Emran Hasan's Blog

A clean way of integrating PHPUnit 3.5.x with CodeIgniter 2.x

Emran Hasan — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 11:10:51 +0000

Now a days, my default choice of framework is always Zend Framework. However, I have to maintain a couple live projects in CodeIgniter from early days. I feel its very important to have tests around critical applications, so I have attempted a couple times to integrate PHPUnit with CodeIgniter but failed every time – well, until now.

I’ve managed it this time with hooks. It provides a clean way of bootstrapping the framework and then performing tests on the Model layer – for me testing the model layer has been sufficient. The use is very simple as it does not require any change in how a regular CodeIgniter application is built.

Grab the code from github.

Example – /tests/PostTest.php

class PostTest extends PHPUnit_Framework_TestCase
{
private $CI;

public function setUp()
{
$this->CI = &get_instance();
$this->CI->load->database('testing');
}

public function testGetsAllPosts()
{
$this->CI->load->model('post');
$posts = $this->CI->post->getAll();
$this->assertEquals(1, count($posts));
}
}

How it works

The provided PHPUnit bootstrap file sets the CI environment as testing and then loads the framework normally – the code is taken directly from the index.php file.
A display_override hook checks if the environment is set to testing or not and when it is, it refrains from outputting the rendered view file
The PHPUnit test case file now can get a reference of the CI object using the commonly used &get_instance() method and can load models and other libraries as needed.
It is good to have separate database configuration for testing and it might be useful to load the test database with fresh data every time test runs – it can be easily added in the setUp method using the Database Forge classes

Let me know what you think!

To me design is…

Emran Hasan — Sun, 15 Jan 2012 16:16:59 +0000

A great compilation by Vostok Studios on what great designers think about design.

Painless Ruby and Rails installation on Ubuntu/Mint

Emran Hasan — Fri, 03 Jun 2011 05:28:16 +0000

It took me an hour to properly install the latest versions of ruby, rails and its mysql binder. Although its less than a 5 mins task, I had to search in forums, blogs to deal with the various errors. So just posting this so its easy for someone else to get done with this in 5 mins.

1. Open Terminal and install RVM (Ruby Version Manager)

bash < <(curl -s https://rvm.beginrescueend.com/install/rvm)

2. Enter the following in ~/.bash_profile and/or ~/.bashrc (replace YOUR USER NAME with the username you’re logged in with):

[[ -s "/home/YOUR USER NAME/.rvm/scripts/rvm" ]] && source "/home/YOUR USER NAME/.rvm/scripts/rvm" # This loads RVM into a shell session.

3. Install Ruby 1.9.2

rvm install 1.9.2

4. Set it as the ruby version to use through rvm:

rvm use 1.9.2

5. Install latest version of Rails:

gem install rails

6. Install mysql bindings:

sudo apt-get install libmysql-ruby libmysqlclient-dev
gem install mysql

7. Now you should be able to create a rails project with mysql binding:

rails new hello
bundle install

Enjoy!

Setting up central Mercurial server in Ubuntu

Emran Hasan — Sat, 07 May 2011 20:33:32 +0000

It’s been a while since we’ve been thinking about moving to Mercurial from Subversion at our company. We were convinced about the benefits of DVCS and chose Mercurial over Git. However, due to pressure at work and some procrastination, the move was delayed a couple times. Finally, today we had the move and the team is already up to speed with it.

Although it’s quite simple to install it in a central server, the different articles on the web had me confused with too many options or with a different distro than Ubuntu. So, here is a dead simple list of things to do for installing Mercurial centrally for your dev team.

