I went with open source package YOURLS. It was pretty easy to [...]]]> A while back I acquired domain, zod.im with intent of setting up my own shortened URL service. While there is nothing wrong with the current offerings by bit.ly or TinyURL, I was academically intrigued by the notion of setting this up.

YOURLS

I went with open source package YOURLS. It was pretty easy to setup and has a nice interface. The documentation didn’t provide me everything I needed, but what it didn’t provide was easily discovered. Examples:

• I don’t install MySQL databases on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis, so I had to go look that back up since the commands weren’t included directly in the setup documentation.
• I front nginx as the web server and chose to look up changes to nginx configuration as the yourls installer provides just content for .htaccess
• I use WordTwit for notifications of posts on this blog to send to Twitter. The current version did not have yourls support, but looks like the next Pro version might have more pluggable solution. So made updates to plugin to use this now.

Installation

Pre-Requisites

• This assumes the starting point of installation already has nginx installed with fastcgi able to interpret php.
• This also assumes MySQL is installed and operational.

MySQL

1. Create the database

mysql> CREATE DATABASE yourlsdb;

2. Create the user & Grant

mysql> CREATE USER 'yourlsdbuser'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'password';

mysql> GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON yourlsdb.* TO yourlsdbuser@localhost;

Install YOURLS

1. Download the code

Check here for the latest version.


$ wget http://code.google.com/p/yourls/downloads/detail?name=yourls-1.5.zip

2. Unzip the code in directory you want as root

$ sudo mkdir -p /var/www/zod.im/web
$ cd /var/www/zod.im/web/
$ unzip <path to>/yourls-1.5.zip

3. Update the configuration

The following is the minimum settings that need to be changed for the private linking to work. Read through the configuration for other changes to consider.

1. Copy the sample configuration

$ cp includes/config-sample.php user/config.php

2. Update the database settings

Use vi or whatever your favorite editor is to edit the new file and follow the information in the file.
Change the database settings.


...
define( 'YOURLS_DB_USER', 'dbuser' );

/** MySQL database password */
define( 'YOURLS_DB_PASS', 'dbpassword' );

/** The name of the database for YOURLS */
define( 'YOURLS_DB_NAME', 'yourls' );

/** MySQL hostname */
define( 'YOURLS_DB_HOST', 'localhost' );
...

3. Update the base site URL

/** YOURLS installation URL, no trailing slash */
define( 'YOURLS_SITE', 'http://example.com' );

4. Update the cookie hash

As the comment shows go here to get a new random hash.


/** A random secret hash used to encrypt cookies. You don't have to remember it, make it long and complicated. Hint: copy from http://yourls.org/cookie **/
define( 'YOURLS_COOKIEKEY', 'qQ4KhL_pu|s@Zm7n#%:b^{A[vhm' );

5. Update the username and password

The username and passwords are in the configuration file with password in clear text. Since this isn’t secure, I recommend not using a password that works anywhere else.


/**  Username(s) and password(s) allowed to access the site */
$yourls_user_passwords = array(
        'username' => 'password',
        'username2' => 'password2'      // You can have one or more 'login'=>'password' lines
        );

Setup Nginx for Rewrite

Edit the nginx configuration for the domain. The configuration of YOURLS provides an .htaccess file with rewrite rules which is fine for Apache, but not so well with nginx.

server {
  server_name www.zod.im www.zodim.com;
  rewrite ^(.*) http://zod.im$1 permanent;
}

server {
    listen   80;
    server_name zod.im;

    access_log /var/log/nginx/zod.im.access.log;
    error_log /var/log/nginx/zod.im.error.log;

    root   /var/www/zod.im/web/;
    index  index.php index.html;

    error_page    404    /404.php;

  location / {
    # If the file exists as a static file serve it directly without
    # running all the other rewite tests on it
    if (-f $request_filename) {
      expires max; 
      break; 
    }

    if (!-f $request_filename){
       set $rule_0 1$rule_0;
    }
    if (!-d $request_filename){
       set $rule_0 2$rule_0;
    }
    if ($rule_0 = "21"){
       rewrite ^/.* /yourls-loader.php last;
    }
  }
  location ~ .php$ {
    set  $script     $uri;
    set  $path_info  "";

    if ($uri ~ "^(.+\.php)(/.+)") {
      set  $script     $1;
      set  $path_info  $2;
    }

    include /etc/nginx/fastcgi_params;
    fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:5555;
    fastcgi_index index.php;

    fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME /var/www/zod.im/web$fastcgi_script_name;
    fastcgi_param  PATH_INFO        $path_info;
    fastcgi_intercept_errors on;

    root /var/www/zod.im/web;
  }

Restart nginx

Go through setup

Open browser and go to the admin page, login and go through initial setup process.

http://example.com/admin/

You get two screens to see. First is initial welcome with button to install. Click this and get the second telling you it has created the database tables.

