Tag Archives: tools

21 Jan
2015

Gollum the Git-Enabled Wiki

In trying to get company documentation off google docs and people’s laptops and into a more useful format, I have been researching developer-friendly tools for business documentation. Requirements went something like:
– must handle words and documents
– should be available locally, bonus points for revision history
– must publish to the web, and ideally be editable there
– should accept content in markdown
– must have access control (which wiped out my original plan of using a static site generator)

While I worked on this, we were using the wiki feature in GitLab … which pretty much hit the nail on the head. Further investigation showed that the wiki feature in GitLab (and indeed in GitHub) is a ruby gem called Gollum. Continue reading →

13 Jan
2015

Set Up Your First Hubot

It took me far too long to get my first hubot working; when I finally sat down to get it going the process was much easier than I expected! So here’s a little guide in the hope that this helps you get started too.
Continue reading →
08 Jan
2015

Hubot and Slack

I’m enjoying using hubot to integrate services very easily and both give updates and respond to commands in chat. One of my hubots chats to us in slack rather than in IRC, and there are a couple of gotchas that I wish I’d known about before I started!

  • Hubot will not respond to you in PM, you need to join a channel and then /invite @hubot and your bot will join you in that channel and then respond when you address him/her by name
  • When configuring channel names for slack (I use the gitlab plugin which needs a GITLAB_CHANNEL environment variable), do NOT include a # at the start of it if you use slack – works a treat in IRC, but skip it for slack. I spent quite a while looking for a bug in the slack adapter before I figured this one out so it’s written here for me to look up next time!
  • Also note that your hubot can only speak in channels that it has joined; I have seen hubot actually crash when asked to speak in a channel that exists but which isn’t known to it.

I think this central way of having plugins which can integrate with many messaging platforms on one side, and integrate with many external APIs on the other means we’ll be doing much more in chat ops moving forward. Already I’m impressed by how many of the hosted tools I use have webhooks, although there aren’t hubot plugins for all of them (yet!).

29 Aug
2014

Compiling PHP Extensions

There are lots of reasons why you might like to compile your own PHP extensions. For me those reasons are usually:

  • The extension isn’t available on pecl (e.g. uprofiler)
  • The extension is on pecl, but you need the newest version or a branch with a particular feature or fix in it, perhaps for testing
  • You are fixing an extension yourself (yay, we need more people like you!)

Related: If you followed my previous post on compiling PHP, be aware that in the php/bin/ folder there is a pecl binary that will install extensions correctly for whichever version of PHP it belongs to, so you may not need to read the rest of this post. However if you do, the paths follow on from the examples in that post.

I haven’t seen a really approachable guide anywhere, we tend to speak of extensions in hushed tones, and actually it isn’t particularly tricky so here is my quick how-to guide. Continue reading →

19 Aug
2014

Running Multiple Versions of PHP

When I advise people about upgrading their PHP version, I say things like “just run your test suite with the new version” “just grab the new version and try your site with the built-in webserver”. A couple of people recently have asked for more detail on how to actually achieve these things so here’s a quick primer on getting new PHP without touching anything to do with your existing PHP installation. Continue reading →
01 Jul
2014

Running Pull Request Builds with Jenkins

The joind.in projects are set up so that the build process runs on pull requests when they are opened, which is great! It means that contributors don’t have to wait for one of the maintainers to look at it, only to reject the contribution on something that could be picked up automatically. I’ve had a few questions about the setup so I thought I’d share how it works. Continue reading →
13 May
2014

Easy Lint Check for JavaScript

I’m introducing lint checking on one of my projects, because it didn’t have a build process yet and I love this as a great place to start. Oh, and because we managed to commit broken syntax! So I set up a php lint job (I will share my travis config in another post) and tried to work out doing the same thing for JavaScript. Continue reading →
16 Jul
2013

PSR-What?

There’s been some cool things happening in the PHP world over the last few years, but with the least helpful names ever … yes, those PSR-somethings which all do totally different things (apart from two of them which are the same). They’re actually all superb things, and done for a good reason, so I thought I’d try to translate them into normal speak.

PSR

Let’s begin at the beginning. Once upon a time, at a conference, the lead developers from a selection of frameworks sat down in the same room (they are better at it nowadays, at the time I might not have believed it had I not been there) and agreed some standards for all their projects to use. The aim is to make PHP frameworks and libraries easier to combine for users, and so it was that php-fig: the PHP Framework Interop Group was born. This group of awesome individuals oversee the PHP Standards Recommendations (PSRs). Continue reading →

29 Apr
2013

What Goes in Source Control?

Short answer: everything! However we need some good directory structures and source control configuration to make that a really practical answer, so this article is a quick outline of my usual advice for a good source control structure for a standard web project. The examples are for a PHP project but I’m sure you could apply this to your own language of choice, also. Continue reading →
07 Feb
2013

Endpoints for HTTP Testing

While working on a book (“PHP Web Services” from O’Reilly, not out yet but soon!) recently, I was looking for some place I could make HTTP requests to, to show off how to make different kinds of requests with different tools. On my own machine, I have a couple of scripts that chatter back giving debug information about the requests that were made, but I wanted to get the tools examples going without any additional dependencies at all. I hadn’t used anything like these tools before, but I found quite a few alternatives, so I thought I’d share what I came up with. Continue reading →