I am using Ubuntu (Hardy Heron) as my primary desktop OS, and I wanted to install some tools for doing development work. At the same time, I thought I might run through the steps and post them for anyone else that might be looking to do the same thing. I’ll walk you through what I am doing, it’s your typical Linux Apache MySQL PHP (LAMP) stack.

First off, you can use sudo to run these install commands as your own local user, by putting sudo before each command, but I find it easier and more concise to simply use sudo to become root and install that way. I will write this article from that perspective, so if you don’t want to do this as root, simply put sudo before each command here.

You can become root by using this command from a terminal session:

sudo su -

Now that we are root, let us install MySQL which will be our database server:

apt-get install mysql-server

Next, let’s install Apache for our web server:

apt-get install apache2

In my case, I am developing in PHP, so we need to install PHP for Apache:

apt-get install php5 libapache2-mod-php5

Last but not least, if you want a nice database manager, get phpMyAdmin:

apt-get install phpmyadmin

If this is not a box that you have KVM (Keyboard, Video, Mouse) access to, and you will be connecting remotely, you will need to install the OpenSSH server so you can ssh into the server. Do this like so:

apt-get install openssh-server

Once installed, you should be able to log into the server with your user account. Please note that by default, you cannot log in as root via ssh. There you have it, now start writing some cool code!

In this post, I’d like to do two things.  First off, I want to plug a really cool site called PortableApps.com that has some really cool software in the form of … well, portable apps.  What these are, are common widely used applications that have been transformed in such a way that they can run right off of your thumb drive, no install necessary, hence the term portable.  They have lots of cool stuff that you can download, absolutely free, and use right off your thumb drive, or hard drive, or anywhere really.  It’s nice being able to have firefox and open office (and much more) with you, no matter where you go, even with all of your own settings and customizations.  That’s hard to beat!  Go check it out, you won’t be disappointed I am sure. Read the rest of this entry »

Anyone that works with MySQL and PHP knows that it’s a good idea to trap and handle errors as a part of making calls to the database. I have seen folk that do it in many different ways, and some that don’t do it at all. It’s a real handy thing to do, especially in the early phases of development. If there is a problem somewhere in your code, good feedback from the application can make troubleshooting much easier. I tend to write functions that make life easier, put them all into a file and then reference that from my pages that actually do the work. In this case, I have a function that will catch and return MySQL errors, along with the query so you can see what is going wrong. First I will show you the function, and then I will show you some usage examples.

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Sometimes we have to generate passwords in our code, no problem. But what about when you need to generate a password that is compatible with the htpasswd command, as in the password is the same as what would be generated by htpasswd? Well, if you are using PHP, you can use this function that I posted in the forums. Check it out …

Sometimes, you have the need to grab the IP address of the current visitor to your site.  I use this for logging actions like comment forms, etc., but also for blocking IPs if there is a need.  Whatever your reason, this is a good chunk of code, in the form of a function you can call, to return the IP address of whoever is loading that page.  Check it out in the forums!

Here is a quick PHP tip that has come in handy for me in times past, it deals with finding the current directory that you are in. I am going to show you how to get two different answers to that question depending on what your needs are. First, let me explain why we would get (or even need for that matter) two different answers. This is because from a PHP page being served up by your web server, there are two current directories from its perspective. One would be the absolute directory to the script, which includes the full path to the root of the web files.

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