Updating PHP 5 with Godaddy and a Dedicated server

Jeff called me up asking for help with his dedicated server on Godaddy. He needed to update his PHP 5.1.6 to the latest stable version. His server is running Centos 5.2 (Final). He tried to call Godaddy for assistance and of course they were no help. I’m no expert myself but have played around with different systems. I found out that you can use the yum command to manage the installed packages. The problem is that the current repositories yum looks at does not contain new versions of PHP. This is why you get an error that says something like – cannot find PHP. What you need to do is add a repository that does have a newer version of PHP. We’re going to add Jason Litka’s repository.

• Log in to the Simple Control Panel
• Log in using SSH
• Type “su – ” to log in with root privileges
• Type “nano -w /etc/yum.repos.d/utterramblings.repo”. If you’re not comfortable with nano, use whatever editor you’re more comfortable with.
• In the utterramblings.repo file type the following
  

  [utterramblings]
  name=Jason’s Utter Ramblings Repo
  baseurl=http://www.jasonlitka.com/media/EL$releasever/$basearch/
  enabled=1
  gpgcheck=1
  gpgkey=http://www.jasonlitka.com/media/RPM-GPG-KEY-jlitka

• Save the file and close it
• Now you can use “yum update php” and it should update it to the latest that the repositories have
• Restart Apache

This tutorial is based on the one found at http://www.jasonlitka.com/yum-repository/. It took awhile for me to find the solution. I hope this helps out people who had the same problem as I did.

jQuery Form Variables

I have been messing around with jQuery for a couple of days now and I think I’m getting the hang of it. Before using jQuery, I was using Mootools for processing forms to divs. It worked as intended but what I couldn’t do was create new javascript within the loaded pages. As interfaces get more complicated, the code started to grow and was getting more difficult to follow. On top of that, I wanted to do more with Mootools than just load pages in divs. I tried to read documents and articles from their website but was hard to follow. I bought a book but to me it was still a bit confusing. I even posted a couple on the forums but didn’t get much help. So I started to look for another framework and found jQuery.

jQuery has many examples and demos on their website and has a large community of developers creating plugins. One of the things I needed to figure out was how to pass form variables using jQuery. I found a sample code on their website but I just couldn’t get it to work – http://docs.jquery.com/Ajax/jQuery.post. I couldn’t pass the form variable over. Their sample code was

$.post(“page.php”, {var1: “var1″, var2: “var2″}, function(data) { alert(data);});

So I started to play around with it more and was able to get it to work. Here’s the new code now based on the example.

$.post(“page.php”, {‘var1′: $(‘#var1′).val(), ‘var2′: $(‘#var2′).val()},function(data){alert(data);});

After reading a few comments about this function, a couple suggested to use serialize() but I have yet to figure that out. At least my variables are passing as they should. The same syntax for the variables can be applied to $.get.

If you are going to copy to code above, make sure you are using apostrophes. For some reason, it’s displaying the “tick” symbol which is the one sharing the key with the tilde ~ on your keyboard. It looks like an apostrophe but more slanted. So be aware of that.

MSSQL Stored Procedures and Classic ASP

A client at work wanted us to create a way to duplicate existing records on their website with a click of a button. These records involve multiple tables in the database. Some of the tables contained a lot of columns. We tried to do most of work using ASP but sometimes the browser would time out and Dreamweaver would crash.

Then I thought, why don’t we have our SQL server do most of the heavy lifting. I created a stored procedure that query the database for the record(s) that need to be duplicated and have them duplicated. Below is a short example to get you started.

First you need to create a stored procedure in SQL Server.

CREATE PROCEDURE stored_procedure_sample
@record_id INT OUTPUT

AS
BEGIN

INSERT INTO table_name (column1, column2, column3)
SELECT column1, column2, column3
FROM table_name
WHERE record_id = @record_id

END;

GO

Next you need to create the ASP page that process the request. You can use form variable or URL query string. For the example, I will use a form variable. Let’s imagine on page1.asp there is a form with a hidden variable that contains the record_id you want to duplicate. You submit this to page2.asp and here’s a sample of what page2.asp should look like.

