Tag: Pear

Installing gearmand, libgearman and pecl gearman extension for php from source in Debian 6 & 7

·

I had a pretty rough evening today. No, not because the waiter forgot to add sugar in my tea, but because it was so boring to go through the trial and errors of installing gearman daemon and pecl gearman extension for php.

First I tried with the pretty-obvious-awe-fucking-some way.

[sourcecode language=”shell”]
apt-get update
apt-get install gearman
pecl install gearman
[/sourcecode]

In above steps, “apt-get install gearman” ran smoothly. But then “pecl install gearman” failed saying that it doesn’t have libgearman. Eh? so I installed libgearman4 (in Debian Squeezy. It was libgearman6 in Wheezy) and libgearman-dev. But pecl failed again to compile the extension saying that libgearman is missing. Strange! So I googled about this issue and found that it could be a link error where a symbolic link might be required of “/usr/include/libgearman” as “/usr/include/libgearman-1.0″. Still no luck.

So I decided to compile gearmand from the source. And libgearman is also included with that, so it will fix two errors at once. I downloaded the latest gearman package from launchpad and tried to compile it

[sourcecode language=”shell”]
wget https://launchpad.net/gearmand/1.2/1.1.11/+download/gearmand-1.1.11.tar.gz
tar -zxvf gearmand-1.1.11.tar.gz
cd gearmand-1.1.11
./configure
[/sourcecode]

Failure 1:
At this step, configure stopped showing the following error

[sourcecode language=”shell”]
configure: error: cannot find Boost headers version >= 1.39.0
[/sourcecode]

To fix this, I had to install “libboost-all-dev” by following command
[sourcecode language=”shell”]
apt-get install libboost-all-dev
[/sourcecode]

And I tried to compile gearman and it failed again

Failure 2:
At this step, configure stopped showing that it cannot find gperf. That’s fine – I have installed gperf and tried to configure gearman again

[sourcecode language=”shell”]
apt-get install gperf
[/sourcecode]

Failure 3:
Now it failed again, showing that libevent is missing. Hmm! Had to fix it anyway

[sourcecode language=”shell”]
apt-get install libevent-dev
[/sourcecode]

Failure 4:
Heck! Another failure. Now it’s showing that it can’t find libuuid. This part was a little tricky to solve, but finally fixed with the following package

[sourcecode language=”shell”]
apt-get install uuid-dev
[/sourcecode]

Let’s configure again. And sweet that the configure script ran smoothly. Let’s compile using make

Failure 5:
Grrr! At this point the make script failed with a bunch of text, where the following lines were at the top

[sourcecode language=”shell”]
libgearman/backtrace.cc: In function ‘void custom_backtrace()’:
libgearman/backtrace.cc:64:6: sorry, unimplemented: Graphite loop optimizations can only be used if the libcloog-ppl0 package is installed
[/sourcecode]

So it cannot find a library named libcloog-ppl. Let’s fix this problem by

[sourcecode language=”shell”]
apt-get install libcloog-ppl-dev
[/sourcecode]

Now I’ve tried to run the make script, and it was good. So i also ran make install to complete the installation.

[sourcecode language=”shell”]
make
make install
[/sourcecode]

Now gearmand and libgearman both are installed. So I tried to install pecl-gearman with the following extension and voila! it worked. No more missing libgearman anymore.

[sourcecode language=”shell”]
pecl install gearman
[/sourcecode]

Now all I had to do is add the line “extension=gearman.so” in my php.ini .

The process was tedious and boring and took me more time than writing this article. If you have seen “Despicable Me 2” when Lucy and Gru went to ElMacho’s restaurant and were attacked by that crazy chicken and finally Lucy exclaimed “What’s wrong with that chicken!”

I really wanted to say “What’s wrong with this chicken” after gearman was installed at last.

Enjoy!

Box.net widget in MiproApps – why did it require special care…

·

In MiproApps, our Visual Facebook Fanpage Desiger from Leevio, everything is built on top of a scalable plugin based architecture. Every plugin manages it’s data using a central plugin manager. Most of these data are isolated from each other, stored and served by the plugin manager without any special coding required from plugin developers. That makes everything simple. As storage and serving is fully managed by Plugin Manager, it helps us to cache, validate and sanitize user data properly from a single place.

But when we decided to add support for box.net, there comes a challenge. We have asked for username and password for box.net account from our users to pull out the data from their shared folders and files. “PASSWORD” – and that is the thing everyone thinks twice before providing to a third party. Everyone cares about their personal data security.

In MiproApps every data collected from user are submitted to storage service via Ajax request. And we simply cant send plain password collected by users in an Ajax request. What we did in this case is we had signed user’s sensitive information using a 128 bit public key (RSA) in client side. The private key is stored securely in our server and that encrypted information is decrypted only in server side. So client application has just the public key.

Box.net widget in Facebook Fanpages powered by MiproApps
Box.net widget in Facebook Fanpages powered by MiproApps

There were other challenges as well, while we went to implement this encryption in client side by Javascript and Decryption by PHP. Unfortunately PHPs Mcrypt doesnt support RSA, and Zend Framework doesnt provide any component for that. And there was a trick when you encrypt your data in JS. You must add a null byte at the end of your data, otherwise PHP cant decrypt it.

We have used RSA library (a combination of RSA, BigInt and Barett Library) from Ohdave and used the Crypt_RSA library from PEAR. And it also required us to install bigint PECL extension.

You can see some example code at here and you can use the RSA public/private key pair either by openssl shell command or the RSA key generator from ohdave.

The service layer is working smooth. Plugin developers doesnt need to bother about encryption and decryption. Everything was managed transparently under the hood. And so far we are only developing our plugins, data is secured and safe. Users can add their publicly shared box.net files directly in their facebook fanpage. For a sample output, you can check out my page. You will find the box.net component at the bottom right corner.