes wrong on the guest machine, your host machine files could be lost! Just sayin.
Install / make sure some extra stuff is ready. This is so that VirtualBox can take more control over the linux kernal thus allowing for things like seemless shared drives form host to guest and vise-versa. (See the http://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch04.html#idp5848336 page under Ubuntu)
In order to fully update your guest system, open a terminal and run
- Now, boot up your UbuntuServer and login - sudo apt-get update - sudo apt-get upgrade - sudo apt-get install dkms - sudo reboot
Boot up again then load the tools iso file (originally located at /Applications/VirtualBox/Contents/MacOS/VBoxGuestAdditions.iso via Show Package Contents on the VirtualBox app)
- Click Devices / CD/DVD Devices / Choose a virtual CD/DVD disk file and locate the VBoxGuestAdditions.iso file
Run a few more commands… you WILL get an error about not installing stuff with X Windows… thats fine.
- sudo apt-get install hwinfo - sudo mount /dev/cdrom /media/cdrom - cd /media/cdrom - sudo ./VBoxLinuxAdditions.run - sudo reboot
Finally…
- sudo mkdir /media/ubuntuserver - sudo mount -t vboxsf ubuntuserver /media/ubuntuserver - cd /media/ubuntuserver
BAM! You should be able to “ls” and list your files
Well, there is one last thing that may be very different for each of your dev environments. Network access to your VM.
For now, I can show you how to use NAT to access your server. I’m NOT a network guy… so there may be a better way. However, I believe that using NAT will keep you padded from the outside network (e.g. at home or at a coffee shot wifi, NAT should work the same in this case.)
- (sometime after NAT has been selected) with your vm running type 'ifconfig' and get the ip address for the the eth0 device - shut down your vm if it's currently running (sudo shutdown -P now) - in your VM's Settings, choose Network - select NAT, and under Advanced click the Port forwarding - setup a new forward from 127.0.0.1 port 8080 (or 80 to replace your main webserver or any other port you want thats free) - set the port forward to the ip address of the eth0 device in your vm port 80
When you boot up you should be able to go (on your Mac host) to http://localhost:8080 or 127.0.0.1:8080 and see the file served from /var/www/index.html on your Ubuntu guest.
Final Note: You can use VirtualBox to auto mount your share. That saves you the need to manually mount the shared drive every time you boot. HOWEVER, you need to add your avarage user to the vboxsf group so they have permission to that share. The perms on the automounted share are root / vboxsf, so this will fix your users… “sudo usermod -aG vboxsf “… e.g.
- sudo usermod -aG vboxsf webdev - sudo usermod -aG vboxsf www-data
The www-data user is the default user apache runs as per your /etc/apache2/envvars file.
References:
I’m always using the Mac OSX Terminal app for things. I was jealous of linux machines though, their terminals were much nicer. Things like the Delete key worked among other things.
I found this to help. (From http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20050525040921189) (Originally it was from http://koorb.co.uk/scrapbook/ I guess, but that page errors out for me.)
Add this to ~/.inputrc (or ~/.bash_profile works too I guess) (it has to go in your .inputrc file.
# this makes the "delete" key work rather than # just entering a ~ "\e[3~": delete-char # these allow you to use ctrl+left/right arrow keys # to jump the cursor over words "\e[5C": forward-word "\e[5D": backward-word # these allow you to start typing a command and # use the up/down arrow to auto complete from # commands in your history "\e[B": history-search-forward "\e[A": history-search-backward # this lets you hit tab to auto-complete a file or # directory name ignoring case set completion-ignore-case On # I'm not sure what keys these are! "\e[1~": beginning-of-line "\e[4~": end-of-line "\e[5~": beginning-of-history "\e[6~": end-of-history "\e[2~": quoted-insert
Thats it, open a new Terminal window and you’ll be able to Delete away.
I have been using my first true mechanical keyboard. I didn’t realize there was such a big variety and such a large community around these keyboards when I first started looking.
I tried a Logitech keyboard first, it was a $30 wireless keyboard and I probably would have kept it if Logitech supported Mac like I would have expected… but they didn’t so I returned it. AND I’M GLAD I DID. If I didn’t, I never would have keept looking for keyboards and in turn never would have came across these mechanical ones.
The hard part was to find a true mechanical keyboard that was also wireless. I did find a couple, but most were in the $250+ range… not something I was willing to spend. I would have went wired before I did that! But a couple forum posts led me to the XArmor U9W wireless keyboard, by iOne (their parent company.)
The real difference between the $30 board I had and this one is the switches. There are apparently different switch companies that make a variety of switches, each with their own unique feel. So when a company decided to make a mechanical keyboard, the seem to go with one of the main manufactures of key switches.
