Rob Allen's DevNotes – Developing software in the Real World

Using MailHog via Docker for testing email

I recently needed to modify the emails that a client project sends out. It was set up to send via SMTP and so the easiest way to do this for me was to add a local MailHog instance and point the application at it. Manually running via Docker The quickest and easiest way to do this is via Docker. Manually, we can do:

$ docker run -p 8025:8025 -p 1025:1025 mailhog/mailhog

1	$ docker run -p 8025:8025 -p 1025:1025 mailhog/mailhog

This will run MailHog with the SMTP port exposed on localhost… continue reading.

Posted on 21 October 2020 in Development Leave a comment

Dorothy Hodgkin

Dorothy Hodgkin by J.S. Lewinski, 1697.© estate of J.S. Lewinski / National Portrait Gallery, London To celebrate Ada Lovelace Day today, I want to highlight Dorothy Hodgkin, a British chemist who made amazing discoveries with X-ray crystallography of molecules. In particular, she confirmed the structure of penicillin and discovered the structure of vitamin B12 and also of insulin. She won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for her work on vitamin B12, which was described as… continue reading.

Posted on 13 October 2020 in Ada Lovelace Day Leave a comment

Step-debugging linked composer dependencies with PhpStorm

One project I'm working on has multiple separate parts in different git repositories that are brought into the main project using linked composer directories. I needed to get step debugging working in PhpStorm and this is the approach I took.

Posted on 7 October 2020 in PHP Leave a comment

Completely reset Apple Watch's Mac auto-unlock

Recently, the ability for my Apple Watch to automatically unlock my Mac started failing on Big Sur betas and then on my main Catalina installation. I'm not sure, but it's possible that updating to WatchOS 7 caused it, though it might have been related to re-pairing to fix the battery life issues I was having. Or, of course, some other software gremlin! Whatever, it was annoying. Scouring the Internet, I discovered what to do in… continue reading.

Posted on 30 September 2020 in Software Leave a comment

Recursive PHP lint

There are many scripts that recursively execute php -l on a set of files or directories. This is mine:

#!/usr/bin/env bash
set -o nounset

# Recursively call `php -l` over the specified directories/files

if [ -z "$1" ] ; then
    printf 'Usage: %s <directory-or-file> ...\n' "$(basename "$0")"
    exit 1
fi

ERROR=false
SAVEIFS=$IFS
IFS=$'\n'
while test $# -gt 0; do
    CURRENT=${1%/}
    shift

    if [ ! -f $CURRENT ] && [ ! -d $CURRENT ] ; then
        echo "$CURRENT cannot be found"
        ERROR=true
        continue
    fi

    for FILE in $(find $CURRENT -type f -name "*.php") ; do
        OUTPUT=$(php -l "$FILE" 2> /dev/null)

        # Remove blank lines from the `php -l` output
        OUTPUT=$(echo -e "$OUTPUT" | awk 'NF')

        if [ "$OUTPUT" != "No syntax errors detected in $FILE" ] ; then
            echo -e "$FILE:"
            echo -e "  ${OUTPUT//$'\n'/\\n  }\n"
            ERROR=true
        fi
    done
done

IFS=$SAVEIFS

if [ "$ERROR" = true ] ; then
    exit 1
fi

echo "No syntax errors found."
exit 0

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#!/usr/bin/env bash

set -o nounset

# Recursively call `php -l` over the specified directories/files

if [ -z "$1" ] ; then

printf 'Usage: %s <directory-or-file> ...\n' "$(basename "$0")"

exit 1

fi

ERROR=false

SAVEIFS=$IFS

IFS=$'\n'

while test $# -gt 0; do

CURRENT=${1%/}

shift

if [ ! -f $CURRENT ] && [ ! -d $CURRENT ] ; then

echo "$CURRENT cannot be found"

ERROR=true

continue

fi

for FILE in $(find $CURRENT -type f -name "*.php") ; do

OUTPUT=$(php -l "$FILE" 2> /dev/null)

# Remove blank lines from the `php -l` output

OUTPUT=$(echo -e "$OUTPUT" | awk 'NF')

if [ "$OUTPUT" != "No syntax errors detected in $FILE" ] ; then

echo -e "$FILE:"

echo -e " ${OUTPUT//$'\n'/\\n }\n"

ERROR=true

fi

done

IFS=$SAVEIFS

if [ "$ERROR" = true ] ; then

exit 1

fi

echo "No syntax errors found."

exit 0

I store it in ~/bin and usually run it like this:

$ cd project
$ phplint .
No syntax errors found.