1. Log onto your server using SSH

ssh admin@rbs-server.com

2. Install mercurial from repository:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install mercurial

3. We need to have a directory to store our Mercurial configuration and repository files, so let’s create one and change it’s owner to the apache user so that apache can access them:

cd /var/
sudo mkdir hg
sudo mkdir hg/repos
sudo chown -R www-data:www-data hg/repos

4. We’ll be creating a configuration that will allow us to host multiple repositories in this server. And we’ll be using CGI to serve the files through Apache:

cd /var/hg
sudo cp /usr/share/doc/mercurial/examples/hgweb.cgi .
sudo chmod a+x hgweb.cgi

5. We need to show the location of the config file to the CGI script, so open the file hgweb.cgi with nano or vim to update the line with “config = …” with the following and save it.

config = "/var/hg/hgweb.config"

6. Now let’s create the file /var/hg/hgweb.config and write the location of the repositories:

sudo nano hgweb.config

Enter the following content and save the file:

[collections]
/var/hg/repos = /var/hg/repos

7. As a final step, we’ll need to update the Apache configuration so that it executes the CGI when requested with a /hg prefix:

cd /etc/apache2/sites-available
sudo nano default

At the end of the defaul virtual host configuration and just before the tag, add the following and save it:

ScriptAlias /hg "/var/hg/hgweb.cgi"

AuthType Basic
AuthName "Mercurial repositories"
AuthUserFile /var/hg/hgusers
Require valid-user

8. In order to take effect of the above change, we’ll need to restart apache:

sudo apache2ctl restart

9. Now you should be able to visit the server’s /hg location like http://rbs-server.com/hg from browser. However, you’ll be greeted with a username/password prompt as we’ve enabled that in our apache configuration above. So, lets add some user for our use.

cd /var/hg
htpasswd -mc hgusers admin

It will ask for the password of the user admin twice and after you enter that, it will be stored in the file hgusers. You can add more users in the similar fashion, just ignore the c parameter as it was used to create the file first time:

htpasswd -m hgusers abid
htpasswd -m hgusers saeed
...

10. Now visit the /hg path in your browser and you’ll see the empty list of repositories after you authenticate.

11. By default Mercurial only allows pushing changes through SSL, but in our case it was not necessary. Also, we wanted to give all our developers the push access to the repositories. For that, let’s update the system-wide mercurial configuration file /etc/mercurial/hgrc by adding the following lines at the end of the file and saving it:

[web]
allow_push = *
push_ssl = false

12. Now that all is set, let’s setup a test repository so that we can clone it in our development machine:

cd /var/hg/repos
mkdir test
cd test
hg init

This repository can now be accessed through http://rbs-server.com/hg/test and can be cloned in a development machine with the following command (mercurial must be installed already):

cd /var/www
hg clone http://rbs-server.com/hg/test

Hope this will make someone’s life easy. Enjoy the beauty of Mercurial!

Photo source

2011

Emran Hasan — Fri, 07 Jan 2011 12:29:25 +0000

First, a very happy new year to everybody!!! The last year has showed me the ups and downs of life and I believe 2011 will be a great year. Some of my wishes in 2011 would be:

Re-shaping my company to become a major OSS based company in Bangladesh
Doing something meaningful for my country
Learning Ruby and related frameworks (Rails, Cucumber, etc)
Spending more time my family
Having more fun with my friends
Living a healthy life

Developing better PHP projects

Emran Hasan — Sat, 06 Nov 2010 14:45:25 +0000

I presented this talk yesterday on the phpXperts seminar 2010 – the largest PHP group in Bangladesh. My objective was to give a quick overview on project structure, development practices and use of tools to improve the overall quality of the PHP projects.

So here goes the presentation:

Quick start on new Facebook PHP SDK (IFrame based)

Emran Hasan — Mon, 03 May 2010 20:39:46 +0000

This post is more than 1 year old. It solved the issues when the SDK was first released and facebook had lack of documentation. However, now facebook has very rich set of documnetation and you should follow that instead!

The new Facebook API has already spread over the application developers and if you’re like me, you’ve already got your hands dirty to see how this new thing works. If you have tried to follow the documentation to authorize/get session in your canvas application, it is likely you have already hit roadblocks. Well, I am no savior but I have glued together a few clues and got it working for myself.

