Nikola Brežnjak – Page 48 – Nikola Brežnjak blog

Books

A Short History of Nearly Everything – Bill Bryson

My favourite quotes from the book A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson:

Once in a great while, and few times in history, a human mind produces observation so acute and so unexpected that people can’t quite decide which is more amazing, the fact or the thinking of it.

Scientists dealt with this paradox in the handiest possible way – they ignored it.

Sometimes world just isn’t ready for a good idea.

The good news appears is that it takes an awful lot to extinguish species. The bad news is good news can never be counted on.

Three stages in scientific discovery: 1: people deny that it’s true. 2: then they deny that it’s important. 3: finally they credit the wrong person.

It’s an unnerving thought that we may be the living universe’s supreme achievement and its worst nightmare simultaneously.

CodeProject, JavaScript

Simple official Spritz API usage

TL;DR: See it in action here or here, and official site here.

Spritz – change the way people read and make communication faster, easier, and more effective.

So, there has been a lot of buzz about this lately and today I too got my API key to test this out. I must say that using Spritz is really easy, and they have a very good documentation with examples so I will keep this short.

After you register to their developer program you will get your API key. A simple use case to get you started is to make a HTML document with the following content:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
	<script type="text/javascript" src="jquery-2.1.0.min.js"></script>
	<script type="text/javascript">
        var SpritzSettings = {
            clientId: "4aac1453ff37b364f",
            redirectUri: "http://www.nikola-breznjak.com/codez/spritz/login_success.html",
        };
    </script>

 	<script type="text/javascript" src="spritz.min.js"></script>
</head>

<body>
    <h1>Spritz test</h1>

  	<div data-role="spritzer"></div>

    <div>This is some demo text that will be Spritzt</div>
  	</div>
</body>
</html>

Important things to note here are that Spritz uses jQuery and you have to use your clientId and put this rediretUri file to your server (on which you host the domain with which you registered your Spritz application).

A little more advanced example is here: http://www.nikola-breznjak.com/codez/spritz/ (you can just view the source of it and I’m sure you’ll know how to take it from there).

Worth noting is that there are some open source versions of this like Open Spritz, though I think this one is way better as it has whole research and the science behind it.

Using this on a simple HTML page was, well, simple. I tried to incorporate this into my wordpress blog (the one you’re reading right now), and though it works nicely when I put the code in the index.php file (the main template file which lists all of the posts), it does not work when I put the same exact code to the single.php (template for showing specific posts). The error that I’m getting in the latter case is this:

Unable to spritz: Unable to retrieve contentVersion, contentId=5343e07be4b063e2752c379b: HTTP call failed, status: 500, message: Internal Server Error

So, if someone got the same error, how did you go about it?

Books

The Cuckoo’s Calling – Robert Galbraith

My favourite quotes from the book The Cuckoo’s Calling by Robert Galbraith aka J.K.Rowling:

There were other routes to woman’s intimacy than to admire her figure in tight dress.

And the best plan is, as the popular saying was, to profit by the folly of others.

He’s about five fucking feet too short to model.

Lose some weight, he told Strike as a parting shot, and I’ll send you something XXL.

The dead can only speak through the mouths of those left behind, and through the signs they left scattered behind them.

He’s not sane, which isn’t to say he’s not a clever fucker.

CodeProject, PHP

POST JSON Data With PHP cURL wrapper class

PHP biceps cURL 🙂

Following is the PHP cURL wrapper class which I use to make GET and POST requests. The examples are below. Disclamer: be sure that you have permission to scrape and use the content you’re after.

