Jake Worrell » Web application developer

Enabling the MySQL general query log in MAMP

Jake Worrell

June 29, 2012

The MySQL general query log can be handy for getting a more thorough overview of what is going on behind the scenes of your app. particularly if your database logic is abstracted out of the way and you want to see whats going on. The MySQL documentation says the following on the MySQL general query log:

The general query log is a general record of what mysqld is doing. The server writes information to this log when clients connect or disconnect, and it logs each SQL statement received from clients. The general query log can be very useful when you suspect an error in a client and want to know exactly what the client sent to mysqld.

Wise words indeed.

I wanted to enable it in MAMP so I hit the internet. Now this may well be common knowledge for all I know but when I did a google for it I came across a few articles that were out of date. So here’s how I ended up doing it in the end:

Open up /Applications/MAMP/bin/startMysql.sh in your editor of choice
Before the ampersand at the end of the line that kicks off mysqld_safe add the following:

–log=/Applications/MAMP/logs/mysql_general_log

it should end up looking something like this:

/Applications/MAMP/Library/bin/mysqld_safe –port=3306 –socket=/Applications/MAMP/tmp/mysql/mysql.sock –lower_case_table_names=0 –pid-file=/Applications/MAMP/tmp/mysql/mysql.pid –log-error=/Applications/MAMP/logs/mysql_error_log –log=/Applications/MAMP/logs/mysql_general_log &
Save, obviously
Stop and start the servers through the MAMP control panel thingy
Test and celebrate. You could maybe do something like

tail -f /Applications/MAMP/logs/mysql_general_log

so that lots of stuff scrolls past so that you feel like you’re hacking in a movie, Thats what I do.

Be warned however, this has only been enabled on my developing machine for a couple of days and already it is at nearly 800k. It might be wise to clear it once in a while via either a cron job or something similar. I guess log rotate may also be an option.

Version 1.0 of Buildiator

Jake Worrell

February 24, 2012

Evening all!

I have recently had a couple of comments from Graeme from Spot Specific about Buildiator; it turns out they are using the project (which I am chuffed about) and have made their own branch called BigBoard which is just a much better name. It’s always exciting and encouraging to hear about people using Buildiator so if you have been using it please drop me a comment and let me know!

Since a few more people have started using Buildiator I have just added an MIT license (or should that be Licence?) to it and tagged the current version as V1.0. MIT license pretty much gives you free reign to do what you wish, though I’d like to receive a shout out or something if you do use the code.

I have a few changes and additions planned and while I will endeavour not to break it whilst adding features, the best way to be sure everything will be fine is to use the V1.0 tag.

Quick Update

Jake Worrell

October 25, 2011

I have just made a couple of changes to the blog. I have fixed the link to my github profile because like an idiot i forgot to update it when I changed my github username. Also, if you’re looking for a freelance idiot I thought you might need to contact me so I have added a contact form for that very purpose.

In other news there are a few changes in the works with Buildiator; I have received a couple of pull requests from a guy (I presume a guy) in Paris and he (I presume he) says he will be sending a couple more my way soon. I will do a proper post when those have been merged in. I must say I’m delighted to hear that his dev team in Paris are getting some use out of the project. If you are using Buildiator then please let me know either via github or the comments or my new contact form.

I’ve got a few more posts planned as I have been playing with all sorts of interesting stuff, hopefully I’ll get some time to update again soon.

sandwich.js for all your javascript concatenation needs

Jake Worrell

September 18, 2011

Howdy! I can’t believe its only just over a month since I last posted here, it seems like ages. A lot has happened in the last couple of months, but more on that some other time.

I have recently been working on a little side project at home and started to think about deployment and this naturally led me to thinking about how to concatenate and minify JS files. I came across StealJS which kind of already does what I wanted but it also does a lot of stuff that I don’t want. It also seemed to require that certain things were in certain directories. So I decided to throw together my own solution – sandwich.js.

It works similarly to Steal however it requires Node.js on the server side in order to do its concatenation work. Its fairly simple and easy to use, and seems (from a small amount of testing) to work quite well. I will be using it a bit more over the coming weeks so no doubt I will add some new features and fixes.

And there is the small matter of working out how to programatically swap the calls to sandwich.js to the new concatenated script. but thats a problem for another day!

Its over on GitHub as usual – along with some usage instructions.

Updates to Buildiator CI Status Screen

Jake Worrell

August 8, 2011

I have just pushed some minor updates for Buildiator up to Github. These include:

Improved error handling
A friendly error if Jenkins cannot be reached
Added support for the ‘unstable’ status

Here is an updated screenshot with the updated status visible:

Enjoy, any feedback would be greatly appreciated.

Buildiator: Continuous Integration Radiator View

Jake Worrell

June 24, 2011

I thought it was probably about time added a new post to my poor, lonely blog.

Buildiator is a basic “radiator view” for use with continuous integration servers. I threw it together quite quickly but, its a little bit nicer looking than the ones I have seen. It looks like this:

It should work on any php ~5.3 web server. It just supports Jenkins currently and I have no plans to add any others myself at this point in time, but doing so should be quite easy.

It seems to work OK though it hasn’t been exhaustively tested at all, ironically it lacks unit tests. I had created it for my own needs but thought I might as well open it up for anyone to use. You can get it here. Feel free to fork it and do whatever you wish to it, comments are welcome as always.

Megajector: PHP Dependency Injection Experiment

Jake Worrell

October 23, 2010

I have recently been talking with colleagues a lot about dependency injection and how “win” it is – particularly when unit testing. One of the options for easing the pain is to use a service container style thing like sfDependencyInjection. Its a nice idea but it makes my feel uneasy for 2 reasons:

Once you start using it your API starts to depend on the injection container.
It totally breaks the rule of demeter.

