installing XHGui via Ansible

I’m still using Ansible to provision Vagrant VMs. This is how I added the XHGui profiler to my standard setup.

Theres a number steps we need to do:

• Install Composer
• Install the uprofiler PHP extension
• Install XHGui
• Set up for profiling
• Set up host for XHGui website

Install Composer

Installing Composer requires these tasks:

- name: Install Composer
  shell: curl -sS https://getcomposer.org/installer | php -- --install-dir=/usr/local/bin creates=/usr/local/bin/composer

- name: Rename composer.phar to composer
  shell: mv /usr/local/bin/composer.phar /usr/local/bin/composer creates=/usr/local/bin/composer

- name: Make composer executable
  file: path=/usr/local/bin/composer mode=a+x state=file

- name: Create global composer directory
  file: path=/usr/local/composer state=directory mode=0775

Firstly we download the Composer installer and run it to create composer.phar. We then rename to composer, make executable and then create a global directory for storing the packages that we download.

Install the uprofiler PHP extension

We install uprofiler via composer:

- name: Install uprofiler
  shell: export COMPOSER_HOME=/usr/local/composer && composer global require 'friendsofphp/uprofiler=dev-master' creates=/usr/local/composer/vendor/friendsofphp/uprofiler/composer.json

- name: Compile uprofiler
  shell: cd /usr/local/composer/vendor/friendsofphp/uprofiler/extension && phpize && ./configure && make && make install creates=/usr/lib/php5/20121212/uprofiler.so

- name: Configure PHP (cli)
  copy: src=uprofiler.ini dest=/etc/php5/cli/conf.d/21-uprofiler.ini mode=644

- name: Configure PHP (apache2)
  copy: src=uprofiler.ini dest=/etc/php5/apache2/conf.d/21-uprofiler.ini mode=644

The last two tasks copy uprofiler.ini to the relevant configuration directories. uprofiler.ini file is really simple:

[uprofiler]
extension=uprofiler.so

Install XHGui

Similarly, we install XHGui using composer:

- name: Install MongoDB
  apt: pkg={{ item }} state=latest
  with_items:
    - mongodb
    - php5-mongo

- name: Install XHGui
  shell: export COMPOSER_HOME=/usr/local/composer && composer global require --ignore-platform-reqs 'perftools/xhgui=dev-master' creates=/usr/local/composer/vendor/perftools/xhgui/composer.json

- name: Set XHGui permisssions
  file: path=/usr/local/composer/vendor/perftools/xhgui/cache group=www-data mode=775

- name: Configure XHGui
  template: src=xhgui_config.php dest=/usr/local/composer/vendor/perftools/xhgui/config/config.php owner=vagrant group=www-data mode=644

- name: Index mongo for XHGui
  script: xhgui_indexes.sh --some-arguments 1234 creates=/root/indexed_xhgui.txt

XHGi uses MongoDB for storage, so we install that install that first and then install XHGui via composer which pulls in all the dependencies. Note that XHGui has a extension dependency on xhprof, but we’re using uprofiler, so we use the --ignore-platform-reqs flag to ignore.

XHGui requires a configuration file in it’s config directory. I copied the default one and then changed it to profile every run. The minimum xhgui_config.php that you need is:

<?php
return [
    // Profile every request
    'profiler.enable' => function() {
        return true;
    },
]

This is the place where you could put in additional checks to decide whether to profile or not, such as checking for a GET variable of “profile”, for instance.

Lastly, the XHGui README recommends that you add some indexes to MongoDB. I also wanted to automatically delete old records, which is also done via a MongoDB directive. This is done via the xhgui_indexes.sh shell script:

#!/bin/bash

# auto-remove records older than 2592000 seconds (30 days)
mongo xhprof --eval 'db.collection.ensureIndex( { "meta.request_ts" : 1 }, { expireAfterSeconds : 2592000 } )'

# indexes
mongo xhprof --eval  "db.collection.ensureIndex( { 'meta.SERVER.REQUEST_TIME' : -1 } )"
mongo xhprof --eval  "db.collection.ensureIndex( { 'profile.main().wt' : -1 } )"
mongo xhprof --eval  "db.collection.ensureIndex( { 'profile.main().mu' : -1 } )"
mongo xhprof --eval  "db.collection.ensureIndex( { 'profile.main().cpu' : -1 } )"
mongo xhprof --eval  "db.collection.ensureIndex( { 'meta.url' : 1 } )"

touch /root/indexed_xhgui.txt

Note that we create an empty file that is tested in the task as we only need to run this task once.

Set up for profiling

To profile a website, we just need to include /usr/local/composer/vendor/perftools/xhgui/external/header.php. This can be done by setting the auto_prepend_file PHP ini setting. As I use Apache, I can just add:

php_admin_value auto_prepend_file "/usr/local/composer/vendor/perftools/xhgui/external/header.php"

To my VirtualHost configuration.

Set up host for XHGui website

Finally, we need a VirtualHost for the XHGui website where we can view our profiles. I decided to use a separate subdomain, “profile“, so my vhost looks like this:

<VirtualHost *:80>
  ServerName profiler.{{ server_name }}
  DocumentRoot /usr/local/composer/vendor/perftools/xhgui/webroot

  <Directory /usr/local/composer/vendor/perftools/xhgui/webroot>
      Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
      AllowOverride All
      Order allow,deny
      Allow from all
      Require all granted
  </Directory>
</VirtualHost>

Where {{server_name}} is an Ansible variable that is the domain name of the site.

All done

That’s it. Once I had worked out which pieces were required, putting them into Ansible tasks was remarkably obvious and now I can profile my website in development.