artodeto's blog about coding, politics and the world

I had the joy to debug a not working contao system line by line.

Why line by line? Because there was no entry in any logs, even with "log all motherfucker"-php.ini values on.

After parsing the lines, I ended up into this error message.

Fatal error: Cannot use 'String' as class name as it is reserved in ... system/modules/core/library/Contao/String.php on line 28

Well, nice to know the error but where was this triggered? So another round with joy and I ended up with an extension, of course installed "by hand" which means not possible to update by the contao updater and this lovely line.

$this->import('String');

After I've changed that line to the following line, all the gizmos where working again.

$this->import('StringUtils');

So, what should you do when you where faced with a 500 Apache Status Code after a contao installation moved from an PHP 5.x runtime environment to a PHP 7.x runtime environment?

cd <project root> grep -ir "import('String');" *

Replace >>import('String');<< with >>import('StringUtil');<< and that is it.

But all would be better if you are not installing extensions by hand.

I was so bored setting up a zend framework application after another that I've created a simple script.

Sharing is caring, so you can find it on github with the lovely repository name phpzendframework_kickstarter.

This repository provides you two scripts to quickly create a new application from scratch (like a breeze and blazing fast within seconds ;-)).

git clone https://github.com/bazzline/php_zend_framework_kickstarter
bash php_zend_framework_kickstarter/create_application /path/to/the/application

See it working and that is it. All mandatory parts are a bash.

I have to maintain a big bunch of repositories with different languages and different language versions.

After some iterations, I came up with a simple idea by using docker for it. To ease up things for any kind of users who have to deal with this code (even qa), the last iteration is to add a "startdockercontainer.sh" script into the repository.

Following an example script for a php repository.
Given is, that the script is located in <project_root>/bin.
Given is, that the docker file exists in <project_root>/data/docker.

#!/bin/bash
####
# Starts a fitting container and creates image if needed.
#
# @todo
####
# @author stev leibelt <artodeto@bazzline.net>
# @since 2018-05-09
####

PATH_OF_THIS_SCRIPT=$(cd $(dirname "$0"); pwd)
DOCKER_IMAGE_NAME='my_php_application'
DOCKER_IMAGE_TAG='0.1.0'

if ! (docker image ls | grep -q "${DOCKER_IMAGE_NAME}\s\+${DOCKER_IMAGE_TAG}")
then
    PATH_TO_THE_DOCKER_SOURCE=$(realpath ${PATH_OF_THIS_SCRIPT}/../data/docker)
    echo ":: We have to build the docker container first."
    echo ":: Please do the following steps first."
    #this is usefull since you have to copy some ssh keys to a path
    # or configure some files.

    read -p ":: Hit <ENTER> to continue."                                                                                                                       

    docker build -t ${DOCKER_IMAGE_NAME}:${DOCKER_IMAGE_TAG} ${PATH_TO_THE_DOCKER_SOURCE}
fi

docker container run --mount type=bind,source="${PATH_OF_THIS_SCRIPT}"/..,target=/application -it ${DOCKER_IMAGE_NAME}:${DOCKER_IMAGE_TAG} /bin/ash

And thats it. If the image is not found on the host, we have to setup things and build the image. Afterwards we start the container and mount the repository code into /applicationof the container.

Defining a column name inside a table definition "database_name" or "table_name" will result in duplicated generated constant definition which will be an evil fail you have to debug for some minutes.

Super hint! Name them "the_database_name" and "the_table_name" :-D.