<%

Dim connString, rsCmd

connString = “your connection string”
Set rsCmd  = Server.CreateObject(“ADODB.Command”)
rsCmd.ActiveConnection = connString
rsCmd.CommandType = 4
rsCmd.CommandText = “stored_procedure_sample”

rsCmd.Parameters.Append rsCmd.CreateParameter(“@record_id”, 200, 1, 4, Request.Form(“record_id”))

rsCmd.Execute

%>

What page2.asp does is it takes the form variable “record_id” from page1.asp and tells the stored procedure to get the values for this record and insert it as a new record. That’s pretty much it. Just a short, simple example on how you can create a stored procedure in MSSQL Server and use it with classic ASP.

Getting include files to work on Windows 2003

I recently been playing around with Windows 2003 because we are still running Windows 2000 Server at work and may be upgrading soon. Our ASP pages are using includes to our database connection page…

<!–#include file=”some_folder/db_connection_file.asp” –>

If you were to run a page with that code on a Windows 2003 server, you may get an error similar to…

Active Server Pages error ‘ASP 0131′
Disallowed Parent Path

To fix this error, I had to do the following:

1. Create a new virtual directory of the folder that contains the files. We’ll call the virtual directory “example”.
2. Update the include syntax to use virtual instead. So you’ll have something like
   <!– #include virtual=”example/some_folder/db_connection_file.asp” –>

You may get this error with javascripts as well if you have something like…

<script language=”javascript” src=”../some_folder/my_script.js”></script>

You should update that syntax to something like…

<script language=”javascript” src=”/example/some_folder/my_script.js”></script>

I’m not a big Windows user anymore so I don’t know why it has to be done this way or know of a setting so that the old method still works. But those are the 2 changes I had to make on some of our websites to make them compatible with Windows 2003.

Installing PEAR on Godaddy shared accounts

I recently found out how to install PEAR on a Godaddy shared hosting account.

1. Visit http://pear.php.net/go-pear. Save the text displayed onto your desktop and name it go-pear.php. Upload this to your server. If you’re hosting multiple domains on the account, it’s best that you should upload this file in your root folder. Run this file on your browser and follow the on-screen instructions.
2. After completing the installation, it is time to edit your php.ini file. If you are running PHP4, there should be a file in the root directory called php.ini. If you are running PHP5, there should be a file in the root directory called php5.ini. If not, create one and add the following: include_path = “.:/usr/local/php5/lib/php:/home/content/s/a/m/sample/html/PEAR”. Keep in mind that /s/a/m/sample is just an example. Doing this will ensure that every page, you create, will look in the PEAR directory so that you it will use the installed packages.
3. This installation will include Pear_Frontend_Web which is the web-based admin interface. It may have created an index.php file in the directory where PEAR is installed (root). If not you can get a copy from PEAR/docs/PEAR_Frontend_Web/docs/index.php.txt. I would suggest creating a folder called pear_admin in the root directory and storing this file there. If you didn’t install PEAR in the root directory, you may need to edit this file accordingly.
4. You will need to create a .htaccess and .htpasswd file in the same directory as the index.php file. An example of how the .htaccess file should look as follows:
   AuthUserFile /home/content/s/a/m/sample/html/pear_admin/.htpasswd
   AuthType Basic
   AuthName “Web-based PEAR Frontend”
   Require valid-user
   

   An example of how the .htpasswd file should look as follows:

   
   admin:cGyUX9QugYMgE
   

   This will create “admin” as the user name and “password” as the password. You can generate your own by going to this link – http://www.htaccesstools.com/htpasswd-generator/

   Be aware that files beginning with a dot are invisible. You may have to edit your settings on the FTP app you’re using so that you can see them.

Once the files are created and saved, you can now go to http://your-domain.com/pear_admin/index.php. It will ask for the user name and password. Once you are logged in, you can now manage Pear via web browser. That’s it! Now you can run PEAR on a shared account from Godaddy. One less complaint