Web work

Fixing outdated Let’s Encrypt (zope.interface error)

I’ve started using Let’s Encrypt for the SSL certificates a while back. I installed it on all the web servers, irrelevant of the need for SSL, just to have it there, when I need it (thanks to this Ansible role). One of those old web servers needed an SSL certificate recently, so I thought it’d be no problem to generate one.

But I was wrong. The letsencrypt-auto tool got outdated and was failing to execute, throwing some Python exception about missing zope.interface module. A quick Google search brought this StackOverflow discussion, with the exact issue I was having.

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/root/.local/share/letsencrypt/bin/letsencrypt", line 7, in <module>
    from certbot.main import main
  File "/root/.local/share/letsencrypt/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/certbot/main.py", line 12, in <module>
    import zope.component
  File "/root/.local/share/letsencrypt/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/zope/component/__init__.py", line 16, in <module>
    from zope.interface import Interface
ImportError: No module named interface

However, the solution didn’t fix the problem for me:

unset PYTHON_INSTALL_LAYOUT
/opt/letsencrypt/letsencrypt-auto -v

Even pulling the updated version from the GitHub repository didn’t solve it.

After poking around for a while more, I found this bug report from the last year, which solved my problem.

I recommend:

Running rm -rf /root/.local/share/letsencrypt. This removes your installation of letsencrypt, but keeps all configuration files, certificates, logs, etc.

Make sure you have an up to date copy of letsencrypt-auto. It can be found here.

Run letsencrypt-auto again.

If you get the same behavior, you can try installing zope.interface manually by running:

/root/.local/share/letsencrypt/bin/pip install zope.interface

Hopefully, next time I’ll remember to search my blog’s archives …

Update (May 31, 2017): check out my brother’s follow up post with even better way of fixing this issue.

Morphos – morphological solution in PHP for English and Russian

If you ever had to deal with morphology in English, you probably found one or two libraries to help you out. But if you had to do that for Russian, than I’m sure you are missing a few hairs, and the ones that you still have are grayer than they used to be. I’ve got some good news for you though, now there is Morphos (GitHub repository).

Morphos is a morphological solution written completely in the PHP language. Supports Russian and English. Provides classes to decline First/Middle/Last names/nouns and generate cardinal numerals.

Just look at this beauty!

var_dump($dec->getForms($user_name, $dec->detectGender($user_name)));
/* Will produce something like
  array(6) {
    ["nominativus"]=>
    string(8) "Иван"
    ["genetivus"]=>
    string(10) "Ивана"
    ["dativus"]=>
    string(10) "Ивану"
    ["accusative"]=>
    string(10) "Ивана"
    ["ablativus"]=>
    string(12) "Иваном"
    ["praepositionalis"]=>
    string(15) "об Иване"
  }
*/

Just this alone can make user interfaces and emails so much better. But there is more to it than that.

Vim setup for PHP development

Robert Basic shares his “current Vim setup for PHP development“. He shows how setup the Gutentags plugin, jump to definitions with CtrlP plugin, display of the current file and method in the status line, add support for PHP namespaces, improve linting with Asynchronous Lint Engine, and add support for PHPStan.

Via PHPDeveloper.

Modern Software Over-Engineering Mistakes

“Modern Software Over-Engineering Mistakes” is a nice collection of examples, results and reviews of over-engineering mistakes of the modern day.

Continue reading Modern Software Over-Engineering Mistakes

GitHub to MySQL

GitHub to MySQL is a handy little app in PHP that pulls labels, milestones and issues from GitHub into your local MySQL database. This is useful for analysis and backup purposes.

There are a few example queries provided that show issues vs. pull requests, average number of days to merge a pull request over the past weeks, average number of pull requests open every day, and total number of issues.

I think this tool can be easily extended to pull other information from GitHub, such as release notes, projects, web hooks. Also, if you are using multiple version control services, such as BitBucket and GitLab, extending this tool can help with merging data from multiple sources and cross-referencing it with the company internal tools (bug trackers, support ticketing systems, CRM, etc).

This is not something I’ll be doing now, but I’m sure the future is not too far away.