Category Archives: Allgemein

Of Tools and Dependencies

Allgemein

Over the last few weeks I had a few discussions with other developers all along the same line of thought: How to install development-tools in a project.

Why? You might ask. Composer is making that very easy after all. When I need phpunit in my project to run unittests I use composer require phpunit/phpunit and composer itself will ask me whether I want to install that as a dev-dependency. How awesome is that! So why do we need to talk about that?

Well. Let’s put it that way: When you do that, and perhaps not only with phpunit but with other tools as well, you tie your production code to your development tools.

Continue reading Of Tools and Dependencies →

Debug LDAP via TLS

Allgemein, authLdap, PHP,

Yesterday I had to do some debugging to find out why an LDAPS connection didn’t work.

The main trouble was that the authLdap plugin for WordPress didn’t work for someone. After a bit of back and forth we figured out that it worked for other applications but not for PHPs LDAP-extension.

The error they got was the usual cryptic Can't contact LDAP server which says nothing at all as that can mean so many different things.

Continue reading Debug LDAP via TLS →

Email notification for SSH logins

Allgemein

On servers I maintain I usually have a script running that sends an email whenever someone logs in via SSH. It allows me to keep track on whether something fishy is going on in a very easy way.

It’s not bulletproof but at least provides me with a certain level of safety that everything is all right.

The other day I had to reinstall a server after some time and of course I had to – again – search for how to set that email script up.

Continue reading Email notification for SSH logins →

Xdebug in Docker

Allgemein, Development, DevOps, ,

Yesterday Dmitri Goosens wrote about how to integrate Xdebug into almost any Docker Setup in PHPStorm. An article that I definitely need to digest a bit more as the PHPStorm integration is something that I often neglect. I am happy when it works on the CLI šŸ˜

One thing though that Dmitri skips though (an dfor good reasons) is how to get Xdebug into your Docker environment.

As I have done that quite a number of times by now I thought I’d share the way I do it currently.

This is my Dockerfile

FROM php:8.3-rc-fpm
RUN PHPIZE_DEPS="autoconf \
      cmake \
      file \
      g++ \
      gcc \
      libc-dev \
      libpcre2-dev \
      make \
      git \
      pkgconf \
      re2c" \
    && XDEBUG_VERSION="" \
    && if [ "$(php -v | head -n 1 | grep 8.3)" != "" ]; then XDEBUG_VERSION="-3.3.0alpha3"; fi \
    && apt-get update \
    && apt-get install -y $PHPIZE_DEPS \
    && pecl install xdebug${XDEBUG_VERSION} \
    && docker-php-ext-enable xdebug \
    && echo "xdebug.mode=debug\nxdebug.discover_client_host=on\nxdebug.start_with_request=yes\nxdebug.log_level=0" >> /usr/local/etc/php/conf.d/docker-php-ext-xdebug.ini \
    && apt-get remove -y $PHPIZE_DEPS

That should install a running version of Xdebug on whatever version of PHP you are using and even allows to use the soon to be relesased PHP8.3.

The main lines here are

    pecl install xdebug${XDEBUG_VERSION} \
    docker-php-ext-enable xdebug \

everything else is decoration resp. necessary that those two lines can do their magic.

Feel free to adapt the FROM line to whatever PHP-version you want to use from dockers official PHP-image (remember that that is not maintained by the PHP folks! It’s maintained by Docker!)

After a docker build -t phpxdebugtest . you should now be able to call docker run phpxdebugtest php -v and see this

PHP 8.3.0RC5 (cli) (built: Nov 1 2023 05:26:54) (NTS)
Copyright (c) The PHP Group
Zend Engine v4.3.0RC5, Copyright (c) Zend Technologies
with Xdebug v3.3.0alpha3, Copyright (c) 2002-2023, by Derick Rethans

And now have fun integrating that Xdebug enabled PHP-Container into your PHPStorm.

Git is awesome

Allgemein

I just recently fat-fingered a branch-deletion of a remote branch. But luckily git has you covered should you do that. Let me tell you the story…

I don’t know why on a lot of keyboards the letters D and F are right next to each other (well, I know but that’s a different story). So far that never was an issue.

But! If you start sloppy typing and while hitting the F key you also hit the D that usually just means you will have to use the backspace and delete a character you didn’t want.

Unless you are on the CLI and hit ENTER immedately after …

What happened:

I was working on a branch and commited some stuff to it. As I already had a PR open for it on github I pushed the change.

Of course the CI found a minor thing in the code. I was casting something that was unnecessary. So I removed that cast in the code and commited that as well to my local branch. As it was a really minor change that I should have done with the previous commit already I decided to do a git commit --amend --no-edit . Just add that to the previous commit and be done.

That now replaced the last commit with a new one and I had to force-push that to the remote branch.

And now I fat fingered.

Instead of git push origin branchname -f I typed git push origin branchname -df

And the -d means: Delete that branch on the remote server.

I mean it’s not that much of a loss. I could have just used git push origin branchname again and be done.

But with deleting the remote branch I also closed the PR. And just pushing the branch again would require me to create a new branch instead of being able to reopen the old one. Why? because the old PR was associated with the old commit-hash. But I now had a new commit-hash.

So how could I fix that?

git reflog to the rescue! While still on the local branch I issued this:

git reflog
4fcb8ff4d (HEAD -> branchName, origin/branchName) HEAD@{0}: commit (amend): Commit Message
0cc696b53 HEAD@{1}: commit: Commit Message
458011b1b HEAD@{2}: rebase (continue) (finish): returning to refs/heads/branchName

So the great thing here is that we not only have the log of our last commits (which would only show one entry for the Commit Message` commit. But we have both commit hashes. How cool is that!

That allowed me now to do git push origin 0cc696b53:branchName which pushed the commit 0cc696b53 to the server and named the resulting branch branchName . That caused GitHub to realize that the branch is still existing and allowed me to reopen the PullRequest.

So now we are almost in the same situation as before my fat fingered stupidity.

The only thing left to do now is to actually push (and not delete) the branch to the server.

And a git push origin branchName -f (no -d) later the branch is updated and the PullRequest knows about the update and CI is up and running.

Thank you git for saving my back!