We needed to catch PHP Fatal Errors in the production environment and notify about it to developers, also at the same time, showing our beautiful fail whale page to user instead of ugly error or a white screen of death.

Here I will show you how to do this in CodeIgniter, though credit for this idea goes to hipertracker.

First of all you will need to setup a hook, so update your hooks.php file with following code

	$hook['pre_system'][] = array(
	    'class'    => 'PHPFatalError',
            'function' => 'setHandler',
            'filename' => 'PHPFatalError.php',
   	    'filepath' => 'hooks'
);

Now put the code shown below in PHPFatalError.php file in your applications hooks folder.

This is the simplifed version of what I have done, so please update handleShutdown function as per your needs.

Only drawback was that it showed just function list and not variables.

And today I found this neat patch of this plugin by Geoffray Warnants which now makes it even better with icons and also showing variable.

Download the patch here (post is in French, scroll down to download the patch)

So here are the steps needed to install PEAR and PHPUnit error free on WAMP.

So let’s start with PEAR, please note my Wampserver is installed on drive ‘H’,  substitute it with your own.

Steps to Install PEAR

1 ) Locate the "php.ini" file. In my case, I found it at this path:

H:\wamp\bin\php\php5.3.0\php.ini

Don’t use the WAMP system tray icon to edit this file.

2 ) Find the following line:

;phar.require_hash = On

3 ) Uncomment the ";phar.require_hash = On" line by removing the semi-colon.

4 ) Change "On" to "Off".

phar.require_hash = Off

5 ) Save the file.

6 ) Now on command prompt type ‘go-pear’

7 ) Select ‘local’ to the question asked.. and follow the instructions.

8 ) Now we need to edit the ‘php.ini’ again to add pear include path. Open ‘php.ini’ that we found in php5.3.0 folder and search for ‘go-pear’, you will see

;***** Added by go-pear
include_path=".;H:\wamp\bin\php\php5.3.0\pear" 

;*****

Copy these three lines and paste it to ‘php.ini’ file which is located at :

H:\wamp\bin\apache\apache2.2.11\bin 

9 ) Restart the apache, and you have PEAR installed on you machine.

But we are not done yet, to use ‘pear’ command in your command prompt from anywhere you will need to modify the windows environment variables.

10 ) Go to control panel –> system  and click on the ‘advanced system settings’ (it is on the left sidebar)

11 ) Click on the environment variables button and new/edit ‘PATH’ variable and add 

‘H:\wamp\bin\php\php5.3.0’

in your path. You also need to add a new variable ‘PHP_PEAR_PHP_BIN’ and set the value to

‘H:\wamp\bin\php\php5.3.0\php.exe’

close you command prompt and open it again for these changes to take effect.

12 ) now type ‘pear’ on the command prompt and you should see pear command help printed for you.

Now that PEAR is installed, let’s install the PHPUnit.

Steps to install PHPUnit

1 ) On ‘C’ drive create a folder named ‘php5’

2 )Then on command prompt type:

 pear upgrade pear

2 ) Once PEAR  is updated, on command prompt type:

 pear channel-discover components.ez.no 

 pear channel-discover pear.phpunit.de

 pear channel-discover pear.symfony-project.com

4 )Finally type:

 pear install --alldeps phpunit/PHPUnit

And with this you should have PHPUnit installed on your system.

In my quest to install PHPUnit I found help from following articles

1. Stackoverflow
2. Wampserver forum
3. Using Zend Framework blog

The idea was that whenever such an exception occur on production we should send an email to developers mailing list so that someone can investigate it.

As usual I did a quick google search and i found two forum posts in CodeIgniter and one on stackoverflow, but they all fall short as CodeIgniter does not set’s any default exception handlers they way it sets the native error handler.

So here is a quick tutorial on how you can do that.

First of all you need to setup a hook, so put following code in hook.php file in config folder.

$hook['pre_controller'][] = array(
                   'class'    => 'ExceptionHook',
                   'function' => 'SetExceptionHandler',
                   'filename' => 'ExceptionHook.php',
                   'filepath' => 'hooks'
                  );

Now I am using pre_controller hook as I wanted to use $CI object which is available at this stage.

Now put the code shown below in the file named ExceptionHook.php in your application’s hooks folder.

Also if you need to capture and email native PHP errors, you can do so by extending the Exceptions library as shown in the code below.

While I have used the simple PHP mail function in the example above, you can use CI’s mail library as well.

If you have any doubts feel free to ask in comments below.

So to make you life simple here is a small script in PHP that does that.

$geocode=file_get_contents('http://maps.google.com/maps/api/geocode/json?address=573/1,+Jangli+Maharaj+Road,+Deccan+Gymkhana,+Pune,+Maharashtra,+India&sensor=false');

$output= json_decode($geocode);

$lat = $output->results[0]->geometry->location->lat;
$long = $output->results[0]->geometry->location->lng;

The line above makes a request to Google maps API. Passes the address, and receives the response in JSON format.

