Pragmatism in the real world

QAuth scopes vs user roles

There is a different between scopes and roles. A scope is the abilities that the client requests that the user can then decide if they are going to authorise that client to do those things. A role is the rights that a given user has within the application. Scope examples are "read-name", "read-address", "read-email", 'write-all", etc. Example roles might be "moderator", "user", "administrator", etc. and is used by the app to determine what the user… continue reading.

Writing out the page contents in Playwright

I recently had a problem with a failing Playwright test that only happened when running in Docker. The test that was failing was: let locator = page.locator('a[href="/login"].nav-link'); await locator.click(); await expect(page).toHaveTitle(/Log in/); The test clicks the link to go to /login and then checks that the next page's title contains the text "Log in". Not an especially complicated test, so I was quite surprised when it failed claiming that the title was blank. To work… continue reading.

Running Spectral lint in Gitlab CI

In my Makefile, I check for OpenAPI spec issues with this command: docker run –rm -it -v $(PWD):/tmp stoplight/spectral lint \ –ruleset /tmp/spec/.spectral.yaml /tmp/spec/openapi.yaml When running in GitLab CI, we set the image to stoplight/spectral:latest, and override the entry point so that we can run spectral directly: openapi-lint: stage: test image: name: stoplight/spectral:latest entrypoint: [""] script: – spectral lint –ruleset spec/.spectral.yaml spec/openapi.yaml Note that GitLab's CI running automatically sets the current working directly to the… continue reading.

Docker Compose DNS entries

Sometimes you need some additional DNS entries in your containers. This is how to do it in compose.yaml. Internal entries Within the containers, the name of the container in compose.yaml is resolvable via DNS. Given this compose.yaml: services: web: # … app: # … networks: myapp: driver: "bridge" We can ping web from within the app container. If we need to access the web container using another domain, we add it as a network alias:… continue reading.

Fixing PhpStorm cannot find a local copy of Standard Input Code

Recently, I set up my PHP dev environment to allow me to step debug from unit tests that I run with make unit The relevant parts of Makefile look like this: # Set DEBUG=1 to enable Xdebug ifeq ($(origin DEBUG),undefined) XDEBUG := else XDEBUG := XDEBUG_SESSION=PHPSTORM endif unit: ## Run unit tests docker compose exec php bash -c "$(XDEBUG) vendor/bin/phpunit –testsuite=unit" I can now set a break point and run the unit tests with Xdebug… continue reading.

Installing the SQL Server PHP extension in Docker on Mac

I'm working on a project that uses MS SQL Server as its database. Recently, I noticed that the SQL Server Docker container now works with Apple Silicon Macs, so looked into setting up a PHP-FPM container with the sqlsrv extension installed. I'm noting the relevant parts of my Dockerfile for when I need them again, so this is entirely an aide-mémoire! FROM ubuntu:22.04 # Install PHP as per https://akrabat.com/7126 ## Register the Microsoft package repository… continue reading.

Prevent the Docker container from taking 10 seconds to stop

For one project that I'm working on the PHP-FPM-based Docker container is built from a Ubuntu container with PHP is installed into it. A little like this: FROM ubuntu:22.04 RUN apt-get update && apt-get upgrade -y && apt-get install -y gnupg curl # Register the Ondrej package repo for PHP RUN mkdir -p /etc/apt/keyrings \ curl -sS 'https://keyserver.ubuntu.com/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0x14aa40ec0831756756d7f66c4f4ea0aae5267a6c' | gpg –dearmor | tee /etc/apt/keyrings/ppa_ondrej_php.gpg > /dev/null \ && echo "deb [signed-by=/etc/apt/keyrings/ppa_ondrej_php.gpg] https://ppa.launchpadcontent.net/ondrej/php/ubuntu jammy main" >… continue reading.

Damaged application error when developing for Mac

I've been doing a few updates to Daily Jotter, my little Mac app that's available in the Mac App Store. It's been a little while since I last updated it and a few things have changed. After updating the code to fix deprecation warnings, my immediate problem was that the debug version of the app wouldn't start up and I see this error. I know this error well. It means that my app has exited… continue reading.

Changing port maps in Docker Compose

When using Docker Compose, I often map the ports to local ones in the compose.yaml like this: services: web: build: context: ./docker/web ports: – "8080:80" Adding to the port map If port 8080 is in use already on a developer's machine, then we can add a new mapping using compose.override.yaml services: web: build: context: ./docker/web ports: – "8081:80" The compose.override.yaml file is merged with the compose.yaml file and the effective configuration is now: services: web:… continue reading.

Release process checklist

I recently released a new version of rst2pdf. We don't do this frequently and it would be very easy to get it wrong. As a result, we have a RELEASE_PROCESS.rst document in our repo that provides a step-by-step list of what to do. I can't emphasise enough how useful such a document is and every project should have one and I've used them with client projects too. In general the following items need to be… continue reading.