Thoughts From a Professional Lesbian
WordPress now lets you add banners to your plugin pages.
Naturally, I added one to Impostercide that reflected my own brand of humor:
Which is now Nacin approved:
https://twitter.com/#!/nacin/status/149884924990734336
Add your own by creating an assets folder in your SVN repo (same level as tags and trunk) and add a file called banner-772x250.jpg (or .png). Make the image 772×250 px, check in your change, wait 15 minutes, and you’re done!
Cron isn’t reliable, since Apple uses launchd. I’m not the only person who grumbles about this. I know cron. I don’t know launchd, having never had a reason to learn it, so this took some doing. And no, I’m not using a GUI app to write this stuff for me, like LingonApp, since ti feel if I do that I won’t learn how it works.
My goal was simple: Update my local copy of an app (WordPress) when I logged into my computer. Obviously this won’t work if I have no access to the Internet, but that’s okay.
I made a file called wordpress.svn.updater.plist and put it in ~/Library/LaunchAgents/
The content of the file is as follows:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd"> <plist version="1.0"> <dict> <key>Label</key> <string>wordpress.svn.updater</string> <key>ProgramArguments</key> <array> <string>svn</string> <string>update</string> <string>/Applications/MAMP/htdocs/</string> </array> <key>RunAtLoad</key> <true/> </dict> </plist>
So basically every time I log in, SVN updates my install of WordPress, which is in /Applications/MAMP/htdocs/ as I’m using MAMP. I tried it with ~/Sites/localhost/ which is an ln link back to the MAMP folder, but according to Console (where I read my error messages), that didn’t work. If I hard coded the path, though, it was fine.
Now that SubVersion is up and running, I decided to make it visible to others via WebSVN. The only reason I’m using WebSVN, which is really cool, don’t get me wrong, is because I can’t get mod_dav_svn and the default apache stuff working with my server.
Go to http://svn.ipstenu.org and you can see my web-version of SubVersion up for you to snag whatever you want.
Installing and configuring this was really easy. I followed the directions. Done. The only tweak was that I had to finagle some Open Basedir settings to let my install talk to SubVersion. But it works, and now you can see what I’m working on.
After some twittering with Mark Waterous, we decided that I probably had an out of date version of SVN. This is not a surprise. My server is CentOS, and they have this weird ‘core’ plugin repository that basically says ‘whatever version of a package we release your OS with is the version you get’. It took some heavy lifting and a stern conversation with yum that I do too want to use rpmforge as a source, but I finally upgraded everything to version 1.4.6 (previously I was on 1.1.x).
And what happened when I tried to reactivate mod_dav_svn
Same damn error!
API module structure 'dav_svn_module' in file /usr/lib/httpd/modules/mod_dav_svn.so is garbled - expected signature 41503232 but saw 41503230 - perhaps this is not an Apache module DSO, or was compiled for a different Apache version?
I took a step back and decided to make sure SubVersion really was working on my server. After a couple hours of wrangling, I determined it was. In fact, it’s working fine. For a while I had svnserve running and you could see it up on a website. But it still wouldn’t let me check in or out files from my PC at work (I had to do it all via command line on the server). That’s not what I want.
So why won’t dav_svn work? No idea. Mark implied it’s CentOS and I’m inclined to agree. Everything else works. Not that I really have a thing against CentOS, but Red Hat (and it is Red Hat) has been weird ever since they released their IPO a decade back. Lost their street cred, I suppose.
Mark’s suggestion:
Pain in the butt, but uninstall current, try mod_dav_svn-1.4.6-0.1.e14.rf.i1386, then 1.3.2, then 1.2.1, see if any work?
Thankfully, installing older packages in yum is pretty easy. It’s just yum install mod_dav_svn-1.4.6-0.1.el4.rf.i386 and done. Except I got this:
---> Package mod_dav_svn.i386 0:1.4.6-0.1.el4.rf set to be updated
--> Running transaction check
--> Processing Dependency: subversion = 1.4.6-0.1.el4.rf for package: mod_dav_svn
--> Finished Dependency Resolution
Error: Missing Dependency: subversion = 1.4.6-0.1.el4.rf is needed by package mod_dav_svn
Basically, subversion and mod_dav_svn have to match for this to work. Now, since I have subversion working, I really don’t want to roll that back. I decided that maybe I just had a bad copy from the repository, so I downloaded SubVersion and installed it manually. This is always fun, but I do it often enough at work that I’m only slightly terrified. This is why I have a managed server, by the way. Since I got the same damn error after a manual install, I decided that something was wrong with my server and mod_dav_svn.
Thankfully there are alternatives!
svnserve is not as ‘pretty’ but it works. I followed the default installation directions and then used Subversion : svnserve over xinetd to get it running. Once I got it running, I was able to point things at svn+ssh://ipstenu.org/svn/repos/ipstenu (which will do you no good, it’s locked to my user ID/password). Now everything downloads and I say sayonara to Google Code!
Next up, I’ll put a WebSVN site up for people to browse my code. If they really want to.
Since my webhost, the utterly wicked cool Liquidweb, already has SubVersion installed, I thought ‘Wouldn’t it be nice to get OFF of Google Code and onto my own site.’ Step one was turning my site into a MultiSite install, but that’s actually another story. Step two, which is this step. See, I have SubVersion (here after referred to as SVN) on the server. What I didn’t have was a way to go to http://svn.ipstenu.org and get things like my plugins.
I’m currently having all sorts of shenanigans when I tried to get this up and running. There’s no one good doc on how to do it all, and while I tried to make this into one, I believe the term ‘Epic Fail’ comes to mind.
Following the CentOS directions, my install fails when I try to add these lines
LoadModule dav_svn_module /usr/lib/httpd/modules/mod_dav_svn.so
LoadModule authz_svn_module /usr/lib/httpd/modules/mod_authz_svn.so
to my httpd.conf, I get a fun error.
httpd: Syntax error on line 28 of /usr/local/apache/conf/httpd.conf: Syntax error on line 1 of /usr/local/apache/conf/includes/pre_main_global.conf: API module structure 'dav_svn_module' in file /usr/lib/httpd/modules/mod_dav_svn.so is garbled - expected signature 41503232 but saw 41503230 - perhaps this is not an Apache module DSO, or was compiled for a different Apache version?
When I look at it, I see I’ve got this version:
# yum info mod_dav_svn
Setting up repositories
Reading repository metadata in from local files
Excluding Packages in global exclude list
Finished
Installed Packages
Name : mod_dav_svn
Arch : i386
Version: 1.1.4
Release: 3.el4_8.2
Size : 96 k
Repo : installed
Summary: Apache server module for Subversion server.
Description:
The mod_dav_svn package allows access to a Subversion repository using HTTP, via the Apache httpd server.
At this point, I think I have a bum version of mod_dav_svn. Or I’m benig too dumb for SVN.