It’s a pretty common need to format an array as a proper comma-delimited string for use in SQL’s “WHERE … IN” clause. Following is a simple solution that demonstrates how closures in PHP 5.3+ make writing such code pretty elegant. A unit-test is included to demonstrate several edge cases: function sql_instring($arr) { if (empty($arr)) {...

Following is a step-by-step guide to installing the latest CouchDB release on Debian Squeeze from sources. Installing Prerequisites $ sudo apt-get update $ sudo apt-get install build-essential $ sudo apt-get install libssl0.9.8 libssl-dev zlib1g zlib1g-dev lsb-base $ sudo apt-get install ncurses-dev libncurses-dev $ sudo apt-get install unixodbc unixodbc-dev xsltproc $ sudo apt-get install libmozjs-dev libmozjs1d...

“REST vs. SOAP” has been an ongoing battle for quite a while, in the tech industry. There is a seemingly upwards trend of the number of open RESTful APIs emerging vs. the SOAP ones. It’s probably safe to conclude that, at least among open APIs, REST is winning. The problem, however is the ambiguity of...

If a server running MongoDB crashed or MongoDB did not get to shut down cleanly for some other reason, you may not be able to start Mongo again, getting “exception in initAndListen std::exception: old lock file, terminating” error in Mongo error log. Fix is actually pretty easy, you just need to locate mongod.lock file and...

Let’s start with setting up a developer account. Please note: “:developername” should be replaced with whatever your unix user name you want to be when developing (“irakli” in my case). ERROR: Loading command: install (LoadError) no such file to load -- zlib Install Latest Nginx From Source: $ sudo apt-get install libc6 libpcre3 libpcre3-dev libpcrecpp0...

Debian Lenny only provides Git 1.5.x out of the box, which is a pretty old git version. Following simple steps show how to update/build git from source: $ sudo apt-get install tcl $ sudo apt-get install tk $ sudo apt-get install python-software-properties $ sudo apt-get install zlib1g-dev $ sudo apt-get install build-essential autoconf $ cd...

We start by installing dotdeb APT repository to get easy access to the latest .deb packages for some of our components like NginX, PHP stack etc. $ sudo su - # echo "deb http://packages.dotdeb.org stable all" >> /etc/apt/sources.list # echo "deb-src http://packages.dotdeb.org stable all" >> /etc/apt/sources.list # echo "deb http://php53.dotdeb.org stable all" >> /etc/apt/sources.list #...

Following instructions were tested on a RackSpace Cloud Server. It should work for any other reasonably configured, mostly bare-bones Debian Lenny and latest Ubuntu (e.g. on other popular hosting options like: SliceHost, Linode etc.). First, let’s install some essentials: $ sudo apt-get update $ sudo apt-get upgrade $ sudo apt-get install build-essential $ gcc -v...

Default bash prompt is limited. Good news is that it’s highly customizable. Personally I have two requirements to bash prompt: I want two levels of folder hierarchy displayed (one is too confusing, full path is too long) I use Git for all my code (when I have it my way), so I want to see...

*Update*: Brew packages have changes so new way of getting things done:\ > brew tap josegonzalez/homebrew-php > brew install php53 --with-mysql --with-fpm > brew install php53-apc *Older instructions*: I am not a fan of MAMP, XAMPP or other pre-packaged Apache/PHP distributions, in general. Ever since OS-X started moving towards being POSIX-compliant operating system and equally...

There are many benefits of using JRuby with Rails, among others: great thread-support via JVM, easy integration with the vast amount of functionality provided by existing Java libraries, streamlined database access and deployment. We have blogged about installing latest Rails with native Ruby and NginX. In the following blog post we will go through the...

Drupal uses extended version of SimpleTest for automated testing. It provides two parent classes for test cases: DrupalWebTestCase and DrupalUnitTestCase. Documentation describes the DrupalWebTestCase as the one appropriate for “typical Drupal tests”. However, a quick look at its setUp method is enough to notice that when this class is used a lot is done at...

Make sure you have epel Yum repo installed, if you don’t: $ sudo rpm -Uvh http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/epel/5/x86_64/epel-release-5-4.noarch.rpm Please note that the above instructions are for a 64-bit architecture, on a 32-bit architecture: $ sudo rpm -Uvh http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/epel/5/i386/epel-release-5-4.noarch.rpm Make sure you have working version of JDK 6 (including the compiler), if not install it by running: $...

This tutorial assumes that you are working with the local account on CentOS 5.x and sudo into root as necessary. Configuring Yum Yum is a popular package manager for CentOS and RedHat Linux distributions. Unfortunately, standard Yum repositories carry significantly outdated packages. Fortunately, there are third-party Yum repositories with more updated LAMP packages which we...