Deploying Elixir Apps

Recently we started playing with Elixir which is an awesome language bringing quite a few perks in terms of performance, reliability and scalability but also enforcing a mentality shift to functional programming (as compared to OOP as in modern PHP).

When it came to deployment we basically had two options: using exrm releases or just starting the app (that uses Phoenix framework) in production mode.

Internet didn’t tell us much about which option is more useful aside from exrm being the “cooler” one and the rolling update – “easier”, so we tried both, starting with the cool one 🙂 Continue reading

PHPUnit – Integration Tests Console Output

When writing integration tests we have special group of slow tests that do a lot of stuff like performing hundreds of downloads or editing thousands of entries. In some cases one of the actions can trigger fatal error and the message would not be specific enough to determine which of those actions broke everything.

Here is a neat trick to enable any test to show console output, it uses fwrite to write to standard I/O stream: Continue reading

What is “real programming”?

Here is one disturbing read.

“Real programming”? Come on, sure webdev has its share of people who basically install and use content management systems and adjust appearance without implementing any functionality, but developing software that lives on server and can be used by client computers is as real as it gets.

Frameworks do the low level job for us these days, true. Just as C language does low level job so that programmers don’t have to use machine code. The idea of the lower level programming being more real then high level one is just silly and can do real damage as in above post.

Laravel – How To Fix Wrong Domain in Queue Jobs

There is a tricky problem that happens when queued job tries to get the URL (via URL helper or from config) – it doesn’t seem to “notice” the .env / config app.url setting.

The reason is that somehow the queue worker misses the current environment name (might only happen if it is managed system wide via upstart or similar service).

The solution would be to include the –env flag when running queue worker like that: Continue reading

Recover Linux Dual Boot after update to Windows 10

Here’s the problem: I dual boot Windows 7 and Ubuntu 14.04, after deciding to upgrade Windows to 10, I ended up with upgrade partially finished and GRUB going into rescue mode.

That means that Windows messed up GRUB and possibly corrupted Linux’s partition. Here are basic steps I had to take to recover Linux + Windows dual boot (make sure you have a live USB to boot from): Continue reading