This code is also available on GitHub at this link: https://github.com/Hitman666/PHPcURLWrapper

Class code and simple GET request

//CurlWrapper_static.php

class CurlWrapper {
    private static $useragents = array(            
        "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/33.0.1750.154 Safari/537.36",
        "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0; WOW64; Trident/4.0; SLCC1)",
        "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.2; WOW64; rv:28.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/28.0",
        "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_9_2) AppleWebKit/537.75.14 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/7.0.3 Safari/537.75.14"
    );

	private static $cookiesFile = "curlCookies.txt";

    private static function getUserAgent() {
    	$rand = rand(0, count(self::$useragents) - 1);

    	return self::$useragents[$rand];
    }

    public static function SendRequest($url, $ref = "", $type = "GET", $postData = "", $headers = "", $proxy = "") {
        $useragent = self::getUserAgent();

        $ch = curl_init();
		curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL,$url);
		curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT,120);
		curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, self::getUserAgent());

		curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, true); 
		curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
		curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_AUTOREFERER, true);

		curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR, realpath(self::$cookiesFile)); 
		curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE, realpath(self::$cookiesFile));

		curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, false);

        //options
        if ($ref != "") {
            curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_REFERER, $ref);
        }

		if ($proxy != "") {
			curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_PROXY, $proxy);
		}

		if ($type == "POST"){
			curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_CUSTOMREQUEST, "POST");
			curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, true);
			curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $postData);
		}

		if ($headers != ""){
			curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, $headers);
		}

        $result = curl_exec($ch);
		curl_close($ch);

		return $result;
	}
}

Simple GET request:

require("CurlWrapper_static.php");

$googleHTML = CurlWrapper::SendRequest('https://www.google.com');
echo $googleHTML;

If you’re a firm non-static lover here’s a “normal” class:

//CurlWrapper_nonStatic.php

class CurlWrapper{    
    private $_useragents = array(            
        "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/33.0.1750.154 Safari/537.36",
        "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0; WOW64; Trident/4.0; SLCC1)",
        "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.2; WOW64; rv:28.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/28.0",
        "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_9_2) AppleWebKit/537.75.14 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/7.0.3 Safari/537.75.14"
    );

	private $_cookiesFile = "curlCookies.txt";

    private function getUserAgent(){
    	$rand = rand(0, count($this->_useragents));

    	return $useragents[$rand];
    }

    public function SendRequest($url, $ref = "", $type = "GET", $postData = "", $headers = "", $proxy = "") {
        $useragent = $this->getUserAgent();
        echo $useragent;

        $ch = curl_init();
		curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL,$url);
		curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT,120);
		curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, $useragent);

		curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, true); 
		curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
		curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_AUTOREFERER, true);

		curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR, realpath($this->_cookiesFile)); 
		curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE, realpath($this->_cookiesFile));

		curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, false);

        //options
        if ($ref != "") {
            curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_REFERER, $ref);
        }

		if ($proxy != "") {
			curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_PROXY, $proxy);
		}

		if ($type == "POST"){
			curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_CUSTOMREQUEST, "POST");
			curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, true);
			curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $postData);
		}

		if ($headers != ""){
			curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, $headers);
		}

        $result = curl_exec($ch);
		curl_close($ch);

		return $result;
	}
}

How to use it with simple GET request:

require("CurlWrapper_nonStatic.php");

$curl = new CurlWrapper();
$googleHTML = $curl->SendRequest('https://www.google.com');
echo $googleHTML;

JSON POST request

Here’s an example of sending a JSON POST request to imaginitive URL ‘http://service.com/getData.json’ with some data array:

	require("CurlWrapper_static.php");

	$cookieSettingUrl = 'http://service.com/';
	$cookie = CurlWrapper::SendRequest($cookieSettingUrl);

	$data = array(
		"year" => 2014,
		"day" => 3,
                "month" => 4,
		"id" => 20
    );
	$postData = json_encode($data);

	$jsonUrl = 'http://service.com/getData.json';
	$headers = array('Accept: application/json','Content-Type: application/json');

	$resultsHTML = CurlWrapper::SendRequest($jsonUrl, $cookieSettingUrl, "POST", $postData, $headers);
	$resultsJson = json_decode($resultsHTML);
	var_dump($resultsJson);

Important to note is that you have to add proper $headers array, and that you json_encode your data array as shown when POSTing to a service which expects JSON data.

The reason why I first used these two lines:

$cookieSettingUrl = 'http://service.com/';
$cookie = CurlWrapper::SendRequest($cookieSettingUrl);

is to set any cookies (and you will find that some services do this) that may be needed to be sent along with the request to ‘http://service.com/getData.json’. Cookies are set to ‘curlCookies.txt’ in the CurlWrapper_* class. You can change this to your liking, and you have to make sure that you set proper permissions for this file.

