nerdnotes.org » cakephp

Cakephp logger plugin

Bram — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 09:32:19 +0000

For one of my projects, I wanted to have a live view of the cake log file in the admin page. What started out as some hacked controller methods, turned into a plugin that can be inserted in any random cake app. Ingredients:

a php implementation of the unix tail command, by Paul Gregg
a session variable to keep track of what part of the log file has been sent
some jquery code (using the periodicalupdater plugin) that adds new lines to a div element as they appear in the log file, scrolls down so the new content becomes visible

The online demo consist of a bare cake ‘install’ with the plugin dropped into the plugins directory. As you can see, there’s no models, views or controllers. Visiting the app will actually log some messages to the debug log. To monitor the log file, visit the plugin path.
I’ve also added two links that lets you add lines to the debug log.

The theoretical advantage of using a plugin is that you can simply drop the code in the plugins directory and voila! it works!
In practice, it’s quite annoying that plugins are similar to, but not exactly structured like cake apps. For example: images and js code should be placed in the vendors folder instead of webroot. Secondly: app_model.php and app_controller.php need to be prefixed by the (singular) plugin name.
Finally, it’s not clear how to integrate the plugin with your actual cake app. Like using the app’s authentication methods to only allow ‘admin’ users to view the log file.

I’m actually not sure a plugin is the right way of implementing an online ‘tail -f’. A component might do a better job. What do you think?

Online demo

The plugin can be downloaded here.

Cakeshell

Bram — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 13:04:34 +0000

I’ve written a little wrapper script to ease the execution of cake shells. Just by creating symbolic links, you can turn any custom) cake shell into a shell command that can be called from any location. Ie: you don’t have to cd to your cake app directory. Just make sure the symlink is in your $PATH.
$ ./cakeshell Error: script should be symlinked cakeshell 0.1 - (c)2010 nerdnotes.org


This wrapper script is built in order to ease running cake shells.
Usage:

The script should be located somewhere your cake directory structure.

Make sure you configure the relative path of the cake script from the

directory this script lives in (REL_CAKE_PATH).
For each of the shells you want to be available, create a symlink to

./cakeshell with the name of the cake shell you want to execute
Example*

*using some real world paths here
To simplify the following cake shell call:
./cake/console/cake bake
You'll need to do this once:
cd ~/bin

ln -s ../public_html/cakesite/cakeshell bake
If ~/bin is in your PATH, you can simply run the bake script from anywhere

That’s the output, here’s the script itself.

CakePHP Email component

admin — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 22:11:29 +0000

This is quite a simple component that integrates PHPMailer with CakePHP. Save the following code to /app/controllers/components/email.php

 'phpmailer' . DS . 'class.phpmailer.php'));

/*
    Depends on "unhtml"
*/

class EmailComponent extends PHPMailer
{
	// phpmailer
	var $Mailer = 'sendmail'; // choose 'sendmail', 'mail', 'smtp'
	var $unhtml_bin = '/usr/bin/unhtml';

	// component
	var $controller;

	function startup( &$controller )
	{
		$this->controller = &$controller;
	}

	function renderBody($view)
	{
		// render the view and use its output to set the body text of the email
		$this->Body = $this->controller->render('emails/' . $view, 'email');

		// reset the output of the controller
		$this->controller->output = '';

		// create plain text version of the email
		//
		// create temporary files
		$htmlfile = tempnam(TMP, 'htmlfile');
		$textfile = tempnam(TMP, 'textfile');

		// write html to temporary file
		file_put_contents($htmlfile, $this->Body);

		// convert the html file to plain text
		$cmd = "cat $htmlfile | $this->unhtml_bin > $textfile";
		system($cmd);

		// set the plain text body of the email
		$this->AltBody = file_get_contents($textfile);

		// remove temporary files
		unlink($htmlfile);
		unlink($textfile);
	}
}

?>

In addition to that, make sure phpmailer is installed in /app/vendors/phpmailer. I just extracted the phpmailer archive in /app/vendors/ and created a symlink:
$ tar xzf PHPMailer_v5.0.2.tar.gz $ ln -s PHPMailer_v5.0.2 phpmailer
Usage
In your controller code, make sure the component is included by adding it to the components array:

var $components = array('Email');