I am assuming that you have already created your application by following the Getting Started section from the official documentation. Also, this is for IFrame based applications only.

Enough talking, let’s get some code.

Step 1: Get the new SDK

Download the new SDK from github. We will only need the facebook.php file from the src folder. In our project directory, let’s create a folder called “lib” and put the file there.

Step 2: A configuration file

Let’s now create a configuration file to store our facebook configuration. Let’s name it config.php. Here goes the source:

define("FACEBOOK_APP_ID", '113795715321151');
define("FACEBOOK_API_KEY", '064baf5fb98de050cd7b9a001ca1988b');
define("FACEBOOK_SECRET_KEY", '430f43c01f6dfe02c284b4545976f9ce');
define("FACEBOOK_CANVAS_URL", 'http://apps.facebook.com/emran-test-app/');

Step 3: Application Main Page

This file will be the main entry point to our facebook application. It just instantiates the facebook object, sets the configuration and checks for a valid session. If it does not find a valid session, it redirects to the login page. For first time visitors, it will be the authorization page. On later requests, the operation will occur in the background – without any user interaction.

include_once 'lib/facebook.php';
include_once 'config.php';

$facebook = new Facebook(array(
'appId' => FACEBOOK_APP_ID,
'secret' => FACEBOOK_SECRET_KEY,
'cookie' => true,
'domain' => 'phpfour.com'
));

$session = $facebook->getSession();

if (!$session) {

$url = $facebook->getLoginUrl(array(
'canvas' => 1,
'fbconnect' => 0
));

echo "";

} else {

try {

$uid = $facebook->getUser();
$me = $facebook->api('/me');

$updated = date("l, F j, Y", strtotime($me['updated_time']));

echo "Hello " . $me['name'] . "
";
echo "You last updated your profile on " . $updated;

} catch (FacebookApiException $e) {

echo "Error:" . print_r($e, true);

}
}

You might be wondering – it’s pretty straight-forward, so what’s the catch ? Well, to be honest, the documentation does not have the “canvas” parameter mentioned anywhere which does the primary magic here. Also, if you do not use the javascript trick, then you end up with an authorization dialog with full facebook UI within the iframe itself (see below).

CodeIgniter Version

Here is the CodeIgniter version of the above example. The significance is that CodeIgniter removes the values from the $_GET super global – which is required for the library to work. We thus re-populate it on the constructor ourselves and start a session to share data among subsequent page visits.

include_once APPPATH . 'libraries/facebook-php-sdk/facebook.php';

class Test extends Controller
{
private $facebook;

public function __construct()
{
parent::__construct();
parse_str($_SERVER['QUERY_STRING'], $_GET);
session_start();
}

public function index()
{
$this->facebook = new Facebook(array(
'appId' => $this->config->item('facebook_app_id'),
'secret' => $this->config->item('facebook_secret_key'),
'cookie' => true,
'domain' => 'phpfour.com'
));

$session = $this->facebook->getSession();

if (!$session) {

$url = $this->facebook->getLoginUrl(array('canvas' => 1, 'fbconnect' => 0));
echo "";

} else {

try {

$uid = $this->facebook->getUser();
$me = $this->facebook->api('/me');

$updated = date("l, F j, Y", strtotime($me['updated_time']));

echo "Hello " . $me['name'] . "
";
echo "You last updated your profile on " . $updated;

} catch (FacebookApiException $e) {

echo "Error:" . print_r($e, true);

}
}
}
}

Hope I am able to help a few people.

Cheers!

Enterprise PHP

Emran Hasan — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 12:11:13 +0000

I presented this talk on the Soft Expo 2010 – the largest software fair in Bangladesh. The intention was to clear some of the misconception about PHP, the growth of PHP, how it can fit in the enterprise now, etc.

After these, I shed light on some topics that a company/developer should keep in mind in order to write good software in PHP. This was followed by live session on caching, mysql query optimization, use of Xdebug, etc.