Hope this proves useful to someone.

Linux

How to use crontab in specific use cases

Here I will post non standard and ‘out of the ordinary’ crontab settings. A note to myself (ANTM): crontab file in Centos is located in /etc/crontab. Lets start:

Run a cron job every 5 minutes but starting from minute 3.

Surely you can go about this like so:

3,8,13,18,23,28,33,38,43,48,53,58 * * * * /bin/mycommand

but there’s much cleaner way of doing it:

3-59/5 * * * * /bin/mycommand

More info can be found on this Stack Overflow question and also another option is suggested here and goes like this:

*/5+3 * * * * /bin/mycommand

Similarly

Run a cron job every 5 minutes

*/5 * * * * /bin/mycommand

Books

The Woodcutter – Reginald Hill

My favourite quotes from the book The Woodcutter by Reginald Hill:

He was certainly very good to talk to, meaning of course he was a good listener.

The written word and gave them to see a physical existence.

The evidence was overwhelming. The jury took 20 minutes to find you guilty. 12 strangers, 12 citizens picked of the street. In this world we’re unfortunate to live in, and especially in this septic aisle we live on, where squalid politicians conspire with a squalid press to feed a half educated and wholly contemplated public on a diet of meritorious trivia. I’m sure it will be possible to concourt enough evidence to persuade 12 strangers that Nelson Mandela was a canibal.

Only a fool lives in a house another fool can throw him out of any time he likes.

Only climbers or real idiots climb up there without the rope.

Johnny could do just about anything until someone told him what to do.

Life was a struggle if you left yourself at the mercy of feelings.

Not exactly thinking but aware that there were thoughts in the room that might keep you awake were you foolish enough to think them.

Universities are full of books, but hard cash is always in short supply.

Grim necessity makes strange bed fellows.

Today’s lie will sell more than yesterday’s truth.

There is neither happiness nor misery in the world, only the comparison of one state with the other.
Only the man who has plumb the depths of misfortune is capable of scaling the heights of joy. To grasp how good it is to live, you must have been driven to long for death. Live then and be happy, dear children of my heart and never forget: until the day arrives when God in his mercy unveils the future to man, all of human wisdom lives in these two words: WAIT and HOPE.

Most relationships end with deceit, your’s began with it.

Phaser

Make a Flappy Bird clone with Phaser

Flappy Bird – no info as anyone who may be reading this knows about it 😉

Phaser – open source desktop and mobile HTML5 game framework supporting both JavaScript and TypeScript

This is basically just an addition to the great 3 series tutorial (part 1, part 2, part 3) from LessMilk’s blog and hereby I thank him for them.

The original tutorial makes the bird (square) jump by pressing the space key, whilst to make the bird jump on a mouse click (or tap on mobile devices) all you have to do is replace the

var space_key = this.game.input.keyboard.addKey(Phaser.Keyboard.SPACEBAR);

in the menu.js file with:

var space_key = this.game.input;

Also, I added the crash sound (original file from here) in the hit_pipe function:

if (this.bird.alive == false){
    this.crash_sound.play();
    return;
}

which I’ve defined in the create function:

this.crash_sound = this.game.add.audio('crash');

of the file play.js .

You can download this changed code from Github, and try out the game here.

Books

The Antidote – Oliver Burkeman

My favourite quotes from the book The Antidote by Oliver Burkeman:

Inspiration is for amateurs, the rest of us just show up and get to work.

In the effort to try to feel happy is often precisely the thing that makes us miserable, and then it’s our constant efforts to eliminate the negative insecurity, uncertainty, failure of sadness and that is what causes us to feel so insecure, anxious, uncertain or unhappy.

The worst thing about any event is usually your exaggerated believe in its horror. The way to diffuse disbelief is to confront the reality.

When you really face mortality, the ultimate and unavoidable worst case scenario, everything changes. All external expectations, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving away what is truly important.

