Vagrant: ShellProvisioner vs. Chef

In my last blog entry, I demo’d how to get started with Vagrant and the ShellProvisioner. To further illustrate how amazingly simple it is to get started on some Ruby, I’ll convert the shell script from my last blog post to a little recipe for chef. Same objective, we install a PEAR package — but it could be anything really. Follow me. Shell This is the shell script from before:...

June 20, 2012 · 2 min

Vagrant sans Ruby

Development, testing, staging and production — this is how most people devide up different environments for application development. Maintenance and setup of these environments is often not a trivial goal to achieve. Having worked with a couple different code bases and setups over the last decade, I often noticed things like environment specific hacks (if ($env == 'testing') { ... }) in application code and service configurations and a lot of manual labour all around....

June 5, 2012 · 4 min

Deploying PHP applications: PEAR and composer resources for chef

This is something experimental I have been working on for our chef deployments. So the objective was/is to find a sane way to install PEAR packages and install dependencies with composer. execute in chef recipes In chef recipes, almost everything is a resource. In case you’re just getting started with Chef, a list of current resources is available on the Opscode Wiki. It’s a link I put in my browser bar since I frequently work on chef recipes....

February 23, 2012 · 2 min

Twitter bootstrap + Zend_Form = ♥

I dig Twitter’s bootstrap library because as a developer, it helps me produce good looking forms without a lot of effort. Especially when administration interfaces are concerned, you I can only go so far — my first constraint is not being a great designer (to confirm, check out this blog) and two: I don’t like working with ugly interfaces. To cut to the chase… Easybib_Form_Decorator It’s a decorator library for Zend_Form....

October 2, 2011 · 1 min

A roundhouse kick, or the state of PHP

Last week the usual round of PEAR-bashing on Twitter took place, then this morning Marco Tabini asked if PHP (core) was running out of scratches to itch. He also suggests he got this idea from Cal Evan’s blog post about Drupal forking PHP. http://blog.tabini.ca/2011/04/is-php-running-out-of-itches-to-scratch/ http://blog.calevans.com/2011/04/07/four-reasons-why-drupal-should-fork-php/ [Not submitting to your linkbait.] Pecl and PHP So first off — moving libraries from the core to an external repository was done for various reasons....

April 12, 2011 · 7 min