As promised a few times now I have finally got round to modifying the code slightly to remove any Symfony dependencies (Although there might still be some).
This download has been created using version 0.5.0 of the Symfony plugin. An example PHP page “example.php” has been added under the web directory to show the required JS scripts and a quick example of creating a chart using it. More details can be found here: http://www.symfony-project.org/plugins/sdInteractiveChartPlugin
This script is a modified version of the original vhost creator script for nginx posted here (Actually it was a modified version of the original version of this script).
The script below will automatically create a new user on the system and adds the nginx user to the new users group. This allows FTP access to be given to the newly created user and the user will only have access to the their site and not to all vhosts running on your server, however as long as the users group has permission to access the files then nginx will still be able to serve them.
NOTE: This setup only helps lock down access to the vhost directories on a web server hosting only static sites, if CGI of any kind (i.e. PHP) is available then this will also need to be locked down so each user has access to a CGI process or set processes running as that user.
When creating a new Linux EC2 instance on AWS you’re able to pass extra data to the server to be used late in the boot sequence. This can be in the form of a simple bash script, or the URL(s) of a number of scripts. Or the data could simple by a list of parameters you need that instance to know. Full details on the sorts of things you can pass via the “User Data” parameter can be found on Ubuntu Website or details for the AWS build AMI can be found here. (Not all images can be passed User Data, but the standard ones by Amazon can be along with a range of community ones.)
Now if you pass a script or the URL to a script as User Data to your new instance then this will get run for you, and you don’t need to worry about it. However if you pass it a list of parameters (for example you may pass it the Endpoint URI for your RDS instance so the DB settings for your apps can be set up correctly) you need to know how to read the User Data. Along with reading the User Data you may also want to read in Metadata about your new instance, such as its AMI-ID or the public hostname of your instance. Reading the Metadata is done by querying a simple API:
The base URI of all the query’s is: http://169.254.169.254/
Recently when setting up a Symfony project on an Nginx powered server I found the Example configuration script found on the Nginx wiki for Symfony didn’t fully work as expected.
So I modified the example config to produce the following, which as far as I can tell works exactly the same as the default .htaccess file does under Apache.
Setting up virtual hosts on any sort of web server normally takes at least a few minutes and several commands (if you’re not running a control panel of some variety, and even then it normally takes a good number of clicks and checking boxes to get what you want). All of this can be quite annoying when you have to set up several of these a day.
So I put together a simple bash script to quickly provision the hosting for a new static site running on Nginx. The script was originally build for use on the Amazon AMI running on AWS. The script uses the sudo command as the password is not required for the default user on the AWS AMI, however if you are running as a non root user with access to the sudo command then you should be prompted for your password when running the script.
zRSSFeed is a nice little RSS Reader for jQuery which uses Google’s Feeds API to parse the RSS Feed.
However if your RSS URL contains required GET variables you’ll find zRSSFeed will just display: “Feed could not be loaded.” – Or similar (if you’ve changed the default error message). There is however a really easy fix, although you will probably want to make the change in the non-minified version of the source and then re-minify. Change line 46 from:
var api = "http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/services/feed/load?v=1.0&callback=?&q=" + url;
To:
var api = "http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/services/feed/load?v=1.0&callback=?&q=" + encodeURIComponent(url);
This encodes the URL to allow it to be embedded as a GET parameter. (See MDN for more info…)
Edit:
Another thing I noticed with zRSSFeed is it won’t load the feed from Google over SSL if your site is using https. However this is easily fixed just modify the same line as above, from:
var api = "http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/services/feed/load?v=1.0&callback=?&q=" + encodeURIComponent(url);
To:
var api = location.protocol + "//ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/services/feed/load?v=1.0&callback=?&q=" + encodeURIComponent(url);
When Symfony creates an Admin module automatically its default routing setup only allows it to work with an integer based primary key. This means you can’t use a unique varchar column as your primary key, for example. There is however an easy way to solve this and tell Symfony to match other characters in its routing module. All you need to do is update your routing.yml file adding the requirements parameter like so:
user_languages:
class: sfPropelRouteCollection
options:
model: user_languages
module: user_languages
prefix_path: /languages
column: iso
with_wildcard_routes: true
requirements: { id: "[a-zA-Z]+" }
The above pattern will match any number of characters, and won’t worry about the case. However you could make this pattern match anything you wanted, the string must be a valid regular expression pattern the same as you would use for preg_match and similar.
sdInteractiveChartPlugin has been updated to version to 0.3 to fix two little issues:
More info and the download for the plugin can be found here:
http://www.symfony-project.org/plugins/sdInteractiveChartPlugin/0_3_0