Elastic Search is a fantastic, clustered search server built on top of Apache Lucene search engine. It’s very easy to install and configure. However, on some servers, if you follow instructions (which is basically: download, unpack, run: bin/elasticsearch) you may get a weird permission error: $ ./elasticsearch exec: 179: : Permission denied even though there...

It’s not always easy, in PHP, to figure-out which PHP ini files are actually parsed and loaded. CLI may use diff set than web, and if you are using NginX with FPM, there may be yet another set. Following extremely simple piece of code can greatly help to clear-up the confusion: <?php print_r( php_ini_loaded_file() );...

I like Espresso from MacRabbit for server-side scripting a lot. The latest version (2.0) has merged a wonderful code editor with the best-of-the-class CSS editor, giving one awesome, unified experience. And, of course, you can edit your files directly over an SSH connection (the latter, alas, is not as straightforward as it is in Panic’s...

With the increasing popularity of server-side Javascript, you may want to have Javascript everywhere. You can use Javascript outside of a browser, on any platform. There are many choices: you can install Mozilla SpiderMonkey, Google V8 or Mozilla Rhino. If you are like me and use Mac OS-X as your development machine, however, you have...

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...