Posted on

PHPUnit, PhpStorm and docker-compose

I wanted to run tests with PHPUnit on a docker environment, which was set up with docker-compose, and use the PhpStorm integration. Since PhpStorm 2013.2 there is a docker intergration which works well for single containers, but unfortunately it does not seem to use the running network of containers. So for example my PHP container does not get access to the MySQL container for integration tests.

If that’s not a problem for you, you will not need what I am going to explain here, read this instead: https://blog.jetbrains.com/phpstorm/2016/11/docker-remote-interpreters/

Continue reading “PHPUnit, PhpStorm and docker-compose”

Posted on

Set up KeePass with KeeAgent on Linux

When migrated my workstation to Linux, one important tool was the password manager. I use KeePass, so there are two options around:

I tried both. On KDE, KeePassX integrates nicer into the Linux desktop while KeePass on Mono looks and feels a bit foreign. But the lack of features like auto open and plugins made me ditch KeePassX quite fast. Two important plugins for me are KeePassHttp, which integrates KeePass with Chrome as password manager, and KeeAgent which automatically registers SSH Keys with passphrases at a running SSH Agent.

Setting up KeeAgent was a bit tricky and all instructions I found on the internet were incomplete, so I’ll share how I did it (on Arch Linux with keepass-plugin-keeagent-beta 0.9.1-1). There are two ways to use the plugin: as client for an existing SSH agent or as standalone SSH agent. I choose client mode to always have an SSH agent available.

Continue reading “Set up KeePass with KeeAgent on Linux”

Posted on

Why I Am Actively Going to Drop PHP 5.3 Compatibility

PHP Supported Versions

It’s simple and elegant, since PHP 5.4 introduced short array syntax:

$everySingleArrayInitializationFromNowOn = [];

Why this step? An alarming large amount of websites still runs on PHP 5.3, which does not get updated anymore since 2014/08/14, after one year of “security only” support. In other words, the next critical security hole will only be fixed for versions above 5.4. By the way, active development of the PHP 5.4 branch was discontinued on 2014/09/14. it’s already in the “security only” phase. On 2014/08/28, PHP 5.6 has been released, on 2013/06/20, almost 1.5 years ago, PHP 5.5.

So, by now, in the year 2014 everybody should work on PHP 5.5, right? That’s the theory, in practice it looks like this:
PHP versions statistics - October 2014 - Pascal MARTIN
Source: http://blog.pascal-martin.fr/post/php-versions-stats-2014-10-en

Almost half of the Alexa Top 1M Sites that run on PHP, state the version 5.3, ca. one quarter even 5.2, which is not supported since Jan. 2011. PHP 5.2.17 even is the most used patch version in this statistic.

There are probably many reasons:

  • “never touch a running system” mentality
  • Not or not sufficiently maintained servers
  • Incompatible frameworks and legacy applications

I want to go into some background briefly.

Continue reading “Why I Am Actively Going to Drop PHP 5.3 Compatibility”

Posted on

Problem: Double Accents (“^^”) in Windows 7

Something you should know: If you are using Windows 7 and get double accents when typing, you might have a serious problem, because it seems like this is a side effect of any activated keyloggers. While it’s nice that these cannot be active entirely unnoticed, it is annoying if you use a program that you want to log your keyboard actions.

In my case, the text expander FastFox was acting as a desired keylogger to supply shortcuts while I typed.