Alan Ivey

Node.js and NPM on CentOS 2012-Feb-10 *Update:* This no longer appears to be necessary as of nodejs 0.8.0. It may have been fixed earlier but I noticed neither of these changes are necessary anymore. Something new though, I had problems with node-gyp, and the solution was to install python26 with yum and then re-run the npm command with PYTHON="/usr/bin/python26" npm install -deps or similar. The preferred way to install node and NPM seems to be installing from source, but I’m a perennial fan of using packages to keep things tidy, especially if I need to uninstall something. ... ➦

Alan's 2011 Favorites 2012-Jan-30 Favorite Links of 2011 Google Reader - between the Android app, Reeder for iPad, and the website, keeps me up to date on the news. Stack Overflow and other Stack Exchange sites - one of the best ways to get help and help others. 9GAG - thanks to (our summer intern) Vicky for showing this to me, I waste a lot of time looking at internet memes. Best Entertainment of 2011 Friday Night Lights - the final season was aired on NBC in the first half of the year. ... ➦

OS X 10.7 Lion Development: MacPorts 2011-Oct-11 OS X Lion comes with most of the tools you would need to do “MAMP” (Mac OS X, Apache, MySQL/MariaDB, PHP) development, as outlined in my previous posts once you add a database. So then why would you want to use MacPorts? Setting your development environment up in MacPorts isolates the binaries, libraries, and configuration files, completely separate from the existing OS X install (with the exception of startup scripts). ... ➦

OS X 10.7 Lion Development: Native Apache & PHP with Homebrew MySQL or MariaDB 2011-Sep-07 OS X Lion ships with Apache and PHP, which both require a little bit of tweaking to get fully-functional for “MAMP” local development. The one thing Lion does not ship with is a database. This will be very similar to my previous post on local development but this time we’ll be using Homebrew to install either MySQL or MariaDB for the database. Since we’ll be using a compiler for Homebrew, I’ll also cover how to add APC and other PECL modules that you can add to OS X. ... ➦

OS X 10.7 Lion Development: Native MAMP with MySQL installer 2011-Aug-24 With the release of Lion, there are some subtle differences to setting up a local MAMP (Mac OS X, Apache, MySQL, PHP) environment compared to Snow Leopard. In an effort to keep this from being overly wordy and just get to the good stuff, we’ll dive right in, so read on to get started. Note that for all commands before that are starting with a $, the dollar sign is showing a command-line prompt in Terminal, and you should not actually type it as part of the commands. ... ➦

Use Syslog instead of Watchdog 2011-Aug-17 In this example, we choose one of our servers to receive the Syslog traffic and the others will send traffic to it. In a large environment, you should use a non-public-facing server to act as a syslog server for your sites, ideally using a database to store data, but we’ll just output everything to a file to keep things simple for this guide. If you decide to use a database like MySQL to store your data, this can still provide you with a starting point, but just know that using your same production database server defeats my intended purpose since I was ultimately trying to alleviate the amount of writes on the database. ... ➦

Keep Drush Up to Date 2011-Mar-25 UPDATE: See Three Ways to Get Drush on OS X for a newer guide. At EchoDitto, we’re big fans of Drush. It’s installed on all of our servers and it’s a great way to perform maintenance tasks, download core and modules, and much much more. I’m not a big fan of installing from zip files though, so let’s use git to easily keep our Drush install up to date. Before the git transition, I would use Subversion to check out the latest drush release somewhere, like /usr/local/drush (on my Mac), using the CVS clone Subversible. ... ➦

Dump each MySQL table to a file 2011-Feb-22

Here’s a one-liner to dump each table in a database to it’s own .sql file. Crack open your shell of choice and follow along.

Replace the USER, PASSWORD, and DBNAME values with your own. If you’re not running this to connect to a local database, add –host=domain.tld after each password to connect to your remote server.

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Fix pear permissions problem on Mac OS X 2011-Feb-15 On Snow Leopard, you can install drush without using sudo. A dependency for installing drush is downloading a Pear library. The following example should allow you to be able to use the following commands to install drush to /usr/local/drush with a symlink in /usr/local/bin/drush, but it fails on the ‘pear download’ step, even though it’s writing to a user-writeable directory. Read on the figure out how to fix this annoying problem. ... ➦

Easy PHP 5.2 RPMs on CentOS 2011-Jan-25 I had previously written a post on one method of upgrading PHP from 5.1 to 5.2 on CentOS and Red Hat servers by creating new RPMs. Since then, I have found a much better way to create PHP 5.2.17 (or newer) RPMs to easily upgrade (and later remove, if you want) the older version available by default. I’ll presume you have no prior experience building PHP RPMs. We start by adding the Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux (EPEL) repository to our server. ... ➦