In app/views/layouts, create a new layout called email.ctp. It should contain something like:

Let’s send some emails!
In controller snippet, the renderBody(‘test’) call will create a html email from the view in app/views/users/emails/test.ctp. Additionally, a plain text version will be generated using ‘unhtml’. Unhtml has a package in the Ubuntu / Debian repository.
The action works just like rendering a normal view. The $this->Email object is just an instance of PHPMailer and all PHPMailers’ methods and properties apply.

function testmail()
{
	// *Some notes*
	// Email methods:    http://phpmailer.worxware.com/index.php?pg=methods
	// Email properties: http://phpmailer.worxware.com/index.php?pg=properties
	//
	// Email configuration is done in /app/controllers/components/email.php

	$this->set(compact('some', 'vars'));

	// the email content is just a (html) view in app/views/{controller}/emails/testmail.ctp
	$this->Email->renderBody('test');

	// subject
	$this->Email->Subject = 'Test from example.com';

	// sender
	$this->Email->SetFrom('test@example.com', 'Test');

	// recipients
	$this->Email->AddAddress('joe@example.com', 'Joe');
	$this->Email->AddAddress('jane@example.com', 'Jane');

	// send!
	$this->Email->Send();
}

Cakephp ThumbnailHelper

admin — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 17:44:20 +0000

This thumbnail helper is based on the one published by Studio Canaria. Additional features are multiple size caching and an extra method which is a truly drop-in replacement for $html->image().
Usage:

image('picture.jpg', array(
 	'alt' => 'test thumbnail',
 	'width' => '100',
 	'height' => '75'
 	)
 );

// result:
// 

?>

Installation:

Download thumbnail.txt
Rename it to thumbnail.php and place it in /app/views/helpers/
download phpThumb()
Extract the phpThumb archive in a directory named /app/vendors/phpthumb/
Add ‘Thumbnail’ to the ‘helpers’ array your controller
Create a directory named ‘thumbs’ in /app/webroot/img/. Make sure it’s writable for the webserver.

That’s it!
In the above example, the thumb helper will first check if there is a file named /app/webroot/img/thumbs/100×75/picture.jpg. If it isn’t there yet, it will instantiate phpThumb and create the thumbnail.
For more advanced usage, there’s also the render() method. It will give you the flexibility to use images located outside /app/webroot/img and also make use of most of the phpThumb options.
Advanced example:

render(
	$data['Picture']['path'],
	array(
		'w' => 320,
		'h' => 200,
		'ra' => 10
	),
	'5271a9e66c99c84c092d7fd81cebcd57'
);

echo $html->image($thumb);

?>

This will generate a picture named /app/webroot/img/thumbs/320×200/5271a9e66c99c84c092d7fd81cebcd57.jpg, which is a 10 degrees rotated thumbnail of the original image specified with $data['Picture']['path'].

explorerTree demo files

admin — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 15:35:25 +0000

To save you some typing, this archive contains a working example of the tree helper code described in the bakery. The archive includes cake 1.2, three images and jquery. In the js-code, some hard-coded paths were corrected. It also contains a file named tree.sql which contains a dump of the database including some sample data.

cakephp, user_dir and mod_rewrite

admin — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 08:53:17 +0000

Here’s a little note on getting a cakephp app working in your public_html directory. In order to get the mod_rewrite configuration working, add a RewriteBase rule to the .htaccess files in the cakephp source. If your app is located in /home/me/public_html/cakesite/ and the URL to the site is http://host/~me/cakesite you’ll need to change the following .htaccess files:

/home/me/public_html/cakesite/.htaccess
/home/me/public_html/cakesite/app/webroot/.htaccess

Add the following line to these files, just below the line stating “RewriteEnginge On”:

RewriteBase /~me/cakesite/

For example, the first .htaccess file will look like:


	RewriteEngine on
	RewriteBase /~me/cakesite/
	RewriteRule    ^$ app/webroot/    [L]
	RewriteRule    (.*) app/webroot/$1 [L]

Bonus notes with instructions for Debian/Ubuntu systems
You should have mod_rewrite enabled:

$ sudo a2enmod rewrite
$ sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 force-reload

To make sure the use of .htaccess files is actually allowed. In the Directory section of your apache configuration, there should be a line like:

AllowOverride FileInfo

Also, be sure to force-reload Apache after making this change.