The second screen may complain about not being able to write the .htaccess file, but since nginx is used, that can easily be ignored.

Conclusion

The process to create your own personal shortening service can take a little as little as 15 minutes with YOURLS. It will probably take longer to figure out your short domain name and acquire it.

I decided to use open source tools as [...]]]> A year ago, my wife, daughter and I visited my wife’s aunt and uncle in Waterford, Michigan area. She signed me up to do a small web site for them to promote the printing business. The printing business has been in the family since 1946.

I decided to use open source tools as much as possible to deliver the site. Long term, I don’t expect to have access to tools I use at work and I actually know I shouldn’t use tools from work to work on external projects. And so, I stayed with open source tools as much as possible.

I set up the website relatively quickly with ruby on rails, but did not launch it for awhile. While I like the ruby on rails approach to rapid development I haven’t used ruby enough to learn the syntax and be productive in it. In the meantime between developing the site and actually launching it, I worked on a project for a client that utilized symfony. This gave me enough opportunity and time to learn php and the symfony framework. So the in-development site was migrated from a ruby on rails to symfony project.

One thing I liked when I set up the rails project was the usage of capistrano to manage the deployment of the application to my slicehost instance. I decided to see how it could work with symfony as well. In the end, I was able to get a good amount of information from the following site. Besides paths and server changes to the configuration presented on the page, I utilize git as version control.

I have found great value in git over subversion. I like the fact that git does not require server software to run. Getting it up and running with just a dedicated user and ssh was a snap. Even better, git doesn’t manage every file with 3 extra files per instance like subversion seems to do. To copy a subversion branch from one server to another takes forever due to all the .svn files. Git can easily be moved around and ability to remove git from a file structure works just as easily.

In the end, I built the very small site, ForbesPrint.com with the following tools:

• php for scripting language
• symfony for php framework
• nginx for web server
• fastcgi for php runtime environment
• git for source control
• gimp for image editing
• slicehost for server hosting utilizing Ubuntu virtual machine
• SpringSource Tool Set for IDE with Aptana Studio plugin for php project support

Now that the basics are in place, I hope to expand the site to better accommodate their needs and growth the business.

As I was in the process of setting up a clean Mac Book Pro, I tried going through this process. I quickly ran into [...]]]> Most web searches for adding the imagick extension to MAMP suggest using MacPorts to install ImageMagick and then use this compiled version as the library to running ‘pecl install imagick’.

As I was in the process of setting up a clean Mac Book Pro, I tried going through this process. I quickly ran into some problems getting the imagick extension running under MAMP. This is a tail of that adventure.

I started with the latest version of MAMP 1.8.4 and MacPorts 1.8.2 installed.
Then installed ImageMagick

$ sudo port install ImageMagick

This went off without a problem. Could then easily run the ‘convert’ program to see if is working. Next step felt like to install imagick extension.

$ cd /Applications/MAMP/bin/php5/bin

And just make sure the right version of PECL is executed via ‘./’ else may get Mac OS X installed or even MacPorts installed version.

$ ./pecl install imagick

The process doesn’t stop with error, but immediately it has gripes about missing header files.

downloading imagick-2.3.0.tgz ...
Starting to download imagick-2.3.0.tgz (86,976 bytes)
.....................done: 86,976 bytes
12 source files, building
WARNING: php_bin /Applications/MAMP/bin/php5/bin/php appears to have a suffix 5/bin/php, but config variable php_suffix does not match
running: phpize

grep: /Applications/ MAMP/bin/php5/include/php/main/php.h: No such file or directory

grep: /Applications/ MAMP/bin/php5/include/php/Zend/zend_modules.h: No such file or directory

grep: /Applications/ MAMP/bin/php5/include/php/Zend/zend_extensions.h: No such file or directory