CodeProject, NodeJS

Deploying MEAN.io to Nodejitsu from Windows machine

Disclaimer: I’m in no way affiliated with Nodejitsu or MEAN.io. I’m just documenting my experience with them – problems (and solutions) I’ve faced while trying these new technologies on a Windows machine.

Great, with that off my chest, we can now start. This is a successor post to the previous one: Getting started with Nodejitsu on Windows by deploying a MEN framework, so you may wanna check that too.

MEAN is a fullstack javascript platform for modern web applications.

MongoDB – leading NoSQL database, empowering businesses to be more agile and scalable

Express – minimal and flexible node.js web application framework, providing a robust set of features for building single and multi-page, and hybrid web applications

Angular – lets you extend HTML vocabulary for your application. The resulting environment is extraordinarily expressive, readable, and quick to develop

Node.js – a platform built on Chrome’s JavaScript runtime for easily building fast, scalable network applications

Following the notes on the official website you have to clone the repo, install all the dependencies withnpm and then run grunt .

git clone http://github.com/linnovate/mean.git

cd mean

npm install

grunt

If you get an error like this:

C:\Users\Nikola\Desktop\mean>grunt
Running "jshint:all" (jshint) task
>> 42 files lint free.

Running "concurrent:tasks" (concurrent) task
Running "nodemon:dev" (nodemon) task
Running "watch" task
Waiting...[nodemon] v1.0.15
[nodemon] to restart at any time, enter `rs`
[nodemon] watching: *.*
[nodemon] starting `node --debug server.js`
debugger listening on port 5858
Express app started on port 3000

events.js:72
        throw er; // Unhandled 'error' event
              ^
Error: failed to connect to [localhost:27017]
    at null.<anonymous> (C:\Users\Nikola\Desktop\mean\node_modules\mongoose\node
_modules\mongodb\lib\mongodb\connection\server.js:553:74)
    at EventEmitter.emit (events.js:106:17)
    at null.<anonymous> (C:\Users\Nikola\Desktop\mean\node_modules\mongoose\node
_modules\mongodb\lib\mongodb\connection\connection_pool.js:140:15)
    at EventEmitter.emit (events.js:98:17)
    at Socket.<anonymous> (C:\Users\Nikola\Desktop\mean\node_modules\mongoose\no
de_modules\mongodb\lib\mongodb\connection\connection.js:512:10)
    at Socket.EventEmitter.emit (events.js:95:17)
    at net.js:440:14
    at process._tickCallback (node.js:415:13)
[nodemon] app crashed - waiting for file changes before starting...

make sure that you have MongoDB installed and that you have the mongod.exe running on the default port 27017. Instructions on how to install MongoDB on a Windows machine can be found here: http://docs.mongodb.org/manual/tutorial/install-mongodb-on-windows/, but tl;dr is:

download the installation zip package
unzip in c:\mongodb
create c:\data\db folder
run c:\mongodb\bin\mongod.exe

When you have mongod.exe started in one command window (I use Console2) and you run grunt in other you will get this in the “mongo” console:

C:\mongodb\bin>mongod.exe
mongod.exe --help for help and startup options
Tue Mar 11 14:50:24.240 [initandlisten] MongoDB starting : pid=10136 port=27017 dbpath=\data\db\ 64-bit host=Nikola-PC
Tue Mar 11 14:50:24.240 [initandlisten] db version v2.4.9
Tue Mar 11 14:50:24.240 [initandlisten] git version: 52fe0d21959e32a5bdbecdc62057db386e4e029c
Tue Mar 11 14:50:24.240 [initandlisten] build info: windows sys.getwindowsversion(major=6, minor=1, build=7601, platform=2, service_pack='Service Pack 1') BOOST_LIB_VERSION=1_49
Tue Mar 11 14:50:24.240 [initandlisten] allocator: system
Tue Mar 11 14:50:24.240 [initandlisten] options: {}
Tue Mar 11 14:50:24.244 [initandlisten] journal dir=\data\db\journal
Tue Mar 11 14:50:24.244 [initandlisten] recover : no journal files present, no recovery needed
Tue Mar 11 14:50:24.323 [initandlisten] waiting for connections on port 27017
Tue Mar 11 14:50:24.324 [websvr] admin web console waiting for connections on port 28017
Tue Mar 11 14:50:40.982 [initandlisten] connection accepted from 127.0.0.1:58323 #1 (1 connection now open)
Tue Mar 11 14:50:41.014 [initandlisten] connection accepted from 127.0.0.1:58324 #2 (2 connections now open)
Tue Mar 11 14:50:41.024 [initandlisten] connection accepted from 127.0.0.1:58325 #3 (3 connections now open)
Tue Mar 11 14:50:41.024 [initandlisten] connection accepted from 127.0.0.1:58326 #4 (4 connections now open)
Tue Mar 11 14:50:41.025 [initandlisten] connection accepted from 127.0.0.1:58327 #5 (5 connections now open)