Combining Modalbox & CakePHP

admin — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 13:17:44 +0000

I’m pretty sure this can be implemented more elegantly, but I’ll describe my attempt to unite Modalbox with CakePHP 1.2.

First example – a modal box view
This example shows the steps I’ve taken to flavour a freshly baked cake app with modalbox. The starting point is a customer model, a controller and some basic index, view and edit views.
Showing a cakephp view in a modalbox, is just a few snippets away. Just make sure you include prototype, scriptaculous and the modalbox javascript and the modalbox css file in the default layout…

/app/views/layouts/default.ctp:
echo $html->css('modalbox');
echo $javascript->link('prototype');
echo $javascript->link('scriptaculous.js?load=effects');
echo $javascript->link('modalbox');

Then create the appropiate link to the view you want to load inside the modalbox. For example, if you want to show customer details from the customers/index.ctp view:

# ...somewhere in the loop that lists customers:
echo $html->link('View', array('action' => 'view', $customer['Customer']['id']), array('title' => 'Customer details', 'onclick' => "Modalbox.show(this.href, {title: this.title, width: 400}); return false;"));

Make sure you use the RequestHandler component so that the customer view is displayed in the ajax.ctp instead of the default.ctp layout. You can do this by making sure the following line is in /app/app_controller.php:

var $components = array('RequestHandler');

And… there you go! When you click the view link, the modalbox slides in, while the rest of the page dims to gray. When you hit the escape button, click the little ‘X’ or click anywhere in the gray area, the modal box slides back where it came from.

Ok, now forms!

This is where the example pages don’t seem to apply anymore. Or… this is where my concept of AJAX, CakePHP, Modalbox, etc. is fundamentally wrong… you tell me!

By calling an ‘edit’ view instead of the ‘view’ view, you’ve got yourselves a form inside the modalbox! Also very nice!
After submitting the edit form, you’ll get redirected to the index page again. That’s when the form validates.
Wait until you omit a required field. Instead of the index page, you get redirected to the edit form itself rendered in the ajax layout. There’s no single line of code yet that makes sure that the form will end up in the same modalbox.

To solve this, you need to replace the $form->create call in the edit view by $ajax->form. The form, starting with the tag generated by the Ajax helper, will submit using XMLHttpRequest instead of a normal HTTP request. In this way, the modalbox stays open and will be filled with whatever the form returns!

This was the form-helper call:

echo $form->create('Customer');

…and the ajax-helper equivalent:

echo $ajax->form('edit', 'post', array(
    'model'    => 'Customer',
    'url'      => array( 'controller' => 'customers', 'action' => 'edit'),
    'update'   => 'MB_content'
));

In order to make the Ajax helper available in the view, make sure you have included it in the controller:

var $helpers    = array('Html','Javascript', 'Ajax');

I’m still wondering why the calls aren’t a little bit more alike…

This brings us one step closer…. or one step too far??
All content will be rendered inside the modalbox. We need to tell modalbox when it’s not needed anymore. For example, when the form validated.

This can be done with a small javascript function that we define in the Default.ctp layout:

function closeModalbox()
{
	if ($('closeModalbox')) {
		// hide the modal box
		Modalbox.hide();
		// refresh the current page
		location.reload(true);
	} else {
		// resize to content (in case of validation error messages)
		Modalbox.resizeToContent()
	}
	return true;
}

The function checks if there’s a div element with id=”closeModalbox”. If that is the case, it will close the modalbox and refresh the current page. Which, in itself is not so Ajax….(but it works great!)
If it can’t find the div element, it will resize the modalbox to it’s fresh content. To make sure the function is called, we can hook it into the Ajax form by adding the following line to the options array:

'complete' => 'closeModalbox()'

In the edit view, we need to make sure that the closeModalbox-div is echoed conditionally:

if (isset($closeModalbox) && $closeModalbox) echo "";

The $closeModalbox variable is, in his turn set from the controller after the data is successfully saved.