So I started playing with Doctrine Annotations to try and create a dependency injection ‘solution’ that can be easily removed. It’s far from perfect and it’s far from complete but I’ve created a repository for it on github with the intention of making it a bit more useful when I get around to it.

I would love to hear any comments or suggestions, and if anyone wants to fork it and have a play then they are more than welcome to! It’s definitely an experiment at the moment so don’t expect anything pretty.

The repository can be found here: Megajector

How to get the internet coding for you

Jake Worrell

March 10, 2010

I witnessed a situation today where a class needed about 8 setters and getters. As far as we could see NetBeans - despite some great features - doesn’t generate getters and setters for PHP (bare in mind that we didn’t look very hard). “there must be something online” I though and I was pleased to find PHP Getter Setter Generator and right away it probably saved us at least 15 minutes and a few copy/paste mistakes. I thought I’d list a couple of online code generators I have come accross recently.

POG (PHP Object Generator)

POG basically generates an ORM class for you based on a form that you fill out on the website. It is mostly aimed at people who need to quickly putt data out of a database and treat it like an object. Personally I would consider alternatives such as Doctrine (currently my favorite) or Propel however there is definitely a place for tools like this and it is probably worth playing with. If you don’t want to use a full ORM like Doctrine and want to get some development started quick POG is probably worth a look.

PHP Getter Setter Generator

PHP Getter Setter Generator serves one simple purpose and as mentioned above saved us time within seconds of us coming across it. As I also mentioned above it also reduces chances of copy/paste errors. Its just a shame it doesn’t automatically generate docblocks for you.

CSS3, Please!

This is something slightly different. Brand new on the ‘scene’ from Paul Irish (of yayQuery and more recently the jQuery dev team) and Jonathon Neal, css3please.com allows you to choose CSS3 features that you want to use and provide the CSS for you to copy and paste into your own stlyesheets without having to worry about the different css syntax for css3 features in different features. It is simple and provides you with a live updating example of the resulting styles. Again this serves a single purpose which I believe is the best approach.

Of course it is up to you whether you think code generation is a good thing or not, personally I believe that in the right situation code generators can be useful time saving tools and are definately worth baring in mind.

5 Cool Features in NetBeans IDE

Jake Worrell

March 5, 2010

Until I switched to Ubuntu as my main development environment a few years ago my favourite IDE for PHP development was E text editor. To be honest, I have never really been 100% happy with an IDE; there always seems to be something missing. In the case of ‘E’ it was the lack of a stable linux version. My Linux favourite lies somewhere between GEdit and Geany however they lack the super cool features you get with a full IDE.

Essentially what I am saying is when it comes to IDEs and text editors I am fickle.

So recently I tried a couple of alternatives. Full IDEs. A colleague of mine, who we shall call Mr Eclipse, used Eclipse. I have always hated Eclipse for some reason and it soon became one of my favorite things to say ‘see, eclipse is crap’ every time he had problems with it (which was fairly frequently). I decided to put my unfair hatred to one side and try it out for myself for a while. Unfortunately something just wasn’t quite right, it seemed slow I found myself going back to GEdit when i actually needed to get some work done, not really a good sign – IDEs are supposed to make life easier after all.

So then I discovered NetBeans and – for now at least – it has become my go-to editor when working on full projects – I still use GEdit for quick note taking (Friday pizza orders for example). So here is a quick list of a few features that I really enjoy about NetBeans along with some super-short videos of them in action. These are the things I show my colleagues when I am attempting to ‘convert’ them. Mr Eclipse is a prime example, since I showed him ‘Local History’ he has been using NetBeans as well and a few more have also started to try it out.

Docblocks

I like documentation, I have to be honest. When I see a nicely laid out class complete with doxygen/PHPdoc style docblocks it just makes life that little bit nicer. Writing the stuff on the other hand is a pain in the backside. NetBeans has a nice feature which helps reduce the monotony a little – if you start to document a function it will automagically add in the attributes for you.

Example of NetBeans Automatic DocBlock Stuff

Picking up PHPdoc/Doxygen documentation

It is all very well having API docs generated from source but what about when you’re in the flow of coding and you can’t bare to switch from your IDE? NetBeans saves the day again by displaying large help tool-tips as you type generated from your docblocks. The best way to understand is to watch the example below, in short though – its cool.

Example of NetBeans Displaying Documentation

Refactor… Rename

Refactoring has been a very a hot topic recently at work, and I believe it to be a highly important discipline for any project that is going to maintained by many people over a long time period. A rename is a simple refactoring admittedly but it is nice to have a feature in your IDE that makes it easy and visible.

Example of NetBeans Refactor… Rename

Automatic Method & Variable Creation

You know how it is, you’re writing some code and you realise that you need to call a function or access a variable that doesn’t yet exist. NetBeans helps out here – it spots a call to a method or a reference to a variable that doesn’t exist yet and non-intrusively offers to create it for you. Not only that, if you supply some attributes in your function call it also takes those into account when creating the code.

Example of NetBeans Automatic Variable Creation

This also works for methods:

Example of NetBeans Automatic Method Creation

Local History

Now this is super awesome; it is basically like having local source control built into your IDE. Essentially it allows you to see a diff between your current code and earlier versions and gives you options for merging and reverting. Everything is nicely laid out and easy to follow and it’s an absolute joy to use when you have just realised that you did need that code you deleted 5 minutes ago after all.

Example of NetBeans Local History (beware, this one is almost 2MB)

So thats your lot! 5 cool NetBeans features. This is by no means all of NetBeans‘ best features and in fact after a few more weeks of using it I might post a follow up with some more. Or maybe I’ll be on to another IDE by then!