PHP on Infinite Script

Infinite Servers

Fri, 02 Feb 2024 11:41:27 +0000

Introduction

Infinite Servers is a self-hosted server fleet monitor built around a single design constraint: the agent must run completely unprivileged. Each monitored host installs a PHP script that runs as nobody, reads /proc, and pushes status every 15 seconds to a central dashboard. No root access, no persistent daemon with elevated privileges, no external database server.

This design was motivated by the security risks that plague popular alternatives. Tools like Nezha require agents to run as root, which creates a severe blast-radius problem: if the dashboard is compromised, an attacker can push arbitrary commands to every connected host with full system privileges. Two recent CVEs illustrate just how real this risk is:

Create Unit Testing Cases in Zend Framework

Tue, 03 Mar 2015 02:30:45 +0000

A solid unit test suite is essential for ongoing development in large projects, especially those with many people involved. Going back and manually testing every individual component of an application after every change is impractical. Your unit tests will help alleviate that by automatically testing your application’s components and alerting you when something is not working the same way it was when you wrote your tests.

The Zend Framework 2 API uses PHPUnit, and so does this tutorial application. A detailed explanation of unit testing is beyond the scope of this tutorial, so we will only provide sample tests for the components in the pages that follow. This tutorial assumes that you already have PHPUnit installed.

Create CDN View Helper in Zend Framework 2

Thu, 26 Feb 2015 11:26:08 +0000

In this article, you will learn how to create a custom view helper in Zend Framework 2. A concrete example will be used; a helper which generates links for a subdomain, intended for storing static files. This is especially useful if you wish to use a Content Delivery Network (CDN). With very little modification, the helper can be made generic to support links to subdomains for all purposes.

Note: Zend Framework 2 has reached end of life. In 2019 the project moved to the Linux Foundation and was renamed Laminas, so the Zend\ namespaces below are now Laminas\ (for example Zend\View\Helper\AbstractHelper becomes Laminas\View\Helper\AbstractHelper). The view-helper mechanics are otherwise unchanged, so this post is kept as a historical walkthrough. For a real project, run the namespaces through the Laminas migration guide and follow the current custom view helper docs.

Building and Installing HHVM on CentOS 7

Sat, 14 Feb 2015 09:12:09 +0000

What’s HHVM?

HHVM is an open-source virtual machine designed for executing programs written in Hack and PHP. Instead of interpreting PHP directly, it uses a just-in-time (JIT) compiler to reach much higher throughput while staying compatible with existing PHP code. Facebook, which created HHVM, reported roughly a 9x gain in web request throughput and a 5x drop in memory use over the old PHP 5.2 + APC engine, and back in 2015 HHVM could run most of the popular PHP frameworks out of the box.

TestZilla

Thu, 01 Jan 2015 11:40:00 +0000

Introduction

Crowd testing is a software testing approach where a distributed group of real users, rather than an in-house QA team, tests a product across a wide variety of devices, operating systems, and usage scenarios. The goal is to surface bugs that structured internal testing tends to miss, at a fraction of the cost of a dedicated test lab.

TestZilla is an open-source crowd testing platform designed to connect two parties: hunters (volunteer testers who find and report bugs) and developers (product owners who register their software and receive the reports). Hunters earn points for accepted reports, creating a lightweight incentive loop that encourages quality submissions. The project started as a Spring MVC application and was later fully rebuilt using the Phalcon framework to support a faster continuous delivery workflow.

Build Tengine, MariaDB and PHP on Ubuntu 14.04

Sat, 22 Nov 2014 03:40:35 +0000

Introduction

Nginx is one of the most popular web servers in the world and is responsible for hosting some of the largest and highest-traffic sites on the internet. Tengine is a branch of Nginx which is created by Alibaba Inc.

MariaDB is a database server developed by some of the original authors of MySQL and offers drop-in replacement functionality.

Note: This guide is from 2014 and builds every component from source on Ubuntu 14.04, which has long since reached end-of-life. On a current system you would install Tengine/Nginx, MariaDB, and PHP from the official APT repositories and manage them with systemd instead of the SysV init.d scripts shown below. It’s kept here as a historical walkthrough.

Difference Between require and include in PHP

Fri, 14 Nov 2014 06:33:06 +0000

One of the most common questions I get from PHP beginners is: why are there four different ways to pull one file into another?

There is include, include_once, require, and require_once. They look almost interchangeable, but picking the wrong one can either hide a fatal bug or crash a page that should have kept running.

The four are really just combinations of two independent choices:

include vs require: what happens when the file is missing. include emits a warning and keeps going; require stops the script with a fatal error.
plain vs _once: how many times the file may be loaded. The plain form loads the file on every call; the _once form loads it at most once per request.

One note before we start: despite the parentheses you often see, include and require are language constructs, not functions. Both require 'core.php'; and require('core.php'); work, but the manual recommends the parenthesis-free form, which is what I’ll use throughout.

Sending Email with Zend Framework 2 Using Template

Tue, 07 Oct 2014 08:12:31 +0000

Sending a templated HTML email is a one-liner in some frameworks, but Zend Framework 2 ships no such helper, so you have to wire up the view renderer, the MIME message, and the transport yourself. This post walks through that setup.