The URL has following options

http://maps.google.com/maps/api/geocode/output?parameters

where output can be 1) JSON or 2) XML

For more details about parameters check out the Google’s geocoding documentation.

MySQL Error - Can't create/write to file '/tmp/#sql_7d3f_0.MYI' (Errcode: 30)

It took me some time to figure out that the error was due to /usr/tmpDSK getting corrupted, and and not really a problem with MySQL or our database as we were thinking all this time, and as usual google came to rescue.

Here are the steps to fix this for cpanel users…  run the following commands in the order mentioned

/usr/sbin/lsof /tmp

/bin/umount -l /tmp

/bin/umount -l /var/tmp

/bin/rm -fv /usr/tmpDSK

/scripts/securetmp

This will create a new /tmp partition for you and the problem will go away. By the way error code 30 means that file system is read only.

Let me describe the problem, I was running a simple xml parsing script whose task was to parse the xml file and insert the content into WordPress database as a post, everything was working fine except the ‘INSERT’ statement was failing with out any errors. Basically everything would run but nothing would get inserted into database and no errors. We had used the ‘wp_insert_post’ function in  ‘post.php’ file to handle the insertion of post, which was returning ‘0’ instead.

After lot’s of time spend checking and cross checking the sql statements for error and PHP code logic, i finally found the problem which was a small kinda cryptic error ‘MySQL server has gone away’ for every single query that was getting executed in the script.

Well, a quick google search took me to MySQL manual page where it list bunch of possibilities on why the error might be coming.

To me the most logical one were

1. 1. You tried to run a query after closing the connection to the server. This indicates a logic error in the application that should be corrected.
   2. A client application running on a different host does not have the necessary privileges to connect to the MySQL server from that host.
   3. You have encountered a timeout on the server side and the automatic reconnection in the client is disabled (the reconnect flag in the MYSQL structure is equal to 0).
   4. You can also get these errors if you send a query to the server that is incorrect or too large.
   5. You are using a Windows client and the server had dropped the connection (probably because wait_timeout expired) before the command was issued.

I investigated each one but it turned out that because a query was taking a bit to long to execute MySQL closed the connection and refused all further request from the client.

So you might be wondering what was the Solution to this problem.

Well Rob of Rob’s notebook had the almost perfect solution for it. He created a replacement file for ‘wpdb.php’ which takes care of this problem, yeah it is temporary and you have to remember to replace this file every time you do an WordPress upgrade but it works.

If you are facing this problem go download it and replace you ‘wpdb’ file and save yourself some time.

It is as if the the media manager buttons has been disabled.

If you were facing these problems it is most probably due to the Flash uploader not working properly with Flash version installed on your system.

Solution:

The simplest solution to fix this issue is to go to,

Global Configuration –> Systems –>Media settings.

And select ‘No’ for ‘Enable Flash Uploader’ setting, and save the settings.

That’s it, this simple. Now go back to you media manager and upload files to your heart’s content.

Then I heard about DVCS and Git. I found solution to one of my big problem, ability to commit code while I am not connected to office network, and share code with my teammates.

Their was only one small problem we didn’t wanted to loose the benefits of centralized repository, and we use Windows  OS( let’s not get into windows vs linux, i will win). So last 3-4 months I was looking for different DVCS systems with better windows support and i experimented with Mercurial (TrototoiseHg is good), but i think Git wins the race of DVCS hands down, and with popularity of GitHub I don’t see much choice here.

And finally I found about git-svn, and I was on my way.

Here are the commands and steps that you can use to manage Git and SVN together.

1. Create a working copy(or actually a git repository ) using

   git svn clone –s <path to ur svn rep, eg https://akjoomgallery.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/>

2. Get the source from svn repository to your git repository using

   git svn fetch

   (only needs to be done first time, it is slow and time consuming process)

3. When you need to update your working copy  you use

   git svn rebase

4. When you need to commit back to svn repository just use

   git svn dcommit

I used above commands in Git bash shell that comes with Git.

Also note their would be time when we have some changes in the Git repository that is not yet ready for commit, but we need to update our repository and Git won’t let you do that, without committing them (rebase will always give error) in such situation you use following set of commands

git stash

git svn rebase

git stash apply

git stash clear

Update:

And if you don’t want to these things manually here is my favourite tool that does that using nice GUI and perfect windows integration TortoiseGit

I have written this a month back before I found TortoiseGit, so this is now just for reference, and to get me back to my blogging.

Have fun.

<script type="text/javascript">
if (top !=self) {
   top.location=self.location;
}
</script>

Just put this code in head section of your html page, and it will ensure that your page always get’s displayed outside the frames.