Category: Dev

Lately, I’ve been undertaking a large-scale, back-office project to support our growing operations teams at Plastiq. The application started experiencing some hanging, which ended up being caused by native PHP session handling. I was able to fix the issue by swapping in AWS’s DynamoDB for session management and storage, and I thought it’d be helpful to document the steps I took.

More after the jump.

Here’s a tutorial that explains how to set your Mac to use IPv4 instead of IPv6. Instructions have been tested and confirmed on macOS Sierra (10.12.3), though this should work on other OS versions too.

Sometimes I leave processes running which take up ports on my local machine (e.g., Redis server). I won’t be able to use the port until it’s freed up, but it’s sometimes a chore to figure out how to kill the process by port.

I found the following snippet super useful to kill a process by port in Mac OS:

lsof -t -i tcp:[port] | xargs kill

Just replace the [port] above with the actual numbered port (e.g., 6379).

Here’s a quick command you can use to find any folders that are over a GB in size on a Linux OS.

sudo du -h / | grep '[0-9\.]\+G'

I recently found myself with the need to connect to a Mongo DB instance from a PHP application running on Amazon EC2.  The PHP docs led me to this MongoDB extension, which seemed to be a good fit for my needs.  Still, the matter of installation was a little bit less clear, considering that the EC2 instance was pretty barebones and lacked a fair number of the “standard” libraries that would enable this single line installation to work.

After a bit of finagling, I got everything to work via the steps I’ve outlined below.

Whenever a MySQL query contains a WHERE conditional, the database server must find all the matching rows before it can execute any operations.  In order to optimize this matching, a database administrator might define an index on any columns he or she knows will be used more frequently in WHERE conditions.

Adding an index to an existing table with many rows, however, can take a long time or even fail entirely. Here’s a quick tip to deal with those situations.

Changes to my php.ini file kept getting overwritten, until I found where the real file was being loaded from! Here’s how to update php.ini for MAMP PRO.

I recently had to export a database with over 50MM rows, and while I love using PHPMyAdmin for most database operations, the tool’s export functionality tends to crap out on larger data sets.  This article outlines how to export a large MySQL database (with compression to save space!).

If you’re SSH’d into a MySQL server and want to export MySQL query results to CSV (readable by Excel), simply add the below snippet to the end of your query.

INTO OUTFILE '/tmp/results.csv' 
FIELDS TERMINATED BY ',' ENCLOSED BY '"' 
LINES TERMINATED BY '\n'

Note that ‘/tmp/results.csv’ in the code above should correspond to a writeable destination, and the file can’t already exist.