dracoblue.net

Shutdown gtat.org

Sun, 06 May 2018 17:23:00 +0200

In 2002 I started an online game (based on Grand Theft Auto III), which became a successful multiplayer gamemode and finally transformed to a samp game mode in 2006 and is still alive and beeing played by thousands of users every month.

Now after 16 years it's time to say goodbye. The site will shutdown on 20th of may 2018. All data will be removed and destroyed.

Use Environment Variables for php.ini Settings in Docker

Mon, 09 Oct 2017 01:05:00 +0200

If you use the official docker image for php and want to modify e.g. max_post_body_size, you might come to the conclusion that adding a custom php.ini might be the only solution.

In terms of the 12factor app manifest, this is kind of disappointing, since they promote usage of environment variables for deployment specific configuration.

When trying to enable my php application to be configurable like this, I found multiple ways how to make this possible and want to share those with you.

Perf-Boost (+85%) for SF/Composer Projects in Docker

Fri, 07 Apr 2017 13:00:00 +0200

Today I was working on a php development environment using docker on MacOSX (you might run into the same problems on windows, too!). The osxfs in Docker for Mac is painfully slow and the company behind docker is actually aware of that. At #77 they track the issue at docker-for-mac right now. At the time of writing the ticket is still open.

If you happen to use symfony as PHP framework or in particular composer as package manager for php projects, you end up with a very big directory called vendor.

In symfony standard edition I am counting 10259 files and folders.

For this blog post I put a vanilla symfony 3.2.7 project at DracoBlue/symfony-composer-docker-performance-test. With this commit I added a docker-compose.yml and a nginx.conf to run app.php on http://app.locahost.me:8080 and app_dev.php on http://dev.locahost.me:8080.

If you run a quick benchmark against app_dev.php:

$ ab -n 1000 -c 16 http://dev.localtest.me:8080/
Concurrency Level:      16
Time taken for tests:   319.303 seconds
Complete requests:      1000
Failed requests:        0
Requests per second:    3.13 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request:       5108.845 [ms] (mean)
Time per request:       319.303 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate:          131.33 [Kbytes/sec] received

you end up with response times for a vanilla symfony project of round about 319ms.

The app.php:

$ ab -n 1000 -c 16 http://app.localtest.me:8080/
Concurrency Level:      16
Time taken for tests:   86.140 seconds
Complete requests:      1000
Failed requests:        0
Requests per second:    11.61 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request:       1378.234 [ms] (mean)
Time per request:       86.140 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate:          54.50 [Kbytes/sec] received

looks better (86ms), but is not very convenient for development.

Let's tune this with a simple trick down to 46ms (-85%) for app_dev.php and down to 9ms (-88%) for app.php.

Hanging subrequests in Nginx

Sun, 09 Oct 2016 00:50:00 +0200

While I was working on lua-native-ssi-nginx (an opinionated lua replacement of nginx's ssi directive), I ran into the following issue:

The proxy_pass requests seemed to hang (or lock) as soon as the response was too big.

Even with nginx in debug mode, I could only see this in the error.log:

2016/10/08 10:47:19 [debug] 31895#0: *1337 http upstream request: "/sub-request?"
2016/10/08 10:47:19 [debug] 31895#0: *1337 http upstream dummy handler
2016/10/08 10:47:19 [debug] 31895#0: *1337 http upstream request: "/sub-request?"
2016/10/08 10:47:19 [debug] 31895#0: *1337 http upstream dummy handler
2016/10/08 10:47:19 [debug] 31895#0: *1337 http upstream request: "/sub-request?"

Building Microservices

Fri, 10 Jun 2016 15:10:00 +0200

When Sam Newman's book (280 pages) on microservices was released in the first month of january 2015, I was already reading a preview edition for some weeks. Having the book as paper version next to my desk, let's me open it once in a while to find a good example for a concept or a piece of software for my microservices day work.

The book is not about indepth knowledge about every part of hosting lots of little connected systems, but gives such an awesome overview about all parts, that I can encourage everybody maintaining or creating systems and libraries to read this book!

Spring Data JPA Reference

Thu, 31 Mar 2016 14:32:00 +0200

After reading the spring boot reference in november, I wanted to know more in depth knowledge of spring data. That's why I read the official spring data jpa reference.

Something new to me is, that you can use _ in spring data repository interface names to give a hint to the query builder. So:

List<Person> findByAddress_ZipCode(ZipCode zipCode);
// resolves to address.zipCode or address.zip.code

Fix DOM Exception 5 invalid character with atob

Mon, 21 Mar 2016 14:35:00 +0100

When I was developing on http://web.twtxt.org I ran into this mysterious javascript error:

InvalidCharacterError: DOM Exception 5: An invalid or illegal character was specified, such as in an XML name.
atobbundle.js:245
(anonyme Funktion)bundle.js:245
emitbundle.js:1119
handlebundle.js:1673
onreadystatechangebundle.js:1465

The source code in question took a base64 encoded content of the github api and converted it with window.atob into an utf8 string.

This worked well except for safari on iOS!

Local Elasticsearch Cluster Status = RED

Mon, 01 Feb 2016 00:09:00 +0100

If you want to check the status of your local single node elasticsearch development server, you can query the cluster stats endpoint at maybe http://localhost:9200/_cluster/health?level=indices.

{
  "cluster_name": "erstmal",
  "status": "red",
  "number_of_nodes": 1,
  "assigned_shards": 4,
  "unassigned_shards": 126
}

If this status shows "red" and you can see lots of unassigned_shards here, you have a problem.

Uploading Snapshots and Releases to Maven Central with Travis

Sun, 31 Jan 2016 11:55:00 +0100

When I was developing on the http-response-headers open source library for spring boot, I was curious how difficult it would be to make this available at maven central. And of course: everything should work automatically with travis ;).

To make your jars available at http://search.maven.org/, you can submit your open source project to "Sonatype OSSRH".

Basically you have 3 steps (OSSRH Guide):

Create a Jira Account at Sonatype
Create a Project Ticket
Deploy to https://oss.sonatype.org/content/repositories/snapshots or https://oss.sonatype.org/service/local/staging/deploy/maven2/. Therefor you need to:
- Modify your pom.xml
- Add build plugins for binaries, javadoc and sources jar files and gpg signing
- Create a gpg key
- Sign your builds
- Integrate this with travis secured environment variables

The steps 1 and 2 took me some minutes and the response of the sonatype staff came a workday later. Nice.

Since I wanted to automate step 3, the following lines are more like a reminder for myself how I got this working. You can follow the following steps to set this up for your self, too.

Versioning for Java Componentes and Libraries

Sat, 09 Jan 2016 15:35:00 +0100

While reading in Chapter 13 "Managing Components and Dependencies" of Continous Delivery (July 2010, Addision Weslay) I asked myself how would one implement this if you implement the components (parts of the system, which change often) and libraries (internal/external parts, which change very seldom) in your own project.

A while back (1) for example contributing to PHPUnit was kinda tricky. You had to git clone the main repository and 11 different component repositorys. If you wanted to change something in these components, you could do that there. If you run continous integration, every change to those components needed to be in git master of those components. But how does one do a release then? Lots of tooling and in the end the release version number was hardcoded (2) and committed.

I am pretty sure that you know of some java project with dependencies, which work in a similar fashion.

When discussing this with my co-workers at exozet, we have been thinking how one approaches these concerns of lean development and safe releases with Java and Maven (or gradle). Of course we are using SemVer 2.0 as semantic versioning strategy. So I want to present an approach, which I infered out of the books example and would like to hear your opinion!