All posts by Dustin Bolton

AWS, Databases

Connecting to mySQL instance over SSL on Amazon RDS with Sequel Pro

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1. Download the root certificate (bundle) here.
2. Download the intermediate certificate for YOUR instance’s region here.

Open both files in a text editor. Copy the contents of the intermediate certificate to the TOP of the root certificate above the existing contents.

Point Sequel Pro to this file hen selecting the “Key file”. Leave other SSL options blank except for the checkbox enabling SSL.

If you do this wrong you will get an error like:

SSL connection error: ASN: bad other signature confirmation
AWS, PHP, Programming, Technical

Amazon S3 PHP SDK v2 – getCommand() must be of the type array, string given – Solution!

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Catchable fatal error: Argument 2 passed to Guzzle\Service\Client::getCommand() must be of the type array, string given, called in ../_s3lib2/Guzzle/Service/Client.php on line 76 and defined in ../_s3lib2/Guzzle/Service/Client.php on line 79

If you’re getting this error when working with the version 2 PHP SDK for Amazon Web Services’ S3 service, fear not. It’s probably as simple as you passing the wrong parameters into the function. In this example I was calling listObjects() using the old SDK’s parameters rather than the new SDK’s. Simply fix!

Wrong (eg. old SDK v1 way):

$response = self::$_client->listObjects( $settings['bucket'] );

Right (eg. new SDK v2 way):

$response = self::$_client->listObjects( array( 'Bucket' => $settings['bucket'], 'Prefix' => $prefix ) );

All fixed!

Programming

Cordova / Phonegap ios emulate results in a black screen in simulator — SOLUTION

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Problem

Trying to get Cordova to run the simulation of the default sample hello world app you type:
cordova emulate ios

At this point the emulator ran and the simulation was merely a black screen inside the simulator window. After a while the following error eventually was displayed in the console:

The Error

Session could not be started: Error Domain=DTiPhoneSimulatorErrorDomain Code=2 "Simulator session timed out." UserInfo=0x7fd5848179d0 {NSLocalizedDescription=Simulator session timed out.}

Error: /Users/XXXX/XXXX/platforms/ios/cordova/run: Command failed with exit code 1
at ChildProcess.whenDone (/usr/local/lib/node_modules/phonegap/node_modules/cordova/node_modules/cordova-lib/src/cordova/superspawn.js:135:23)
at ChildProcess.EventEmitter.emit (events.js:98:17)
at maybeClose (child_process.js:743:16)
at Process.ChildProcess._handle.onexit (child_process.js:810:5)

Solution

To fix this I reset the permissions on the project directory by right clicking the project directory, clicking “Get Info”, clicking the lock to allow access to edit the settings, selected the “Gear” dropdown and selected “Apply to enclosed items…”. This successfully solved the problem for me so that re-running the emulator with works now.

Javascript, NodeJS, Programming, SailsJS, Technical

Websockets not working on Elastic Beanstalk with NodeJS when using nginx as a proxy

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Amazon Web Service’s default nginx configuration does not have websocket support enabled by default. I am running SailsJS with Socket.io on NodeJS with the default nginx proxy and discovered that websockets were failing to connect. Creating a directory named .ebextensions in the root of my application and a file named 01_files.config within it with the configuration below solved the problem as it instructs nginx to pass websockets through. Just drop this in, deploy your app, and you should be good to go with your websockets functioning.

.ebextensions/01_files.config contents:


files:
    "/etc/nginx/conf.d/websocketupgrade.conf" :
        mode: "000755"
        owner: root
        group: root
        content: |
             proxy_set_header        Upgrade         $http_upgrade;
             proxy_set_header        Connection      "upgrade";

I searched high and low for a solution to this problem and after finding several similar but functioning solutions I combined them to get the above.

Javascript, Programming, Technical, Uncategorized

Deploying first SailsJS node.js app to DigitalOcean using Dokku on Mac

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Here’s a (very) quick and dirty overview of the steps. Follow everything below in order and you should have your node.js app (optionally running SailsJS) deployed on a dokku server on DigitalOcean within a few minutes.

Useful Links:
* Dokku – https://github.com/progrium/dokku
* MariaDB plugin – https://github.com/Kloadut/dokku-md-plugin

Set your SSH key into DigitalOcean if you haven’t already
* cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub | pbcopy
* Paste this key into digitalocean control panel.

Create Droplet

* Select 1GB
* San Fran
* Dokku
* Select your existing SSH key.
* Virtio + backups (maybe virt network if need to connect)

Set up Dokku

* Visit in your browser: http://YOUR-SERVER-IP/
* Submit, optionally setting the app URL to use subdomains. Most settings should default to correct at this point.

Initialize the app access dokku

* cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub | ssh [email protected] "sudo sshcommand acl-add dokku YOUR-APP-NAME"
** Note that if instead of YOUR-APP-NAME you put a full domain it will use that as the URL instead of setting up a subdomain. Eg api.dustinbolton.com instead of dustinbolton-api

Configuring local app

Initialize the local repo if you have not already
* git init && git add -A && git commit -m "Initial commit"

Assign production (or staging) destination:
* git remote add production [email protected]:YOUR-APP-NAME

Create file to tell server what to run on deployment:
* touch Procfile && open Procfile
* Add the following into this new file & save:
* web: sails lift
** For non-sails framework, instead of “sails lift” this would be “node app.js”.