Configuring for:
PHP Api Version:
Zend Module Api No:
Zend Extension Api No:
configure.in:158: warning: AC_CACHE_VAL(lt_prog_compiler_static_works, ...): suspicious cache-id, must contain _cv_ to be cached
../../lib/autoconf/general.m4:1998: AC_CACHE_VAL is expanded from...
...
aclocal.m4:4641: _LT_AC_TAGCONFIG is expanded from...
Please provide the prefix of Imagemagick installation [autodetect] : 
$

The first problem encountered was simply getting ‘pecl’ to compile the imagick extension as the MAMP distribution does not include the php headers where pecl is expecting them.

There is probably a way to get pecl to pick them up properly, but in the interest of time, one can just create a link from

$ cd /Applications/MAMP/bin/php5

$ ln -s /Applications/MAMP/Library/include include

$ ./pecl install imagick
...
Please provide the prefix of Imagemagick installation [autodetect] : /opt/local
building in /var/tmp/pear-build-mleo/imagick-2.3.0
running: /private/tmp/pear/temp/imagick/configure --with-imagick=/opt/local
...

and provide ‘/opt/local’ when prompted for prefix of Imagemagick installation. Everthing seemed to go well. Finally, modified /Applications/MAMP/conf/php5/php.ini to add

extenstion=imagick.so

And modified /Applications/MAMP/Library/bin/envvars to add

DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH="/Applications/MAMP/Library/lib:/opt/local/lib:$DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH"

Finally ran:

$ /Applications/MAMP/bin/php5/bin/php -i | less

to see if it was enabled. Unfortunately, the imagick module was not listed. After a little investigation, in the php error log was the following entry:

PHP Warning:  PHP Startup: Unable to load dynamic library '/Applications/MAMP/bin/php5/lib/php/extensions/no-debug-non-zts-20060613/imagick.so' - (null) in Unknown on line 0

After some various searching and other, checking what I did wrong, I finally considered the files:

$ file /Applications/MAMP/bin/php5/bin/php
/Applications/MAMP/bin/php5/bin/php: Mach-O universal binary with 2 architectures
/Applications/MAMP/bin/php5/bin/php (for architecture ppc):  Mach-O executable ppc
/Applications/MAMP/bin/php5/bin/php (for architecture i386):  Mach-O executable i386

$ file /Applications/MAMP/bin/php5/lib/php/extensions/no-debug-non-zts-20060613/imagick.so
/Applications/MAMP/bin/php5/lib/php/extensions/no-debug-non-zts-20060613/imagick.so (for architecture x86_64):  Mach-O 64-bit x86_64

So discovered that MAMP is a Universal binary, just not an x86_64 universal binary. So, first, make sure to rebuild imagick.so with i386 binary support and just to be safe, add those settings for the php header files as well.

So, back to the php distribution and run configure setting some flags, although this may not be needed, it can’t hurt.

$ MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET=10.6 CFLAGS="-arch i386 -arch x86_64 -g -Os -pipe -no-cpp-precomp" CCFLAGS="-arch i386 -arch x86_64 -g -Os -pipe" CXXFLAGS="-arch i386 -arch x86_64 -g -Os -pipe" LDFLAGS="-arch i386 -arch x86_64 -bind_at_load"  ./configure --enable-shared

loading cache ./config.cache
checking for Cygwin environment... (cached) no
...

Copy the headers back to MAMP location. And re-run pecl to build universal binary.

$ ./pecl uninstall imagick

$ MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET=10.6 CFLAGS="-arch i386 -arch x86_64 -g -Os -pipe -no-cpp-precomp" CCFLAGS="-arch i386 -arch x86_64 -g -Os -pipe" CXXFLAGS="-arch i386 -arch x86_64 -g -Os -pipe" LDFLAGS="-arch i386 -arch x86_64 -bind_at_load"  ./pecl install imagick

Run php printinfo and

$ /Applications/MAMP/bin/php5/bin/php -i | less

dyld: NSLinkModule() error
dyld: Library not loaded: /opt/local/lib/libMagickWand.2.dylib
Referenced from: /Applications/MAMP/bin/php5/lib/php/extensions/no-debug-non-zts-20060613/imagick.so
Reason: no suitable image found.  Did find:
/opt/local/lib/libMagickWand.2.dylib: mach-o, but wrong architecture

And discover that MacPorts isn’t creating universal binaries.

