Blog

When reviewing code, a simple first step in checking that it doesn’t include any errors is to run a syntax check. In this post, I outline how to set up tools to scan all the code in a directory for syntax errors, and how to run this scan automatically when committing your code to git. For simplicity’s sake I am assuming that you are running Ubuntu, but the principles apply to any development environment.

PHP

The command line version of PHP (package php7.x-cli) allows you to syntax check a single file:

In this post, I describe how to set up spam filtering rules based on the country that an email was sent from, using SpamAssassin. These notes are based on Debian Buster, but the principles are very similar for other versions of Debian and Ubuntu. If you run a mail server that primarily only receives mail from a few countries, this guide should be very helpful to you in the fight against spam.

In this post, I explain two ways to install Chromium on recent versions of Ubuntu using the apt package manager instead of snap. The post is based on the official Ungoogled Chromium instructions for Ubuntu and a blog post by Andrei Shevchuk

In this post, I provide instructions on setting up automatic WordPress security updates for multiple sites on UNIX-based servers.

The very commonly used mysql_* and ereg* PHP functions were removed in PHP 7. For very large codebases, refactoring the code to remove them just isn't practical. To that end, we have developed a compatibility library to enable existing websites and PHP scripts to keep running under newer PHP versions.

There are fundamental differences between PHP scripts that are run by a web request, and those that are run from the command line. One of the main ones is that the environment settings will be completely different, including the path. Every few years I forget this and it comes back to bite me.

Writing Vietnamese correctly requires diacritics that aren’t commonly used in Western languages. Miss one out and you completely change the meaning of what you’re writing. As I frequently communicate in Vietnamese it’s important to be able to input diacritics, which is a bit of problem since Western keyboards don’t include them. On my own laptop I use IBus to allow me to switch into UniKey mode, but it’s a bit fiddly to set up, and it’s not an option when I’m using a different computer.

Today I had to recover a Debian server after the /var partition was accidentally deleted. All the user generated data (primarily website content and databases) was backed up, and I also had access to a backup copy of the installed package list as generated by dpkg --get-selections. The instructions below don’t go into full detail, but hopefully they will set you on the right track. They should also work for Ubuntu installs.

If this happens to you, don’t panic, and whatever you do, don’t shut down or reboot the server!

In this post, I describe how to upgrade the firmware on an LSI MegaRAID SAS controller to the latest version. Upgrading the firmware is recommended before making certain changes, e.g. installing a battery backup unit. These instructions have been tested on an LSI MegaRAID SAS 9260-4i but should also work for other models using LSI’s 2108 chipset.

In this article I'll walk through how to set up Composer, Drupal 8, and Drush in a way that means we can have multiple users running the same centralised version of Drush when appropriate (ie. when a Drupal site isn't set up as a Composer project, or a project doesn't include its own copy of Drush) which means that our team can keep using Drush seamlessly without having to install a separate copy of Composer and Drush for each user or each project on our servers. This approach should also make it easy to keep things up to date and change the configuration later on if needed.