Adding a task/command in Symfony2

By Ashish Datta | 7 Comments on Adding a task/command in Symfony2

I recently took the Symfony2 plunge and started working on a little fun side project (more on that later).

Anyway, this particular project involves sending out daily text messages using the rather awesome Twilio API so I decided to use a Symfony2 task for this. The documentation on how to actually add your own task is a bit sparse so I figured I’d share.

The process is actually pretty straight forward:

  1. In your bundle create a directory named “Command” (without the quotes).
  2. Create a file that extends ContainerAwareCommand
  3. Create a protected function configure – “protected function configure()” to allow you to configure the name of your task and add any options or arguments you might need.
  4. Create a protected function execute – “protected function execute(InputInterface $input, OutputInterface $output)” to actually do whatever needs to be done.
  5. Thats it! Now you can run app/console and you’ll see your task.

Here is the code for mine:

Running Java apps from the crontab

By Ashish Datta | 1 Comment on Running Java apps from the crontab

Earlier this week I was completely dumbfounded by a PHP script that launched a Java app that seemed to work fine when it was run from the command line but kept failing when it was run from a cron.

The Java app in question was “ec2-describe-group” out of the Amazon EC2 API Tools package.  Basically, the ec2-describe-group tool hits the EC2 API and returns information about your account’s currently configured security groups.

The issue I was having was that when the PHP script was launched from a cron ec2-describe-group would keep returning an empty string, but when the script was launched from the CLI ec2-describe-group behaved normally.

After some poking around, I found this StackOverflow post which points out that most the environment variables your shell has aren’t available in a cronjob.

With that in mind, I tried adding JAVA_HOME as well as EC2_HOME to my crontab. Doing this is pretty straight forward, just add these two lines above any of your scheduled jobs:

EC2_HOME=/opt/ec2-api-tools-1.3.36506
JAVA_HOME=/etc/java-config-2/current-system-vm

Unfortunately, this still didn’t resolve the issue. On a whim, I decided to check what type of file ec2-describe-group actually is and discovered that its a Bash script not a Java JAR. Looking at the Bash, the file is actually just executing “EC2_HOME/bin/ec2-cmd DescribeGroups” but it utilizes other environment variables that my cron didn’t have.

For simplicity’s sake, I decided to just switch the PHP script to run ec2-cmd directly and finally everything started working as expected.

Celebrating Symfony2 With One Free Project

By Matt Daum | 1 Comment on Celebrating Symfony2 With One Free Project

Symfony2 was released this past Thursday.  This marks a huge advancement in the framework with tons of new features, better programming patterns, and much better performance.  Symfony2 is now the most popular PHP project on GitHub and contributors are helping better it each day.

Since we are so excited for this release, we are going to take on one small free project for the person or company who submits the best idea and reason for their project.  We’ll be picking the free project within one week of today. Shoot us an email with your project and reason you’d like it done for free.

Congrats to the entire Symfony2 team and we look forward to helping out with it!

Congrats RentPrefs!

By Ashish Datta | Leave a Comment on Congrats RentPrefs!

Last week we launched RentPrefs a new take on renting an apartment. RentPrefs flips the process around by allowing renters to post their preferences and then allowing agents to match them with listings that fit their criteria.

Anyway, yesterday Xconomy did an awesome write up about them so definitely check it out. We also got a nice mention at the end there!

Happy Friday!

Setfive.com v2.0!

By Ashish Datta | Leave a Comment on Setfive.com v2.0!

We started to notice www.setfive.com was starting to show some signs of age so I figured it was time to give it some web 2.0 love. It’s still basically the same site but the HTML+CSS have been modernized, we updated some copy, and added some screenshots to the client page.

Anyway, without further ado check it out at www.setfive.com

I’ve also slowly started updating my Github! First up, check out a Setfive Boilerplate to help your bootstrap projects.