Tag: php code

PHP: Quick and dirty CLI tasks

By Ashish Datta | Leave a Comment on PHP: Quick and dirty CLI tasks

Something that comes up every so often in a sufficiently large PHP project is having to write helper scripts that run on the command line to complete various tasks. It might be periodically processing some images, updating cached analytics, etc. If the project is a Symfony project, it’s usually easy enough to add a Symfony task and be able to leverage the Symfony infrastructure to manage the individual “scripts” as tasks. This is equally true with Drupal, using Drush tasks to manage the individual scripts works well and lets you have a single, central spot for all your “helpers”. But what if its a vanilla PHP project or WordPress?

A technique I’ve started using is to create a class and then add each of the tasks as static functions. This allows you to keep all the tasks in one place, reuse code and configurations, and generally mimic how Symfony tasks and Drush work. From there, the file pulls off $argv to figure out what function to call and just passes $argv in as an argument as well.

Here’s a stub of a class to set something like this up:

Drupal 7: Batch insert nodes with Drush

By Ashish Datta | 3 Comments on Drupal 7: Batch insert nodes with Drush

Well D7 has been out for a little while now and we finally got a chance to use it on a site this week.

Anyway, this site is one of the heavier Drupal sites we’ve done and it involved loading ~200+ nodes of data just to set things up. This presented two problems, how to batch load data and then how to load custom content types with several custom fields.

The Drupal module documentation has example code for adding a node with drupal_exeucte here but it doesn’t deal with how to set custom fields on your content type. On top of this, drupal_execute has been renamed to drupal_form_submit in Drupal 7 and the function signature has changed a bit.

Anyway, I dug around a bit and finally managed to get this working. You’ll obviously need Drush installed for the following code to work but you could rip it out and use it outside a Drush command. I was looking to basically replicate the “load-data” task from Symfony so that I could seed my Drupal database with Nodes at any point so I chose to make this a Drush command.

Here’s what you need:

– You’ll need a module to hold the Drush task. I used Module Builder to generate my scaffolding.
– Create a file named [modulename].drush.inc in your module directory
– Here is the code I’m using for [modulename].drush.inc Replace “cm” with the name of your module:

Thats about it.

With Firebug, it’s really easy to see the field names and the values that you can set by just looking at a form to create whatever type of node you want.

drupal_form_submit can also be used to “submit” any other type of form in Drupal.

An open question is how to “fill out” an ImageField field via the command line since nothing is actually going to be uploaded.

Received problem 2 in the chunky parser

By Ashish Datta | Leave a Comment on Received problem 2 in the chunky parser

I was using cURL in PHP to POST some data to a URL earlier tonight and ran into this problem.

With VERBOSE on cURL was erroring with the following error:

"Received problem 2 in the chunky parser"

After some Googling it turns out this is a problem with how some servers respond with chunked encoding.

A simple fix for this is to set the HTTP version cURL is using to 1.0:

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTP_VERSION, CURL_HTTP_VERSION_1_0 )

It’s not pretty but hey it works!

Google Calender embed missing events

By Ashish Datta | Leave a Comment on Google Calender embed missing events

So we decided to use the Google Calendar API in one of our applications to allow users to easily view and export events from outside the app. In general, the API was working well – I was using the Zend library to interact with Google and things seemed fine.

That was until I tried to embed the calendar using Google’s iframe embed code. For some reason, events weren’t showing up in the embeded iframe calendar even though they were showing up in the actual calendar on calendar.google.com. Even stranger, the events were present in a JSON object on the embeded page and they were showing up in the RSS feed for the calendar.

After literally days of debugging and experimenting I finally found out the culprit.

For some reason, events created via the API that start and end at exactly the same time – say a start date of 08-05-2009 10:00:00 and an end date of 08-05-2009 10:00:00 don’t render on the embeded iframe calendar.

What is even more bizarre is that if you create an event via the web interface that starts and ends at the same time, it will render correctly on an embeded calendar.

Anyway, that was weird. All the events without explicit start and end times now last a grand total of one minute.

PS. Kudos to Daum for finding a constant for PHP’s date() function to generate RFC3339 timestamps.

Use like so:

  $date = date(DATE_RFC3339, $timestamp);

To get back a valid RFC3339 for the Google Calendar API.

FOSS Fridays: OpenSSL in PHP

By Ashish Datta | Leave a Comment on FOSS Fridays: OpenSSL in PHP

Well Twitter has “Follow Fridays” so I thought we should do FOSS Fridays. I don’t really have a plan for this and it might not last but let’s see where it goes.

In the last few days a couple of people have asked for tips on how to use OpenSSL from PHP. So here is a snippet on how to do it. This comes out of an application that provides a shared authentication system between our client’s LDAP system and their partner’s systems.

It works like so:

  1. Users login to the application using their LDAP credentials.
  2. When the users request to visit the partner site, our system packages up their login information, encrypts it, signs it, and shoots it along with the user to the partner site.
  3. Next, the partner checks if the user has an account and if they do it logs them in. Otherwise, it creates them a new account and logs them in.

All of this is done transparently so that the user doesn’t know they’ve actually left the original site.

Here is the code to do it. PS. it’s from a Symfony application.

The net result of all of this is an encrypted payload with the user’s credentials and a signature of the payload. The payload is encrypted with “their” public key and then signed with “our” private key. This ensures that only they can open the package and only we can generate valid signatures.

Happy Friday!