Last, but not least…. it’s relatively simple to be able to fall back to a non-ajax form.

Demo
And since you probably allready lost the overview, here’s the complete source code and…. a demo!

Howto start your CakePHP project in Subversion

Bram — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 22:31:57 +0000

This howto will demonstrate how to start your cakephp project from scratch, taking advantage of subversions “externals definition”. The result will be a basic CakePHP directory structure with only the “/app” part under your svn control and the other directories linked to a specified revision of cakephp. Once setup, if you do a ‘svn chekout’ of your project, you will get all the files at the right location, so no need to merge your ‘/app ‘ with the contents of a tarbal which you downloaded from the CakePHP website.

Let’s get started!

First, we create a temporary directory structure, just for the purpose of importing it:

$ mkdir temp
$ mkdir temp/mynewproject
$ mkdir temp/mynewproject
$ svn import -m "New import" temp file:///home/me/subversion/
# remove the temporary directory structure
$ rm -rf temp

Now, we checkout a working copy:

$ cd ~/src
$ svn checkout file:///home/me/subversion/mynewproject

Ok, this just bought us an empty directory managed by subversion!! Let’s fill it with the use of some magic: Externals. We will create an externals definition for the directory. It will point to the current cakephp1.2 release, which is 5875 at time of writing.

$ cd mynewproject
$ svn propedit svn:externals .

This will fire up your text editor with an empty text file. Type the following line, save and quit:

third-party/cake_1.2.0.5875 -r 5875 https://svn.cakephp.org/repo/trunk/cake/1.2.x.x/

Since this is an actual change to the current directory, we should commit it back to the repository:

$ svn commit -m "Added externals definition for CakePHP 1.2 rev. 5875"

By updating our working copy, the cakephp files will be downloaded to the in the property specified directory:

$ svn update

Wow, that’s nice, isn’t it! Oh… and btw, don’t forget to donate some change to the project!

Let’s go and make some symlinks and a copy of the ‘app’ directory:

$ ln -s third-party/cake_1.2.0.5875/.htaccess
$ ln -s third-party/cake_1.2.0.5875/cake
$ ln -s third-party/cake_1.2.0.5875/index.php
# now create your own copy of the app directory
$ cp -r third-party/cake_1.2.0.5875/app .

Since we don’t need the .svn directories from the cakephp svn checkout. We find and delete them:

$ find app -type d | grep \.svn | sort -r | xargs rm -rf

Finally, add the ‘/app’ directory and the simlinks to our own subversion repository

$ svn add .htaccess app cake index.php
$ svn commit

That should be it!

Remember, when you want to upgrade your CakePHP version. It should be a matter of (a) editing the externals definition on the myproject directory. And (b) re-linking the symbolic links.

‘Compact’ bash prompt

Bram — Mon, 30 Jul 2007 20:47:25 +0000

Especially when working with cakephp, the following line in your .bash_profile script might come in handy:

HOSTCOLOR="31m"
PS1="\u@\[\e[${HOSTCOLOR}\]\h\[\e[0m\]:\w\n\[\e[33m\]\!\[\e[0m\] \$ "

It will print out the current working directory on the first line and the actual bash prompt on the second line. Making it less likely that your command will wrap lines after the first few typed characters.
It changes the command prompt from:

….into:

The login prompt now shows the following info:

username
hostname in red (in my bash script, it will print red for one group of servers and blue for other servers)
current working directory
command history number, ie: use !520 to execute the previous command

CakePHP radio button example

Bram — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 21:06:41 +0000

Thanks Ronnie, for the example! It looks like this useful hint won’t appear in the cakephp documentation any time soon. I think is’t “nerdnoteworthy”:

echo $html->radio(
	'User/admin',
	array(
		'no' => 'No',
		'yes' => 'Yes'),
	null,
	array('value' => 'no')
);