All of a sudden my arrow keys stopped working – up and down keys scrolled the screen up and down, while left and right had no effect. I found the solution here and basically all that you have to do is disable Scroll Lock on your keyboard! Pretty weird stuff, if I may add…
Say you have a simple XML file books.xml that looks like this:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <books> <book> <author> <name>Nikola</name> <surname>Brežnjak</surname> </author> <title>Some awesome book title</title> <year>2014</year> </book> <book> <author> <name>Patrick</name> <surname>Rothfuss</surname> </author> <title>Doors of stone</title> <year>20xx</year> </book> </books>
and you want to get all the names of the authors, you can use SimpleXML:
<?php
$xml = simplexml_load_file("books.xml");
var_dump($xml);
$data = array();
foreach ($xml as $book){
$data[] = (string)$book->author->name;
}
var_dump($data);
?>
The output in this case will look like this:
Disclaimer: I’m in no way affiliated with Nodejitsu or any of the frameworks that I listed below in the post. I’m just documenting my experience with them – problems (and solutions) I’ve faced while trying these new technologies on a Windows machine.
MEN – MongoDB, Express, Node.js, and if you think MEN is not mean enough, take a look at the post on Deploying MEAN.io to Nodejitsu from Windows machine.
Nodejitsu is a cloud platform as a service based on Node.js and serves Node.js applications on their platform. Signup is free, you don’t have to enter billing info in order to try 2 months free (yes, databases work too!), just click on the “Do not select a product now” button:
After signing up you get a confirmation mail like this:
Welcome to Nodejitsu! Your Nodejitsu account is activated and ready to go! username: userName To confirm your account, install the latest jitsu: sudo npm install jitsu -g and then run: jitsu users confirm userName big-h@5h This will allow you to deploy applications with: jitsu deploy
Setting up databases in the web admin interface is easy as you only have to literally click one button after deciding which database type and provider you want:
Hackaton starters are gaining momentum and there are quite a few of them already like:
- Hackaton starter
- Drywall
- DozerJS
- Skeleton
- MEAN – only one which offers Angular out of the box (a follow up post on this is here)
I decided to try out Skeleton, mainly because I liked the “just right” Goldilocks reference 🙂
So, as the site suggests, you first have to installnodemon , gulp andmocha , then clone the github repo, npm & bower install everything and you’re done:
# Install global dependencies npm install -g nodemon gulp mocha # Clone the repoo (and fetch only the latest commits) git clone --depth=1 [email protected]:dstroot/skeleton.git cd skeleton # Install local dependencies npm install bower install # Start everything up with Gulp # (builds the assets and starts the app with nodemon) gulp
Everything works for you? Great! For the rest of unlucky ones, you may got (like me) after running gulp :
gulp
module.js:340
throw err;
^
Error: Cannot find module 'jshint-stylish'
at Function.Module._resolveFilename (module.js:338:15)
at Function.Module._load (module.js:280:25)
at Module.require (module.js:364:17)
at require (module.js:380:17)
at Object.<anonymous> (C:\Users\Nikola\Desktop\skeleton\gulpfile.js:22:21)
at Module._compile (module.js:456:26)
at Object.Module._extensions..js (module.js:474:10)
at Module.load (module.js:356:32)
at Function.Module._load (module.js:312:12)
at Module.require (module.js:364:17)
I tried npm install jshint-stylish , and ran gulp again:
C:\Users\Nikola\Desktop\skeleton>gulp
[gulp] Using gulpfile C:\Users\Nikola\Desktop\skeleton\gulpfile.js
[gulp] Starting 'clean'...
[gulp] Finished 'clean' after 11 ms
[gulp] Starting 'styles'...
[gulp] Starting 'scripts'...
[gulp] Starting 'images'...
[gulp] Finished 'images' after 2.75 ms
[gulp] Starting 'lint'...
[gulp] Finished 'lint' after 192 ms
[gulp] Starting 'watch'...
[gulp] Finished 'watch' after 151 ms
[gulp] Starting 'develop'...
