Remembering things for my future forgetful self: developer’s edition
I need to record a bunch of training tutorials for a web site. I want to use consistent, fake data, so I set up a local copy of the site. I dumped out the database, and created my test data. As the site evolves, I can continue to check out revisions and run migrations, but still have my customized test data.
So far, so good. But a problem arises. When recording, the URL for my demo site shows up. This will confuse the customer. There’s an easy fix for this, of course, which is to change my demo site to respond to the true site’s hostname, and map it in my /etc/hosts file.
It works great! Except that I’m forgetful. I’ll be adding a new feature on my dev machine, get it approved on the staging server, and eventually check it out of revision control to launch it to the live server. I’ll check, and get confused. Where are my changes? I may go so far as to start looking at the filesystem of the live server and issuing informational commands in the revision control system, which will only confuse me more, as the changes are live. Eventually, I’ll notice that some of the data is demo-like data, and then I’ll kick myself for having wasted half an hour on something so stupid. I’ll comment out the line in my /etc/hosts, and everything will be back to normal… until it comes time to record new tutorials.
It’s time to remind future me. First step is in the terminal. I added the following to my .zshrc file:
export inhost=`egrep '127\.0\.0\.1\s+domain.com' /etc/hosts | wc -l` export commented=`egrep '#127\.0\.0\.1\s+domain.com' /etc/hosts | wc -l` if [[ "$inhost" -eq 1 && "$commented" -eq 0 ]] then echo " ____ _______ ___ ____ _____ _" echo "| __ )| ____\ \ / / \ | _ \| ____| |" echo "| _ \| _| \ \ /\ / / _ \ | |_) | _| | | " echo "| |_) | |___ \ V V / ___ \| _ <| |___|_|" echo "|____/|_____| \_/\_/_/ \_\_| \_\_____(_)" echo "" echo "-----------------------------------------" echo "domain.com is remapped in /etc/hosts!!! " echo "-----------------------------------------" fi
This works well. When I’ve edited the /etc/hosts, my terminal comes up like:
But, future me may not go directly to the terminal to diagnose the issue. Future me may foolishly try to compare the current state of the site to the dev or staging version. Never fear! I can save future me from this idiocy.
First, I set my standard test browser to open up new windows and tabs with a “home page” instead of a blank page. That “home page” is http://localhost. I set up the default virtual host, and create an index page with the following barebones code:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
<meta charset="UTF-8">
<title>Home</title>
</head>
<body>
<?php
$server = dns_get_record('domain.com');
if ($server[0]['ip'] == '127.0.0.1')
{ ?>
<h1 style="color:red">WARNING!</h1>
<pre style="color:red">
-----------------------------------------
domain.com is remapped in /etc/hosts!!!
-----------------------------------------
</pre>
<?php } else { ?> we good.<?php } ?>
<h2>Search:</h2>
<form class="search-form-home__form" action="https://startpage.com/sp/search" id="search" method="post">
<div>
<input id="q" maxlength="2048" name="query" type="text" value=""/>
<input type="hidden" name="cat" value="web"/>
<input type="submit"/>
</div>
</form>
</body>
</html>
Now when future me opens up a new browser tab or window, he’ll be greeted with a nearly blank page with a search box. Or possibly a warning!
So, by spending a bunch of time now, I can save future me a bunch of time (and frustration). It’s not clear that it will be worth it, but it was definitely worth trying.