My keyboard is using the Cherry MX Brown switches. That means it has a slight resistance near the top of the key press, and once you start and get past that first part of the key press there is almost no resistance till it bottoms out (with a satisfying clang I may add.)
Different switches have different feels and are generally preferred for different tasks. For example there is one is recommended for dual use gaming / typing. Black is more for gaming as there is no resistance at all till you bottom out the key, and blue would be for typing since there is more resistance and the general feel is good for typing.
Read up on the keyboards here…
http://www.overclock.net/keyboards/491752-mechanical-keyboard-guide.html
There are no bells or whistles here, just a very solid keyboard. It’s actually about 3 or 4 times heavier than any other keyboard I’ve had. I love it!
Overall, after only 2 days of using it, I feel like there is less strain on my hands / wrists. I feel I’ve been able to type on it very naturally and a bit faster, and I feel like I don’t need a bat upstairs in case of intruders… I’ll just wap them with this beast.
I just hope the batteries don’t die in less than a couple months. I’ll try to update this post with the life span I get… but hey… one other feature that’s awesome is I could use a USB cable to power this if they do die. (Although, using a USB cable to power the keyboard still means you need to use the wireless dongle. The keyboard always needs to function wireless.)
I’ve had a Razer brand Copperhead for about 6 years now. That has been a tank that out performed any other mouse I used. I wanted to go wireless though, so I decided to try the Logitech Performance MX.
Overall the mouse was great. I’m on a Mac, I write code all day and play FPS games sometimes. For $99 I expected this mouse to be at least ok for gaming.
The good.
The weight was fine and the mouse was overall comfortable. I likes the very customizable software that Logitech supplied… You could do set the buttons to do almost anything, including emulating alt+click for example.
The battery life was awesome, I used it once a full week without needing to hook it up to recharge, and it didn’t drop under 2/3 bars on the battery indicator. Plus if it did die, it allows for USB cable to be plugged in an charge while using it.
Now for the bad.
The Hyperscrolling was AWEFUL in games. It was just so sensitive that if I moved or bumped the mouse it would trigger the scroll action even if the wheel was in the lock position. It didn’t just trigger one scroll either, it acted like I scrolled up or down a few times.
You have the ability to unlock/lock the mouse wheel. Unlocked you can spin the wheel and it silently spins for a good amount of time with it’s momentum. Locked it clicks and acts like traditional mice, no momentum.
That was awesome outside games but per the behavior described above, made the mouse unusable in games!
In the end I returned the mouse for that reason, maybe that didn’t happen on PC’s but as I’ve found out Logitech support for the Mac is NOT priority to them.
I’m switching from a wired setup to a wireless setup. I’m a programmer and an occasional (but serious) gamer, so I want something that can respond well and not die on me often.
My old keyboard was a Microsoft comfort curve… slightly ergonomically curved, but not split down the middle fully. It was a great keyboard… still works after around 3 years of daily use with no issue, but it does have a cord so… meh.
I looked on line a lot, searching for things like “wireless keyboard” and “wireless keyboard for gamers / coders” … and didn’t find much at all that I liked. Somehow Apples wireless keyboard always topped the first 15ish results.
The keyboard I ended up getting was a Logitic K320. Not because of online searches though, but because I checked out my local Office Max… and this one wasn’t even on display. I had to find it boxed on the bottom shelf! WTF!
I wanted to try a ‘mechanical’ feeling keyboard, but the only keyboards I found topping the reviews were ones that were low-profile quiet touch wireless keyboards. This one is not the deepest keyboard, but it by far has a mechanical feel to it.
The cost was perfect too. Under $30, and since it uses Logitech’s Unifying technology, I didn’t need to plug in 2 wireless receivers for my 2 devices.
It feels great. Overall I can type fast right off the bat with no time for adjustment required. (Coming from a low-profile comfort curve keyboard I was wondering if that would be the case or not.)
Now for the bad.
program on a Mac and I always use the Keyboard preferences to toggle the “Alt” key and the “Windows” key on PC geared keyboards. That way it has a more Mac like feel (where the Command key is next to the space bar.)
This is the first keyboard I’ve ever used that did not represent the keyboard to the OS as at least a basic keyboard… So I could not use the Mac OD settings to tweak the keyboard settings.
After looking into it further I found the issue is probably in the lack of Logitechs support for Mac around the Unifying keyboards.
In the end I could not get used to the mac cmd button not vein next to the spacebar, so I returned the otherwise great keyboard…. Sad face. I hope logitech supports the Unifying keyboards on Mac someday, but I’m sure I’ll have found a non-logitech keyboard by then.