So here goes the presentation:

And a big thanks to Ivo Jansch’s “PHP in the real wolrd” presentation, from where I took inspiration.

Cheers!

Changing the default controller naming convention in CodeIgniter

Emran Hasan — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 06:23:04 +0000

CodeIgniter is one of my favorite framework and I often use it for developing application quickly. Although it is very flexible in most cases, I find its naming convention to be strict. Many times I have faced this problem when my controller’s class name and a model/library’s class names are the same – a Fatal error is inevitable and I have to forcefully change the name of the conflicting class to something less desirable (say from Users to UsersModel). Today I wanted to end this problem.

So I extended the CI_Router core class and made change to the _validate_request method. Now I can name my controller classes in this fashion: UsersController and it resides on the file system as controllers/UsersController.php. If you’ve tried other established frameworks, you should notice that this naming convention is widely used. So, if you have the same need, then just download the MY_Router.php file and put it on your application/libraries folder. That’s it.

Here is how your controller would start:

class UsersController extends Controller
{
public function __construct()
{
parent::__construct();
}
}

If you’d like to have a look at the code, here is the source for quick view:

if ( ! defined('BASEPATH')) exit('No direct script access allowed');

/*
* MY_Router
*
* Extended the core CI_Router class in order to force a different naming
* convention for controllers.
*
*/
class MY_Router extends CI_Router
{
/*
* Suffix in controller name
*
* @var String
*/
private $_suffix = "Controller";

/*
* Call the parent constructor
*
* This is a requirement for extending base CI core class. Just abiding by
* the rules.
*
* @access public
* @return void
*/
public function MY_Router()
{
parent::CI_Router();
}

/**
* Validates the supplied segments. Attempts to determine the path to
* the controller.
*
* @access private
* @param array
* @return array
*/
function _validate_request($segments)
{
// Retain the original segments
$orgSegments = array_slice($segments, 0);

// Add suffix to the end
$segments[0] = ucfirst($segments[0]) . $this->_suffix;

// Does the requested controller exist in the root folder?
if (file_exists(APPPATH.'controllers/'.$segments[0].EXT))
{
return $segments;
}

// OK, revert to the original segment
$segments[0] = $orgSegments[0];

// Is the controller in a sub-folder?
if (is_dir(APPPATH.'controllers/'.$segments[0]))
{
// Set the directory and remove it from the segment array
$this->set_directory($segments[0]);
$segments = array_slice($segments, 1);

if (count($segments) > 0)
{
// Add suffix to the end
$segments[0] = ucfirst($segments[0]) . $this->_suffix;

// Does the requested controller exist in the sub-folder?
if ( ! file_exists(APPPATH.'controllers/'.$this->fetch_directory().$segments[0].EXT))
{
show_404($this->fetch_directory().$segments[0]);
}
}
else
{
// Add suffix to the end
$this->default_controller = ucfirst($this->default_controller) . $this->_suffix;

$this->set_class($this->default_controller);
$this->set_method('index');

// Does the default controller exist in the sub-folder?
if ( ! file_exists(APPPATH.'controllers/'.$this->fetch_directory().$this->default_controller.EXT))
{
$this->directory = '';
return array();
}

}

return $segments;
}

// Can't find the requested controller...
show_404($segments[0]);
}
}

Cheers!

Facebook Developer Garage Dhaka – Open Stream API

Emran Hasan — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 03:26:05 +0000

The first ever “Facebook Developer Garage” took place in Dhaka, Bangladesh and I am proud to be a part of it. I was one of the speakers of this spectacular event organized by Facebook and IBT bangladesh. I spoke about the recently released Open Stream API from Facebook. It was more of an overview rather than a detail one. Here goes the slides:

I have created a quick start example which outlines both Facebook Connect and the Open Stream API. You can check that here. A blog post covering the steps is coming soon in 3-4 days.

Stay tuned if you have interest in them.

Cheers