and this in the “grunt” console:

C:\Users\Nikola\Desktop\mean>grunt
Running "jshint:all" (jshint) task
>> 42 files lint free.

Running "concurrent:tasks" (concurrent) task
Running "nodemon:dev" (nodemon) task
Running "watch" task
Waiting...[nodemon] v1.0.15
[nodemon] to restart at any time, enter `rs`
[nodemon] watching: *.*
[nodemon] starting `node --debug server.js`
debugger listening on port 5858
Express app started on port 3000

You can now take a look at your application by visiting localhost:3000 in your browser: the signup screen: and signin screen:

Ship it

In order to deploy to Nodejitsu, you have to login to Nodejitsu (jitsu login ) and then run jitsu deploy . At this point I got an error like this:

info:    Starting app mean
error:   Error running command deploy
error:   Errors occured while starting the application
error:   Error output from application. This is usually a user error.
error:   grunt-cli: The grunt command line interface. (v0.1.13)
error:
error:   Fatal error: Unable to find local grunt.
error:
error:   If you're seeing this message, either a Gruntfile wasn't found or grunt
error:   hasn't been installed locally to your project. For more information about
error:   installing and configuring grunt, please see the Getting Started guide:
error:
error:   http://gruntjs.com/getting-started
error:
error:   Error starting application. This could be a user error.
error:   info: Running start for app.
error:   info: Cleaning /opt/run
error:   info: Fetching application snapshot...
error:   info: Application snapshot fetched.
error:   info: Unpacking snapshot...
error:   info: Reading `package.json`...
error:   info: Starting application...
error:   info: Spawn: start --min-uptime 2000 -o /opt/run/forza.log -- forza -h multiplex.nodejitsu.com -p 8556 --start-log /opt/run/start.log --app-user hitman666 --app-name mean -- node node_modules/grunt-cli/bin/grunt
error:   info: `aeternum` pid: 63258
error:   info: Writing pidfile: /root/app.pid
error:   info: Tailing forza log: /opt/run/start.log
error:   info: Tail closing..
error:   info: Retry # 1 with 1000ms interval
error:   info: Tailing forza log: /opt/run/start.log
error:   info: Tail closing..
error:   info: Success:start

and naturally, I went looking if someone had a similar issue and it turns out someone on Stackoverflow asked this question. The OP (original poster) did find a solution him self and he said:

The gist of it was I had to move all grunt, karma, and forever dependencies to my devDependencies in the package.json file and change my start to “node server”.

Now, I tried to communicate with the OP to get some more info, but strangely no reply (yet). I figured it out myself in the end and this is how my package.json file looks like now:

{
  "name": "mean",
  "description": "MEAN - A fullStack javascript framework powered by  MongoDB, ExpressJS, AngularJS, NodeJS.",
  "version": "0.1.2-1",
  "private": false,
  "repository": {
    "type": "git",
    "url": "https://github.com/linnovate/mean.git"
  },
  "engines": {
    "node": "0.10.x",
    "npm": "1.3.x"
  },
  "scripts": {
    "start": "node server.js",
    "test": "node node_modules/grunt-cli/bin/grunt test",
    "postinstall": "node node_modules/bower/bin/bower install"
  },
  "dependencies": {
    "express": "~3.4.7",
    "bower": "~1.2.8",
    "grunt-cli": "~0.1.11",
    "connect-mongo": "~0.4.0",
    "connect-flash": "~0.1.1",
    "consolidate": "~0.10.0",
    "swig": "~1.3.2",
    "mongoose": "~3.8.3",
    "passport": "~0.1.18",
    "passport-local": "~0.1.6",
    "passport-facebook": "~1.0.2",
    "passport-twitter": "~1.0.2",
    "passport-github": "~0.1.5",
    "passport-google-oauth": "~0.1.5",
    "passport-linkedin": "~0.1.3",
    "lodash": "~2.4.1",
    "forever": "~0.10.11",
    "view-helpers": "~0.1.4",
    "mean-logger": "0.0.1"
  },
  "devDependencies": {
    "grunt-env": "~0.4.1",
    "grunt-cli": "~0.1.11",
    "grunt-contrib-watch": "latest",
    "grunt-contrib-jshint": "latest",
    "grunt-karma": "~0.6.2",
    "grunt-nodemon": "0.2.0",
    "grunt-concurrent": "latest",
    "grunt-mocha-test": "latest",
    "karma": "~0.10.4",
    "karma-coffee-preprocessor": "~0.1.0",
    "karma-coverage": "~0.1.0",
    "karma-script-launcher": "~0.1.0",
    "karma-chrome-launcher": "~0.1.0",
    "karma-firefox-launcher": "~0.1.0",
    "karma-html2js-preprocessor": "~0.1.0",
    "karma-jasmine": "~0.1.3",
    "karma-requirejs": "~0.2.0",
    "karma-phantomjs-launcher": "~0.1.0",
    "forever": "~0.10.11",
    "supertest": "0.8.2",
    "should": "2.1.1"
  },
  "subdomain": "hitman666-mean2"
}

After making this change I deployed my application once more, and everything went without an error, but when I browsed it on Nodejitsu I got an error

502 Reached max retries limit

I realized that I don’t have a correct MongoDB connection string, and in order to change this I had to edit the file production.js which is in the config/env/ folder.

I copied the MongoDB connection string from Nodejitsu’s admin dashboard (I wrote about how to set this in my previous post: Getting started with Nodejitsu on Windows by deploying a MEN framework).

After this change I deployed my app again, and now everything was working, yay!

CodeProject, NodeJS

Deploying MongoDB and Node.js application on OpenShift

This is a post about getting started with OpenShift Online on a Windows machine by deploying a MongoDB, Node.js and RockMongo application for free. The reason why this wasn’t a title is that it’s just too darn long :). Cool, with getting that off my chest, we can now start…

OpenShift Online – Red Hat’s public cloud application development and hosting platform that automates the provisioning, management and scaling of applications so that you can focus on writing the code for your business, startup, or next big idea.

If you’ve tried OpenShift, you may have come across this offical how-to video only to find it completely useless. The accompanying official blog post is way better but still lacks some exact example code on, for example, how to connect to MongoDB from Node.js. Read on to see how I did it.

First, you have to create a new OpenShift account in case you don’t have one already.

Once you login to the site you get a nice looking dashboard and in order to create a new application you could click on the Add application button:

which would then offer really a lot of options:

Setting up WordPress is easy as clicking the WordPress icon and naming your app on the next page:

and clicking the Create Application button. After the process finishes (few mins) you get the instructions on how to alter the application:

Basically, you clone the application’s source code with git and after doing some changes you push them back. At this point, all you have to do is visit the link of your newly created application (you can see the link in your Applications tab in the OpenShift admin interface) and you’ll get the WordPress init install screen:

If you ever installed WordPress before everything should be familiar from now on. And there you have it – you have WordPress installed in a matter of few clicks.

Keep calm and roll up your sleves

You may be wondering where’s the MongoDB and Node.js from the title? Hack on…

So, we saw how easy it was to create an app from web admin interface, but since we’re devs and we loove terminal (don’t we ;)) we’re gonna take a different route here. OpenShift offers the OpenShift Client tools aka rhc. In order to install rhc you first have to have Ruby installed, and the easiest way to do this on a Windows machine is to install the RubyInstaller:

Just click the big red download button and I’m sure you now how to take it from there. Important note though, while installing just make sure that you check the Add Ruby executables to your PATH option:

After the installation is done you can fire up your terminal (I use Console 2, and you can see my settings here: Customize Console 2 on Windows machine) and run

gem install rhc

and once this is done just run rhc setup (this is an important part for us Windows users, as the official documentation on Installing OpenShift RHC Client Tools says we should only run rhc , and that does not work – as noted by the comments on that post).