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$ cd project

$ phplint .

No syntax errors found.

There are a few interesting bash tricks that I picked up when I wrote this. Firstly, you need to set IFS to break on new line rather than space otherwise the find command doesn't work with spaces in file names. I also discovered… continue reading.

Posted on 13 August 2020 in Development, PHP View all 2 comments

Prevent an external drive from auto mounting on macOS

I have an external drive attached to the USB hub on my Thunderbolt Display that I use to clone my laptop's internal drive every night using the schedule feature of SuperDuper!. At the appointed time, SuperDuper! will mount the external drive, clone the internal drive and then unmount the external drive again which is very convenient. However, whenever I plug in my laptop, the drive automatically mounts. This doesn't particularly worry me, but when I… continue reading.

Posted on 5 August 2020 in Computing, Development One comment so far

Ignoring mass reformatting commits with git blame

I've recently merged a PR by Stephen to rst2df that reformats the entire codebase to align with PEP 8. As rst2pdf is over a decade old, this has resulted in a lot of changes to the files which now have Stephen's name attached. This affects git blame. For example: git blame -L 137,145 rst2pdf/findfonts.py e753c71eb (roberto.alsina 2008-09-05 14:49:24 +0000 137) d56705e4f (roberto.alsina 2009-10-30 15:07:05 +0000 138) # So now we have a font we know… continue reading.

Posted on 8 July 2020 in Development Leave a comment

Converting JSON to a struct in Go

I'm in the process of writing a little command line app in Go that uploads images to Flickr. It's called Rodeo and it's working well as a project with which to learn Go in 2020. Rodeo uses ExifTool to interrogate an image file for meta data. ExifTool is wonderful and very comprehensive and with the -j switch can return JSON. Today I want to note down what I learned about dealing with JSON.

$ exiftool -j -iptc:* -exif:* RKA-glorious.jpeg
[{
  "SourceFile": "RKA-glorious.jpeg",
  "Country-PrimaryLocationName": "United Kingdom",
  "Caption-Abstract": "On a wet gala weekend, Glorious returns after its 2018-19 restoration",
  "Keywords": ["diesel","50 033","Severn Valley Railway","Glorious","railway"],
  "ObjectName": "Glorious Sunrise",
  "ImageDescription": "On a wet gala weekend, Glorious returns after its 2018-19 restoration",
  "Make": "FUJIFILM",
  "Model": "X-T3",
  "ISO": 500,
  "DateTimeOriginal": "2019:10:04 11:50:40",
  "ShutterSpeedValue": "1/1000",
  "ApertureValue": 4.0,
  ...
}]

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$ exiftool -j -iptc:* -exif:* RKA-glorious.jpeg

[{

"SourceFile": "RKA-glorious.jpeg",

"Country-PrimaryLocationName": "United Kingdom",

"Caption-Abstract": "On a wet gala weekend, Glorious returns after its 2018-19 restoration",

"Keywords": ["diesel","50 033","Severn Valley Railway","Glorious","railway"],

"ObjectName": "Glorious Sunrise",

"ImageDescription": "On a wet gala weekend, Glorious returns after its 2018-19 restoration",

"Make": "FUJIFILM",

"Model": "X-T3",

"ISO": 500,

"DateTimeOriginal": "2019:10:04 11:50:40",

"ShutterSpeedValue": "1/1000",

"ApertureValue": 4.0,

...

}]

(For… continue reading.

Posted on 3 June 2020 in Go View all 4 comments

Validating default PHP session ID values

I recently needed to validate the value created by PHP for its session ID. After a bit of research, I realised that there are two interesting php.ini config settings that relate to this value: session.sid_length is the number of characters in the ID session.sid_bits_per_character controls the set of characters used. From the manual: The possible values are '4' (0-9, a-f), '5' (0-9, a-v), and '6' (0-9, a-z, A-Z, "-", ","). Therefore, to validate the session… continue reading.

Posted on 13 February 2020 in PHP View all 7 comments

Turn off foreign key checks when restoring a mysql file dump

I recently received a MySQL dump file where the various tables in it had foreign keys to each other. I usually restore with this command: mysql –login-path=rob < dump.sql but this generated the error: ERROR 1217 (23000) at line 288805: Cannot delete or update a parent row: a foreign key constraint fails It turns out that the easiest way to solve this is to use the –init-command switch to set foreign keys off for this… continue reading.

Posted on 29 January 2020 in Database, Development Leave a comment