workblog » PHP

PHP Error Logs with Virtuozzo

Ian — Mon, 10 May 2010 19:26:03 +0000

Virtuozzo sets domains up to have PHP’s display_errors flag turned off by default, so that you’ll only see a blank page when there are critical errors. This is a good thing in production environments because it avoids potential security issues, but it can also be annoying when you’re trying to debug something.

Instead of displaying the errors, you can configure PHP to log them and then use the logs for debugging. For a Linux environment, you’ll need to create a file named vhost.conf inside the domain’s conf directory, /var/www/vhosts/domain.name/conf.



php_value error_log /var/www/vhosts/domain.name/statistics/logs/php-errors.log
php_flag display_errors off
php_value error_reporting 6143
php_flag log_errors on

Then create the file and assign it the right permissions


cd /var/www/vhosts/domain.name/statistics/logs/
touch php-errors.log
chown apache php-errors.log

And the last thing is to tell Apache to reread the updated conf file


/usr/local/psa/admin/sbin/websrvmng -a

Natural Sorting for MySQL

Ian — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 16:38:02 +0000

MySQL doesn’t provide a way to perform natural sorting on a string, so if you have numbers in your data you may get results like this

Product 110
Product 120
Product 13
Product 140

There are a lot of hacks available, but all of the ones I’ve seen only work in specific circumstances. The only comprehensive solution I found to do the sorting in MySQL is Drupal’s natsort module. You don’t need to be running Drupal to use it, just issue the queries that create the function and it’s dependencies, and you can then call it in your regular queries. But, it requires MySQL 5, so if you’re working on an older server and your data doesn’t work with one of the hacks, then you’ll probably just have to do the natural sorting in your scripting language, using something like PHP’s natsort().

Passing dates and times between PHP and MySQL

Ian — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 21:59:35 +0000

Richard Lord wrote a good article explaining the various ways of handling dates and times with PHP and MySQL.

Installing the Oracle Library for PHP

Ian — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 17:36:59 +0000

Chris Sibert wrote a good tutorial on installing the Oracle library for PHP. If you’re running SELinux, I’d recommend temporarily turning it off to get the module setup so you don’t have to worry about problems during the install, and then turn SELinux back on after you verify the module is working. Then you can update SELinux’s policy to allow Apache and PHP to do everything they need to do.

After you’ve got the module working working you can just put the database server’s hostname and port in the db parameter of oci_connect(), rather than messing with a tnsnames.ora file.


oci_connect('username', 'password', '127.0.0.1:1521/dbname');

Update: The Underground PHP and Oracle Manual has a lot of information on installation, and also a good section on tuning. oci_pconnect() can be used to create a persistent connection to the database server, rather than creating a new one during each script instance.

Home page posts missing when using Pretty Permalinks for Wordpress on IIS

Ian — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 19:12:47 +0000

I’ve been working on a problem recently with the Pretty Permalinks solution for Wordpress on IIS. I was migrating a working Wordpress blog from one server to another and once it was on the new server the front page would come up w/ the theme, but instead of the default posts it would say “Sorry, no posts matched your criteria.” If I reverted to the default ?p=id permalinks everything worked fine, but not with /%postname%. With the %postname% permalinks, any sub pages would work, just not http://example.com/blog. http://example.com/blog/index.php would work, though. I think the problem is because the site was using PHP’s ISAPI module instead of FastCGI. The server I was moving to only had CGI and ISAPI, so instead of using FastCGI I just created a /blog/index.html and set IIS to redirect it to http://example.com/blog/index.php

Blank Page when using IIS Permalink hack

Ian — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 17:44:13 +0000

I use Pretty Wordpress Permalinks on IIS when I need to install WP on a windows server, but on one host I ran into a problem where I would get a blank page if the post didn’t exist instead of the theme’s 404 template. But for some reason it works fine if I just echo something in wp-404-handler.php. I echoed out an HTML comment so it wouldn’t disturb the layout. Here’s my new version of the file:


";
	$qs = $_SERVER['QUERY_STRING'];
	$_SERVER['PATH_INFO'] = $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] = substr($qs, strpos($qs, ':80')+3);
	require_once('index.php');
?>