[gulp] Finished 'develop' after 1.68 ms
[gulp] Live reload server listening on: 35729
[gulp] gulp-notify: [Gulp notification] Clean task complete
events.js:72
throw er; // Unhandled 'error' event
^
Error: Incorrect OS. node-notify requires Mac OS 10.8 or higher
at C:\Users\Nikola\Desktop\skeleton\node_modules\gulp-notify\node_modules\no
de-notifier\lib\terminal-notifier.js:46:25
at Object.module.exports.isMacOSX (C:\Users\Nikola\Desktop\skeleton\node_mod
ules\gulp-notify\node_modules\node-notifier\lib\utils.js:24:12)
at Notifier.notify (C:\Users\Nikola\Desktop\skeleton\node_modules\gulp-notif
y\node_modules\node-notifier\lib\terminal-notifier.js:44:11)
at module.exports (C:\Users\Nikola\Desktop\skeleton\node_modules\gulp-notify
\lib\report.js:17:5)
at Transform._flush (C:\Users\Nikola\Desktop\skeleton\node_modules\gulp-noti
fy\lib\notify.js:41:5)
at Transform.<anonymous> (C:\Users\Nikola\Desktop\skeleton\node_modules\gulp
-notify\node_modules\through2\node_modules\readable-stream\lib\_stream_transform
.js:130:12)
at Transform.g (events.js:180:16)
at Transform.EventEmitter.emit (events.js:92:17)
at finishMaybe (C:\Users\Nikola\Desktop\skeleton\node_modules\gulp-notify\no
de_modules\through2\node_modules\readable-stream\lib\_stream_writable.js:363:12)
at endWritable (C:\Users\Nikola\Desktop\skeleton\node_modules\gulp-notify\no
de_modules\through2\node_modules\readable-stream\lib\_stream_writable.js:370:3)
As the message says (note also on their website), gulp notify , which uses node-notify is not supported on Windows. The way I solved this was that I removed all of the .pipe(notify({ onLast: true, message: ‘Scripts task complete’ })) lines from gulpfile.js, but it still wasn’t enough! Running lint job made the gulp fail, so I removed that to and woila then it all worked.
A note (though you can look this up on the official github page also) on how to setup Google login by:
- Visit Google Cloud Console
- Click CREATE PROJECT button
- Enter Project Name, then click CREATE
- Then select APIs & auth from the sidebar and click on Credentials tab
- Click CREATE NEW CLIENT ID button
- Application Type: Web Application
- Authorized Javascript origins: http://localhost:3000
- Authorized redirect URI: http://localhost:3000/auth/google/callback
- Copy and paste Client ID and Client secret keys into
config/config.js
Note: When you ready to deploy to production don’t forget to add your new url to Authorized Javascript origins and Authorized redirect URI, e.g. http://my-awesome-app.nodejitsu.com and http://my-awesome-app.nodejitsu.com/auth/google/callback respectively. The same goes for other providers.
Deploying to Nodejitsu is done by firstly loging in and then executing jitsu deploy:
C:\Users\Nikola\Desktop\skeleton>jitsu login info: Welcome to Nodejitsu hitman666 info: jitsu v0.13.15, node v0.10.26 info: It worked if it ends with Nodejitsu ok info: Executing command login prompt: username: (hitman666) prompt: password: info: Authenticated as hitman666 info: Nodejitsu ok C:\Users\Nikola\Desktop\skeleton>jitsu deploy
Boom, your app is live on Nodejitsu server and it should look like this (ofc YMMV in term of link):
If you’re using Console 2, and I don’t know why you wouldn’t want to btw, you probably wanted to customize it. Here is an excellent post by Scott Hanselman on how to do it:http://www.hanselman.com/blog/Console2ABetterWindowsCommandPrompt.aspx.
To change settings you have to right-click in the main console and click Edit | Settings.
The settings that I have used from his blog are:
- I’ve set Desktop as my startup directory under Console – Startup Directory
- I hid the menu, status bar and toolbar under Appearance | More
- I’ve set the font to Consolas, but font only 12, as 15 (as he suggests) looks way too big on my screen. No experimentation with matrix colors or transparency.
