I’ve always used MySQL fulltext indexes with a match query for keyword searches but I’ve never been happy with the results and lack of configuration choices. The limited nature of word interpretation and the boolean searches were useless when visitors didn’t know how to use search operators. Fulltext indexes require the MyISAM table structure – yet we generally prefer InnoDB because of performance and foreign key constraints.

For a recent project I decided to finally (long overdue, I know) make the the transition to an external search and indexing application called Sphinx.

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I’ve recently been exploring alternatives to SQL-based databases, primarily MongoDB.

MongoDB essentially stores records as JSON-encoded values and you interact with those records through the API rather than running any SQL. The following instructions are for getting mongodb installed on CentOS 5, along with the extension necessary for PHP support.

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Git is an amazing source control system, and is even better when used with GitHub.com. Installing git on Mac is pretty simple.
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It’s pretty straightforward to install Git on a mediatemple DV 3.0 server. If you have later versions of their servers with Yum installed, you may be able to simply install it through yum.

To begin you need to download the latest version and run through the standard extraction and configure/make/make install.

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Pecl was giving me some problems so I needed to install APC for PHP manually. Pecl was compaining that apxs was not found during the config process, so I had to install it myself so that I could pass it the proper path.


wget http://pecl.php.net/get/APC-3.0.19.tgz
tar -xzf APC-3.0.19.tgz
cd APC*
phpize
./configure --enable-apc --enable-apc-mmap --with-apxs=/usr/local/apache2/bin/apxs
make
make install


Make sure you actually use your correct path to apxs. If apxs isn’t installed then you need to install the httpd-devel package, which usually works just fine through yum install httpd-devel

Then, just add the so path to your php ini and restart.


vi /usr/local/lib/php.ini
extension=apc.so


Then restart your server and should be done! Try running phpinfo(); to see if APC reports as installed and enabled.

After dealing with some weird update issues trying to do this with a manually-download rpm file, I finally figured out that performing the following worked just fine:

# rpm -Uhv http://apt.sw.be/redhat/el5/en/i386/rpmforge/RPMS/rpmforge-release-0.3.6-1.el5.rf.i386.rpm
# yum -y install lighttpd lighttpd-fastcgi mysql-server
# chkconfig --levels 235 lighttpd on
# /etc/init.d/lighttpd start

I did decide to change the port to 81 so that apache could still run on 80:


# vi /etc/lighttpd/lighttpd.conf


I recently began working exclusively on an iMac so I decided to setup a subversion server locally and as my new machine would simply replace my local development machine, which is a Fedora Core 6 pc.

You’ll need to setup at least one repository. I’m going to need multiple repositories that I can use for different clients so I have a bit of extra admin work ahead of me. You can setup as many repositories as you need, but no matter what you’ll need at least one. Here create the folders…

# mkdir /svn
# mkdir /svn/repos

Then we need to tell subversion to make our first repository.

# svnadmin create /svn/repos/myproject

First, I need to setup a config file for svnserve.

# vi /svn/repos/conf/svnserve.conf

Then, look for variations of the following code and edit it as necessary. By default any anonymous user can access the code so to disable that you must include anon-access = none, just commenting the value out will not prevent anonymous access.

anon-access = none
password-db = passwdfile
realm = My SVN Repository
auth-access = write

The password-db is just a path to a file containing usernames and passwords. You’ll create this file especially for SVN. I create each file inside of the repository conf directory. So, save your changes and then we’ll create said user file.

# vi passwdfile

Enter in something like:

[users]
username = password

Anyway, you’ll need to start the svn server.

# svnserve -d --listen-port=3690

One side note – svnserve just runs and doesn’t have a way to stop besides killing the process. If you make changes to the svnserve.conf or user file you’ll need to restart svnserve.

# killall svnserve

Then, go ahead and test (best to do so on a different machine).

# svn co --username=myusername svn://mydomain/svn/repos/myproject


The system should then ask you for your password. Go ahead and run some tests.

I’ve been using subversion a lot recently – from using repositories with client development companies to installing it for clients – it seems to be the SVN month.

Here’s how I installed subversion on a machine with Fedora Core 4. For anyone learning or using Subversion, I highly recommend that you read the book.

You may already have subversion installed, if not, just run this:

# yum install subversion
# yum install mod_dav_svn

Then you’ll need to setup at least one repository. I’m going to need multiple repositories that I can use for different clients so I have a bit of extra admin work ahead of me. You can setup as many repositories as you need, but no matter what you’ll need at least one. Here create the folders…

# mkdir /svn
# mkdir /svn/repos
# mkdir /svn/users
# mkdir /svn/permissions

We need to give these folders the proper permissions

# chown -R apache.apache /svn

Then we need to tell subversion to make our first repository.

# svnadmin create /svn/repos/myproject

First, I need to setup a config file for svnserve.

# vi /svn/repos/conf/svnserve.conf

Then, look for variations of the following code and edit it as necessary. By default any anonymous user can access the code so to disable that you must include anon-access = none, just commenting the value out will not prevent anonymous access.

anon-access = none
password-db = passwdfile
realm = My SVN Repository
auth-access = write

The password-db is just a path to a file containing usernames and passwords. You’ll create this file especially for SVN. I create each file inside of the repository conf directory. So, save your changes and then we’ll create said user file.

# vi passwdfile

Enter in something like:

[users]
username = password

Anyway, you’ll need to start the svn server.

# svnserve -d --listen-port=3690

One side note – svnserve just runs and doesn’t have a way to stop besides killing the process. If you make changes to the svnserve.conf or user file you’ll need to restart svnserve.

# killall svnserve

Then, go ahead and test (best to do so on a different machine).

# svn co --username=myusername svn://mydomain/svn/repos/myproject


The system should then ask you for your password. Go ahead and run some tests.

Now, let’s setup apache.

Create a new apache include file that will hold our configurations (You may already have this is subversion was already installed).

# vi /etc/httpd/conf.d/subversion.conf

Now, this file will need to contain something like this to serve the repository through apache:


LoadModule dav_svn_module modules/mod_dav_svn.so
LoadModule authz_svn_module modules/mod_authz_svn.so


DAV svn
SVNPath /svn/repos
AuthType Basic
AuthName "Subversion Repository"
AuthUserFile /svn/users/svnpass
Require valid-user
AuthzSVNAccessFile /svn/permissions/svnauthz.conf

Now, this essentially tells apache to load the mods needed for svn. We need to create some files so that this config will work properly. The first is our htpasswd file which I named “/svn/users/svnpass”.

# htpasswd -cb /svn/users/svnpass username password

Next we need to create the svnauth file.

# vi /svn/permissions/svnauthz.conf

Inside we’ll place a list of users who have access to files:


[/]

username = rw


The “rw” states that this user has read/write access to the root repository /.

Restart your web server and you should be done.

service httpd reload
or you can use:
/usr/sbin/apachectl restart – this option outputs better error messages in case you’ve made some syntax mistakes.

Go to your repository and you should see subversion displaying the repo info.

http://yoursite.com/svn/repos/