Deploy & launch the app

* git push -u production master
<3>Done!

If you need to manually re-run the app or see the output of the run attempt (such as to troubleshoot):
* ssh [email protected]
cd /home/dokku/YOUR-APP-NAME
dokku run YOUR-APP-NAME sails lift
(or instead of “sails lift”, “node app.js”)

Adapted from the guide at:
http://matthewpalmer.net/blog/2014/02/19/how-to-deploy-node-js-apps-on-digitalocean-with-dokku/

MariaDB (mysql drop-in alternative) plugin:

cd /var/lib/dokku/plugins
git clone https://github.com/Kloadut/dokku-md-plugin mariadb
#git clone https://github.com/musicglue/dokku-user-env-compile.git user-env-compile
dokku plugins-install

Create Database Instance

dokku mariadb:create YOUR-APP-NAME
* This creates the mariadb instance and links it to your app automatically since the name matches. The database name is “db” by default.

You can use the credentials displayed or access them via environmental variables such by: process.env.DB_USER

Setting Custom Environment Variables

Database environment variables should automatically exist but I have seen them drop off. I have not found the cause yet and have decided to manually set the one(s) I need for the time being.
dokku config:set YOUR-APP-NAME DATABASE_URL=whateverhere

If you ever need to restart your app. Only change “YOUR-APP-NAME”:

docker restart `cat /home/dokku/YOUR-APP-NAME/CONTAINER`

HTML, Javascript, Programming, Technical

Programmatically submitting an HTML form via jQuery submit() or trigger(‘submit’) doesn’t work? Solution!

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Say you are trying to submit an HTML form via jQuery. If you’re trying to submit it using .submit() or .trigger(‘submit’) you may have ran into a very strange problem where nothing happens for no reason you can figure out. Here is a very basic example below. Why on Earth is this not working?

[code lang=”js” highlight=”12″]

<script type="text/javascript">

jQuery(‘#my-form-submit’).click( function(e) {
e.preventDefault();
// Do some stuff here…
jQuery( ‘#my-form’).submit();
});

</script>

<form action="?ajax=4" method="post" id="my-form">
<input type="submit" name="submit" value="Submit this form!" id="my-form-submit">
</form>

[/code]

 

Browsers reserve some key words for input names, such as “submit”. As you see in line 12 we have name=”submit”. This simple thing is the problem. Just change name=”submit” to name=”my-submit”:

Does not play nicely with jQuery triggering of submit:
[code lang=”js” highlight=”12″ firstline=”12″]

<input type="submit" name="submit" value="Submit this form!" id="my-form-submit">

[/code]

Works:

[code lang=”js” highlight=”12″ firstline=”12″]

<input type="submit" name="my-submit" value="Submit this form!" id="my-form-submit">

[/code]

Unfortunately browsers offer no error or exlanation to the developer as to why triggering the submit is not doing anything. This can be quite frustrating until you figure this tiny aspect out.

Uncategorized

Error: ER_NO_DB_ERROR: No database selected

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For me this was caused by using the adapter type of ‘sails-mysql’ as the value when setting up the adapter instead of my custom name I made for it matching the definition later in the adapters.js file.

Logic error in mySQL ORM.
{ [Error: ER_NO_DB_ERROR: No database selected] code: ‘ER_NO_DB_ERROR’, index: 0 }
error: Hook failed to load: orm (Error: ER_NO_DB_ERROR: No database selected)

PHP, Programming, Technical

“Uncaught exception Fuel\Core\Database_Exception: No MySQLi Connection”

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Problem

Upon trying to run some migrations in FuelPHP via command line with Oil I ran into this error message containing the error

Uncaught exception Fuel\Core\Database_Exception: No MySQLi Connection

I discovered that when running from the command line my normal php.ini was not being run. PHP was using the defaults, including the default mysql socket which was in the wrong place.

Solution

In my case I created a symlink to redirect which seems to have done the trick. I am running Mamp on OS X in default locations so your directories may differ.

cd /var/mysql

sudo ln -s /Applications/MAMP/tmp/mysql/mysql.sock mysql.sock

There may be a better fix and this may be a symptom of something else being ‘off’.  I initially created a /etc/php.ini with the proper socket location directive but this did not work out properly, possibly due to permissions or something.

Technical

“No input file specified.” with .htaccess on FCGId

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In my case I was trying to get PHP playing nicely with my FuelPHP app running on Apache under FCGId configured via Virtualmin.  My .htaccess looked like:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php/$1 [L]
</IfModule>

The fix was annoyingly simple and took me hours of digging to discover.  Insert a question mark before the slash after index.php like this:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php?/$1 [L]
</IfModule>

Alternatively you can also get it to work WITHOUT adding in the question mark by changing from FCGid to CGI (if configuring via Virtualmin: Server Configuration: Website Options: PHP script execution mode from “FCGId” to “CGI wrapper”) but if you want it to work in FCGid mode you will need the question mark.  I do not know why this is the case though.