Note: Zend Framework 2 has reached end of life. In 2019 the project moved to the Linux Foundation and was renamed Laminas; the Zend\* classes shown below now live under Laminas\* (e.g. Laminas\Mail, Laminas\View). The technique is unchanged, so this post still applies once you swap the namespaces.

WordPress $ is not defined

Thu, 21 Aug 2014 04:29:54 +0000

If you copy a normal jQuery snippet into a WordPress theme or plugin, sooner or later you hit Uncaught ReferenceError: $ is not defined. The confusing part is that jQuery itself is loaded; your other jQuery code may even be working. So why does $ blow up?

Why It Happens

WordPress ships its own copy of jQuery and loads it in no-conflict mode. On startup it effectively runs:

jQuery.noConflict();

noConflict() tells jQuery to give back control of the global $. After it runs, jQuery still points to the library, but $ no longer does; it is left free for some other library to claim.

Zend Framework 2: Get Parameters

Mon, 10 Feb 2014 03:49:35 +0000

The easiest way to read request parameters in a Zend Framework 2 controller is the Params plugin, introduced in beta5. It has utility methods to make it easy to access different types of parameters. As always, reading the tests can prove valuable to understand how something is supposed to be used.

Note: Zend Framework 2 has been deprecated. The project moved to the Linux Foundation in 2019 and lives on as Laminas; the Zend\ namespace became Laminas\, so the plugin shown here is now Laminas\Mvc\Controller\Plugin\Params (in the laminas/laminas-mvc package). The API is unchanged, so the examples below still apply after that rename.

Zend Framework 2: Redirect to 404 page in Controller

Fri, 07 Feb 2014 10:15:43 +0000

I’ve been getting into trouble for several hours with redirecting to the 404 page in Zend Framework 2.

Note: Zend Framework 2 has been deprecated. Zend Framework was migrated to the Laminas Project in 2020, where development continues today. The notFoundAction() technique below still applies in laminas-mvc.

I asked about this on Stack Overflow.

What Didn’t Work

Before that, I was using the following code:

$this->getResponse()->setStatusCode(404);
return;

This sets the HTTP status code to 404, which looks fine at first. But it only changes the response header; it doesn’t dispatch the error controller, so once I built a custom 404 page I found that it never rendered.

Install PHP and PHPUnit on Windows/Ubuntu

Sun, 18 Aug 2013 12:20:05 +0000

Note: This post has been updated for PHP 8.5 and PHPUnit 13. The original 2013 version installed PHPUnit through PEAR (go-pear, pear channel-discover pear.phpunit.de), but PEAR has since been retired and PHPUnit no longer ships through it. The current approach is to install PHPUnit with Composer or as a standalone PHAR, both shown below.

PHPUnit is the de-facto testing framework for PHP. This guide gets PHP and PHPUnit running on Windows and Ubuntu, then writes and runs a first test to confirm the setup works.

Convert Excel Date into Timestamp in PHP

Fri, 05 Apr 2013 08:05:30 +0000

Excel stores a date internally as a number of days since January 1, 1900.
For example: “June 9th, 2011 10:30 AM” would be stored as “40703.4375”.
40703 is the number of full days since 01/01/1900 and 0.4375 represents the time (10.5/24 = 0.4375).

When you process dates read from an Excel spreadsheet (e.g., using PHPExcel) you often want to convert them into a UNIX timestamp, i.e. a number of seconds elapsed since midnight of January 1, 1970 UTC.

Student Management System

Mon, 01 Apr 2013 11:21:00 +0000

Introduction

The Student Management System is a PHP/CodeIgniter web application built for the School of Software at Hefei University of Technology to replace a fully paper-based Comprehensive Evaluation (综合测评): an annual multi-dimensional student assessment covering academic performance, peer review, extracurricular involvement, and community service, used to determine scholarship rankings. According to school news coverage, what previously took over 5 days of manual tallying per cohort was reduced to microsecond-level computation. The project was selected as a National Undergraduate Innovation Training Program (国家级大学生创新训练计划项目) project in 2013.

Use CodeIgniter Resources within Library

Sat, 02 Mar 2013 12:20:46 +0000

To access CodeIgniter’s native resources from inside your own library, use the get_instance() function. It returns the CodeIgniter super object, the same one you reach through $this inside a controller, so your library can load helpers, read config, or call any other class the framework has instantiated.

Note: get_instance() is a CodeIgniter 3.x (and earlier) technique. CodeIgniter 4 dropped the global super object. There you reach framework features through Services, such as service('session') or \Config\Services::session(), or by injecting the dependencies your class needs through its constructor. Everything below applies to CodeIgniter 3.x.

Generate a Random File Name when Uploading Files in WordPress

Mon, 18 Feb 2013 10:00:37 +0000

The passage is telling you how to rename the file name automatically by WordPress (without using any plugins).

A Word of Warning

Warning: To apply this hack, you’ll have to edit one of WordPress’s core files. Keep in mind that it is never recommended. This hack should be redone if you upgrade WordPress.

Editing the Upload Handler

Open the wp-admin/includes/files.php file, and go to line 324 (approximately here). You’ll see the following: