Changing Apigility's auth token expiry

By default, the OAuth 2 token that is generated in an Apigility app expires in 1 hour. Upon expiry, the client is expected to use the refresh token to get a new access token. You can see this when you authenticate via a POST to /oauth as you get this response back: { "access_token": "3812aaea7640a2567c66e21e2587450821103552", "expires_in": 3600, "token_type": "Bearer", "scope": null, "refresh_token": "72d5df08c971526a4ba7c83ec2a7b92d82d9715b" } If you need longer than 1 hour, then simply add this… continue reading.

Posted on 29 October 2015 in Apigility

Render an array based on accept header

I'm currently working on an API using Slim 3 and needed a generic way to render arrays to XML, JSON or HTML based on the Request's Accept header. This is just good practice. The Accept header is used by a client to specify the media types that it accepts. Therefore if our client would like XML, I'd like to give it XML. Similarly for JSON. I also like to support an HTML rendering on my… continue reading.

Posted on 22 October 2015 in PHP

Kathy

Today is Ada Lovelace day which exists to highlight the many amazing and talented women in STEM. I'm bending the rules a little as I'm going to talk about Kathy today though she is not in STEM. I've never known anyone so excited by what's new in technology. She has always embraced technology to do her job better, she was one of the first in her office to be assigned a computer (back in the… continue reading.

Posted on 13 October 2015 in Ada Lovelace Day

The beginner's guide to rebasing your PR

You've successfully created a PR and it's in the queue to be merged. A maintainer looks at the code and asks you to rebase your PR so that they can merge it. Say what? The maintainer means that there have been other code changes on the project since you branched which means that your branch cannot be merged without conflicts and they would like to you to sort this out. These are the steps you… continue reading.

Posted on 8 October 2015 in PHP

The beginner's guide to contributing to a GitHub project

This is a guide to contributing to an open source project that uses GitHub. It's mostly based on how I've seen Zend Framework, Slim Framework and joind.in operate. However, this is a general guide so check your project's README for specifics. TL;DR Skip to the summary. Step 1: Set up a working copy on your computer Firstly you need a local fork of the the project, so go ahead and press the "fork" button in… continue reading.

Posted on 22 September 2015 in PHP

On blocking ads

There's been a discussion on Twitter this evening about ad-blockers now that Apple has enabled users of iOS to install ad-blocking plugins into their Safari browser. Note that this is not at the OS level and there is no default ad-blocker. The user has to choose to go to the App Store, install an ad-blocker app and then go to Settings->Safari and enable the app. As we all know, Twitter isn't ideal for conversations requiring… continue reading.

Posted on 17 September 2015 in Me

Simple Ansible file for Z-Ray preview

Recently, Zend made available a Z-Ray Technology Preview which takes the Z-Ray feature of Zend Server and makes it stand-alone. This is very interesting as it means that I can run it with the PHP 5.6 on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS Vagrant set up that I prefer. I decided to create an Ansible playbook to install Z-Ray into my VM. The Z-Ray instructions are clear enough, so it was simply a case of converting them to… continue reading.

Posted on 15 September 2015 in PHP

Improved error handling in Slim 3 RC1

From RC1 of Slim 3, we have improved our error handling. We've always had error handling for HTML so that when an exception occurs, you get a nice error page that looks like this: However, if you're writing an API that sends and expects JSON, then it still sends back HTML: At least we set the right Content-Type and status code! However, this isn't really good enough. We should send back JSON if the client… continue reading.

Posted on 8 September 2015 in PHP, Slim Framework, Slim Framework 3

random_bytes() in PHP 5.6 and 5.5

Last week, I needed some random data and using the power of the PHP manual, came across random_bytes which does exactly what I need. However, it's PHP7 only. As I target both Linux and Windows, I needed to do a bit more work to get it working which was fine, but a minor nuisance given that I know that there's a better way in PHP7. Talking on the #joind.in IRC channel a few days later,… continue reading.

Posted on 1 September 2015 in PHP

Slim-Csrf with Slim 3

In addition to the core Slim framework, we also ship a number of add-ons that are useful for specific types of problems. One of these is Slim-Csrf which provides CSRF protection. This is middleware that sets a token in the session for every request that you can then set as an hidden input field on a form. When the form is submitted, the middleware checks that the value in the form field matches the value… continue reading.

Posted on 25 August 2015 in PHP, Slim Framework, Slim Framework 3