- I’ve set the option so that when I select with the mouse the selection gets coppied into the clipboard by selecting “Copy on Select” under Behavior
- Hotkeys, changed the New Tab 1 hotkey to Ctrl-T
- Hotkeys, changed Paste to Ctrl-V
- Do not use Ctrl-C as Copy Selection or you will not be able to break some command that keeps running after you run it (like grunt for example). And besides if you used my settings then you already have a “Copy on Select” option set. More info here: http://sourceforge.net/p/console/bugs/401/
edit (18.3.2014): So, it turned out I wanted to be matrix cool :), so I went to change the color of the font, but to no avail. Finally I figured out that actually the grey color needed to be changed to green and not white as I was doing. Here’s an image to make thing clearer:
Heroku is a cloud platform as a service supporting several programming languages which lets app developers spend their time on their application code, not managing servers, deployment, ongoing operations, or scaling…
If you tried to get your feet wet with Heroku by deploying Node.js application, you must have come across this article on Heroku’s documentation (and you also may have run into problems when starting Foreman if you’re on a Windows machine – read onward to see how I’ve solved it).
Obviously, first you have to make an account on Heroku, then install Heroku toolbelt (it gives you git, foreman, and heroku command line interface) for your environment (in my case Windows):
Fire up your command prompt (I use Console2) and run heroku login . You need to have Node.js installed (in case you don’t you can download it here).
Write some Node.js app and put it in app.js file:
//app.js
var express = require("express");
var app = express();
app.get('/', function(req, res) {
res.send('Every day in every way I\'m serving more requests');
});
var port = Number(process.env.PORT || 5000);
app.listen(port, function() {
console.log("Listening on " + port);
});
If you have package.json file then Heroku will recognize your app as Node.js app. In order to create it, run npm init in the root directory of your app. The npm init utility will walk you through creating a package.json file by asking few questions. If you already made your repository on GitHub and cloned it locally then npm init command in this folder will recognize that too and add:
"repository": {
"type": "git",
"url": "https://github.com/yourUsername/appName.git"
}
If you wish, you can freely clone my test app from Github: https://github.com/Hitman666/herokuTestApp.git
Next, install dependencies from your code (in app.js example the required module is express). Use npm install <pkg> –save to install a package and save it as a dependency in the package.json file. In my example that would be one command:
npm install express --save
You have to set a Procfile, which is a text file in the root directory of your application, to explicitly declare what command should be executed to start a web dyno. In our case this would be the contents of Procfile:
web: node app.js
Now you should be able to start your application locally using Foreman (installed as part of the Heroku Toolbelt) by running foreman start .
But here the party started :/
In my case foreman didn’t start at all, and after a lot of searching, I managed to solve it in few steps. First, I updated my Ruby installation:
gem update --system --source http://rubygems.org/
Then, according to this StackOverflow post I installed former version of foreman:
gem uninstall foreman gem install foreman -v 0.61
Finally, I added Ruby’s bin folder (Ruby which, in my case, is in C:\Program Files (x86)\Heroku\ruby-1.9.2\bin) to my PATH variable.
Ok, almost there! Lets add our app to git (you should skip the git init command if you already cloned your app from GitHub):
git init git add . git commit -m "init"
and finally, lets deploy it to Heroku:
heroku create git push heroku master
To open the app in your browser run heroku open . To push the changes to GitHub you have to execute git push origin master.
*Now that your app is up and running on heroku (my link) you may want to prevent it from going to sleep mode. Some suggestions on how to achieve this are in this post on StackOverflow (I went with UptimeRobot).
**At some point, as I was fiddling with the apps on Heroku’s website, I deleted all apps and then the git push heroku master command from my console was not working anymore, so I had to do:
git remote rm heroku heroku create git push heroku master
***Also, I wanted to rename my app and that can be done easily:
heroku apps:rename NEWNAME