$ file /opt/local/lib/libMagickCore.2.dylib
/opt/local/lib/libMagickCore.2.dylib: Mach-O 64-bit dynamically linked shared library x86_64

Again, head to the favorite search engine and look at how MacPorts can work with Universal binaries. After some criteria changes came across this simple set of details.

MacPorts provides a variant +universal for all installs that use configure script to initialize build process that will build Universal binaries. The specific architecture has some defaults based on the OS and current hardware.

A bit of pain to add +universal to every port install command, so make +universal, uh, universal it can be added to the /opt/local/etc/macports/variants.conf file as last line:

# To specify global variants to use for all port builds,
# customize this file to list variant settings you want.
#
# Be sure to uncomment/define the variants_conf setting
# in the system wide ${prefix}/etc/macports/macports.conf
# file or in your personal ~/.macports/macports.conf to
# point to this file to enable this feature.
#
# Any variants specified here that are not supported by
# a port will just be ignored. Multiple variants can be
# specified per line, or one per line is also allowed.
#
# Example:
# +ipv6 +no_x11
+universal

And to force a rebuild of anything you have installed

sudo port upgrade --force installed

Finally, we try php again:

$ /Applications/MAMP/bin/php5/bin/php -i | less

...
imagick

imagick module => enabled
imagick module version => 2.3.0
imagick classes => Imagick, ImagickDraw, ImagickPixel, ImagickPixelIterator
ImageMagick version => ImageMagick 6.5.8-0 2010-01-05 Q16 http://www.imagemagick.org
ImageMagick copyright => Copyright (C) 1999-2009 ImageMagick Studio LLC
ImageMagick release date => 2010-01-05
ImageMagick Number of supported formats:  => 194
ImageMagick Supported formats => 3FR, A, AI, ART, ARW, AVI, AVS, B, BGR, BMP, BMP2, BMP3, BRF, BRG, C, CAL, CALS, CAPTION, CIN, CIP, CLIP, CMYK, CMYKA, CR2, CRW, CUR, CUT, DCM, DCR, DCX, DDS, DFONT, DNG, DOT, DPX, EPDF, EPI, EPS, EPS2, EPS3, EPSF, EPSI, EPT, EPT2, EPT3, ERF, FAX, FITS, FRACTAL, FTS, G, G3, GBR, GIF, GIF87, GRADIENT, GRAY, GRB, GROUP4, HALD, HISTOGRAM, HRZ, HTM, HTML, ICB, ICO, ICON, INFO, INLINE, IPL, ISOBRL, JNG, JPEG, JPG, K, K25, KDC, LABEL, M, M2V, M4V, MAP, MAT, MATTE, MIFF, MNG, MONO, MOV, MP4, MPC, MPEG, MPG, MRW, MSL, MSVG, MTV, MVG, NEF, NULL, O, ORF, OTB, OTF, PAL, PALM, PAM, PATTERN, PBM, PCD, PCDS, PCL, PCT, PCX, PDB, PDF, PDFA, PEF, PFA, PFB, PFM, PGM, PICON, PICT, PIX, PJPEG, PLASMA, PNG, PNG24, PNG32, PNG8, PNM, PPM, PREVIEW, PS, PS2, PS3, PSD, PTIF, PWP, R, RADIAL-GRADIENT, RAF, RAS, RBG, RGB, RGBA, RGBO, RLA, RLE, SCR, SCT, SFW, SGI, SHTML, SR2, SRF, STEGANO, SUN, SVG, SVGZ, TEXT, TGA, THUMBNAIL, TIFF, TIFF64, TILE, TIM, TTC, TTF, TXT, UBRL, UIL, UYVY, VDA, VICAR, VID, VIFF, VST, WBMP, WMV, WPG, X, X3F, XBM, XC, XCF, XPM, XPS, XV, XWD, Y, YCbCr, YCbCrA, YUV

Directive => Local Value => Master Value
imagick.locale_fix => 0 => 0
imagick.progress_monitor => 0 => 0

...

Somewhere during this adventure I definitely considered dumping MAMP and using apache, php and mysql from MacPorts but MAMP does generally provide a simple package installation and a GUI for quickly starting and stopping the services.