Now we can use rhc to create a new application. To create a new application named myTest with Node.js and MongoDB you have to run:

rhc app create myTest nodejs-0.10 mongodb-2.4

and you’ll get an output similar to this:

C:\Users\Nikola\Desktop>rhc app create myTest nodejs-0.10 mongodb-2.4
DL is deprecated, please use Fiddle
Application Options
-------------------
Domain:     chavo
Cartridges: nodejs-0.10, mongodb-2.4
Gear Size:  default
Scaling:    no

Creating application 'myTest' ... done

  MongoDB 2.4 database added.  Please make note of these credentials:

   Root User:     admin
   Root Password: ..bip..Bip..
   Database Name: mytest

Connection URL: mongodb://$OPENSHIFT_MONGODB_DB_HOST:$OPENSHIFT_MONGODB_DB_PORT/

Waiting for your DNS name to be available ... done

Cloning into 'mytest'...
The authenticity of host 'mytest-chavo.rhcloud.com (54.235.21.98)' can't be established.
RSA key fingerprint is cf:ee:77:cb:0e:fc:02:d7:72:7e:ae:80:c0:90:88:a7.
Are you sure you want to continue connecting (yes/no)? yes
Warning: Permanently added 'mytest-chavo.rhcloud.com,54.235.21.98' (RSA) to the list of known hosts.
Enter passphrase for key '/c/Users/Nikola/.ssh/id_rsa':
remote: Counting objects: 21, done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (17/17), done.
Receiving objects: 100% (21/21), 20.22 KiB, done.ceiving objects:  90% (19/21)

Your application 'mytest' is now available.

  URL:        http://mytest-chavo.rhcloud.com/
  SSH to:     [email protected]
  Git remote: ssh://[email protected]/~/git/mytest.git/
  Cloned to:  C:/Users/Nikola/Desktop/mytest

Run 'rhc show-app myTest' for more details about your app.

If you’re concerned about that ‘DL is deprecated, please use Fiddle‘, don’t be as it’s a mere warning as they say on Stackoverflow (or if you want to explore this topic further make sure you check this question on SO).

If you get an error saying that there’s no such cartridge you will get a list of all the available cartridges which you can use, so just adjust the above command accordingly

C:\Users\Nikola\Desktop>rhc app create
DL is deprecated, please use Fiddle
When creating an application, you must provide a name and a cartridge from the
list below:

Short Name      Full name
==========      =========
diy-0.1         Do-It-Yourself 0.1
jbossas-7       JBoss Application Server 7
jbosseap-6      JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 6
jenkins-1       Jenkins Server
nodejs-0.10     Node.js 0.10
nodejs-0.6      Node.js 0.6
perl-5.10       Perl 5.10
php-5.3         PHP 5.3
zend-5.6        PHP 5.3 with Zend Server 5.6
php-5.4         PHP 5.4
zend-6.1        PHP 5.4 with Zend Server 6.1
python-2.6      Python 2.6
python-2.7      Python 2.7
python-3.3      Python 3.3
ruby-1.8        Ruby 1.8
ruby-1.9        Ruby 1.9
jbossews-1.0    Tomcat 6 (JBoss EWS 1.0)
jbossews-2.0    Tomcat 7 (JBoss EWS 2.0)
jboss-vertx-2.1 Vert.x 2.1

Please specify the name of the application and the web cartridge to install
Usage: rhc app-create <name> <cartridge> [... <cartridge>] [... VARIABLE=VALUE]
[-n namespace]
Pass '--help' to see the full list of options

Keep on rockin’ on

MongoDB is an open-source document database, and the leading NoSQL database. In order to add RockMongo MongoDB administration, which is a web front-end for interacting with your MongoDB, you have to execute this command:

rhc cartridge add rockmongo

after which you get an output similar to this:

C:\Users\Nikola\Desktop\mytest>rhc cartridge add rockmongo
DL is deprecated, please use Fiddle
Using rockmongo-1.1 (RockMongo 1.1) for 'rockmongo'
Adding rockmongo-1.1 to application 'mytest' ... done

rockmongo-1.1 (RockMongo 1.1)
-----------------------------
  Gears:          Located with mongodb-2.4, nodejs-0.10
  Connection URL: https://mytest-chavo.rhcloud.com/rockmongo/

Please make note of these MongoDB credentials:
  RockMongo User: admin
  RockMongo Password: ..i.aint.telin'..
URL: https://mytest-chavo.rhcloud.com/rockmongo/

If you login to RockMongo by using the username and pass provided you will get a simple but useful interface:

However, if you prefer to do it via shell, you can do this:

rhc ssh

and after that start interactive command-line interface by typing mongo :

[mytest-chavo.rhcloud.com 532812f94382eca22b000657]\> mongo
MongoDB shell version: 2.4.6
connecting to: 127.9.197.130:27017/admin
Welcome to the MongoDB shell.
For interactive help, type "help".
For more comprehensive documentation, see
        http://docs.mongodb.org/
Questions? Try the support group
        http://groups.google.com/group/mongodb-user

Now let’s select a database, which will be same as your app’s name.

> use mytest
switched to db mytest

To insert some record we can do something like this:

> var a = {"user":"nikola", points:10};
> db.scores.insert(a);

and check if it was successfully inserted:

> db.scores.find();
{ "_id" : ObjectId("53284189d6e5e4aedb1fbafd"), "user" : "nikola", "points" : 10 }

To query this information with Node.js you first have to install mongojs with npm install mongojs . Then open up the server.js file (it is in the root folder of your application) and add these lines in the self.createRoutes object:

self.routes['/db'] = function(req, res) {
    var mongojs = require('mongojs');
    var dbName = "/mytest";
    var connection_string = process.env.OPENSHIFT_MONGODB_DB_USERNAME + ":" +  process.env.OPENSHIFT_MONGODB_DB_PASSWORD + "@" + process.env.OPENSHIFT_MONGODB_DB_HOST + dbName;
    var db = mongojs(connection_string, ['scores']);
    var books = db.collection('scores');

    db.scores.find(function(err, docs) {
       res.send(docs); 
    });
};

All aboard, and ready to take-off

Now it’s time to add the changes to the staging state with git add . (you may wanna check Git if this looks daunting). You can check the status of the files with git status . To commit the changes you have to execute: git commit -a -m “Added code to talk to db” and finally git push to send the changes to OpenShift for deployment.

Now, if you followed this tutorial, on the link http://mytest-chavo.rhcloud.com/db (notice this db here, and ofc exact link would reflect to your app) you should get this output:

And a quick closing with with one useful command to get the overview of the app settings:

C:\Users\Nikola\Desktop\mytest>rhc app show
DL is deprecated, please use Fiddle
mytest @ http://mytest-chavo.rhcloud.com/ (uuid: 532812f94382eca22b000657)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
  Domain:     chavo
  Created:    10:33 AM
  Gears:      1 (defaults to small)
  Git URL:    ssh://[email protected]/~/git/mytest.git/
  SSH:        [email protected]
  Deployment: auto (on git push)

  mongodb-2.4 (MongoDB 2.4)
  -------------------------
    Gears:          Located with nodejs-0.10, rockmongo-1.1
    Connection URL: mongodb://$OPENSHIFT_MONGODB_DB_HOST:$OPENSHIFT_MONGODB_DB_PORT/
    Database Name:  mytest
    Password:       ..ccc...
    Username:       admin

  nodejs-0.10 (Node.js 0.10)
  --------------------------
    Gears: Located with mongodb-2.4, rockmongo-1.1

  rockmongo-1.1 (RockMongo 1.1)
  -----------------------------
    Gears:          Located with mongodb-2.4, nodejs-0.10
    Connection URL: https://mytest-chavo.rhcloud.com/rockmongo/

And this is it, now it’s your time to make something useful with it!

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Ship it

Deploying MongoDB and Node.js application on OpenShift

Keep calm and roll up your sleves

Keep on rockin’ on

All aboard, and ready to take-off

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