I code, therefore I am... a software engineer.

Bash

Dump A MySQL Database To YAML Using PHP

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The Problem

I was recently working on a project that is built on WordPress / BuddyPress. I built up some content using the CMS features of WordPress in my development server and then I transfered the WordPress content to a beta server using the export/import functionality. That kind of stinks having to do that every time I want to push updates to my beta server. So I looked into using Doctrine to generate data fixtures which I could repeatedly run against the different database. Doctrine supports YAML files, which are extremely easy to edit by hand, so it seemed like a good idea.

So what’s the problem? Well, I didn’t currently have any of my data in YAML files. I didn’t want to had edit them or do some sort of copy and paste madness. So, I wrote a script in PHP to dump my data into a YAML file.

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Modify PHP CLI Include Path Dynamically

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I was working with an application platform that I had just downloaded today. I just wanted to check it out and play with it a bit. In the application framework was an executable script that provided some command line utility. I fired up the script and received an error like “PHP Fatal error: require_once(): Failed opening required…”. Of course non of the files from the downloaded archived were in the include path for my system, but I didn’t want to just go adding it to my php.ini file just to play around with it short term. What to do.

Command Line Options

First I wanted to see if there was a command line option that I could pass to PHP to tell it what include_path to use for just this one execution. If you execute the following you’ll see the usage:
php --help
There is no include_path command line option, but there is the -d foo[=bar] option which allows us to modify any of the INI entries by key/value.

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Bash Script Init Style Status Message

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Have you ever wondered how the OK and/or FAILED messages are printed out in the initialization of services on a Linux system during bootup? Well… I have. Anyway, I’ve always thought that it was really cool how the OK and FAILED messages printed out at the same column on the screen and in different colors. So of course I wanted to know how to do that so I could use it in my own scripts.

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How To Create A Bash Install Script

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Have you ever wanted to create an installer program on a Linux system, but didn’t want all the hassle of an actual install builder? I have. I recently had need of a simple, no frills installation that could: ask the user a few questions extract some binary files and do some stuff with those binary …

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