Sander van Dragt

I use the following script to run a daily upgrade on the #BookStack instance:

#!/usr/bin/env bash
pushd /var/www/brain.vandragt.com
        git pull origin release && composer install --no-dev && php artisan migrate --force
popd

I'm looking to create a cross-platform executable of my commandline application. The application is using poetry as the package manager, and I'm running this on MacOS.

First we need to install PyInstaller:

$ poetry add pyinstaller --dev

Then it should be as simple as running the following:

$ poetry shell
$ pyinstaller --onefile app/app.py

Macho Libre

However, this resulted in the following error:

ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'macholib'

macholib can be used to analyze and edit Mach-O headers, the executable format used by Mac OS X.

It’s typically used as a dependency analysis tool, and also to rewrite dylib references in Mach-O headers to be @executable_path relative.

Manually adding this dependency to the project addresses this:

$ poetry add macholib --dev

NLTK

However, now calling pyinstaller again throws up a new error:

Unable to find "nltk_data" when adding binary and data files.

NLTK is a leading platform for building Python programs to work with human language data. It provides easy-to-use interfaces to over 50 corpora and lexical resources such as WordNet, along with a suite of text processing libraries for classification, tokenization, stemming, tagging, parsing, and semantic reasoning, wrappers for industrial-strength NLP libraries [...].

Fortunately we can download the missing data as follows (from within the poetry shell):

$ python
>>> import nltk
>>> nltk.download()

Press the download button on the window that pops up and make sure the installation path matches the error message path.

Then fix the path to NLTK in PyInstaller according to this StackOverflow answer. To get to the right location, ask poetry:

$ poetry env list --full-path
$ cd <path>/lib/python3.7/site-packages/PyInstaller/hooks

Rerunning the pyinstaller command after this produced an executable! However it's 1.2GB, propably due to including the macholib library.

I will update this post when I've figured this out.

Hide Trackbacks is a WordPress plugin that hides pingbacks and trackbacks from your website comments.

The minimum supported WordPress version is now 5.0 and I've bumped up the version to indicate it is tested against the upcoming 5.4 release.

#hidetrackbacks #projects #wordpress

I just released Fafi v0.1.5-alpha. Fafi is a console application that indexes and searches the page content of Firefox bookmarks.

Install via pipx install fafi

v0.1.5 stores the database into it's own application settings (using https://github.com/ActiveState/appdirs)

Source on Github

#projects #fafi #faff

I run my own Nextcloud server, and every other week there's an update to the server, or one of the plugins I've enabled. The following steps enable automatic updates to the Nextcloud server.

This assumes Nextcloud is installed under /var/www/nextcloud:

Add a scheduled task as the webserver user:

$ sudo -u www-data crontab -e

Add the following line to run the upgrade script once a day at 4:05am. Instead of running the upgrade process directly we run a script so that we can also run it from the shell if needed:

5     4  *  *  * cd /var/www/nextcloud && ./upgrade.sh

Now create the script and make it executable:

$ cd /var/www/nextcloud
$ nano upgrade.sh && sudo chmod +x upgrade.sh

The script itself runs the server updater, the no-interaction argument prevents prompting for questions, followed by the occ utility to update all installed apps.

  pushd $(dirname $0)/updater
        /usr/bin/php updater.phar --no-interaction
        cd ..; ./occ app:update --all
  popd

#linux #nextcloud

Over the holidays I’ve build a little tool, Faff, to index and search the page contents of Firefox bookmarks. This allows searching using words that appear on the pages rather than in the bookmark title. It uses full-text-search with ranking / relevance and snippets, it’s quite WIP. More info at https://github.com/svandragt/faff/

It's written in Python command-line tool and uses SQLite's full-text search and Newspaper's text extraction, so a search over all my bookmarks takes only about 0.3 seconds although the indexing is certainly slow.

#faff #projects

Cuttlefish is a PHP based hackable blog framework -- with the goals of being fast, easily hackable, and easy to adopt. I've been working on it since 2012, when it was known as Carbon. It can generate a static HTML site for uploading anywhere, or run dynamically.

Version 0.4 licenses the code as MIT, so anyone can build on top of the project. Cuttlefish now has API documentation courtesy of PHPDox, which is updated whenever code is changed. I've changed the code style from 'WordPress-like' to the PHP community default of PSR12. The project now comes with a Docker container which means getting up and running is even easier.

Install Cuttlefish is easy using the instructions. For a fuller list of changes see https://github.com/svandragt/cuttlefish/releases/tag/v0.4.

Known issue:  I still have trouble getting Xdebug to work, if you're familiar with Docker Compose and Xdebug I could use your help.

For v0.5, now that the codebase is in a better state, I'm looking at adding more features again.

#cuttlefish #projects