I took the plunge and switched from swiftmailer to symfony_mailer in StratosERP on the weekend, and it was surprisingly simple!

This snippet of code generates a pdf file using entity_print with wkhtmltopdf in the private filesystem, creates a new email, attaches the file and also takes a text_format field for the body and sends it.

Today I figured out an issue that has been blocking progress on StratosERP for a while. Its one of the last things needed, and I had run out of other immediate bugs/features, so it had to be sorted.

The issue was the wkhtmltopdf would generate an unstyled pdf. It gave no errors and the handy Entity Print module debugging url worked fine and looked correct.

The Github tools are cool, but mostly I just wanted a quicker way to confirm that my jobs had run successfully, rather than go to the web browser.

It was pretty easy to construct a command to make it a one liner, but first, the github cli tools need to be installed, and the jq utility.

Once thats setup when a git push has just been done, then this command should automatically watch the job.

I recently needed to perform some simple domain redirects, and surprise - there is a minimal docker container that is perfect for the job.

docker run -d --restart=always \
 -e REDIRECT_TARGET=https://domaintoredirect.biz \
 -e VIRTUAL_HOST=www.someotherdomain.com,someotherdomain.com \
 -e LETSENCRYPT_HOST=www.someotherdomain.com,someotherdomain.com \
 --name=domaintoredirect-biz -p 8080:80 morbz/docker-web-redirect

This works a treat, but does require a few things done first:

MS Teams has been adopted all over, but on Linux, they have annoyingly decided to not provide the default Window decorations, so Its not possible to right click, and enable 'Always on Visible Workspace' which is something I like to have on.

OOhhh, found a different way, hold down the ALT key and right click on the teams title bar and the popup has 'Always on Visible Workspace' as an option.

When you make a few Drupal sites, you will eventually find that you want to be able to take a feature that you created on one site and move it across to another site. After all, why re-invent the wheel!

My procedure for doing this has changed over time, using the features module was the way with Drupal 6 and Drupal 7, but with Drupal 8, we have better configuration management, and modules to help make things easier.

Features is again one of the modules that can be used, but I prefer a lighter approach, though its perhaps a little more work.

Covid means some extra time away from my day job at the University of Adelaide. This means I have a fortnight of time to work on side projects as if they were my full time gig. This is a great opportunity to knock some things out, so this is the plan.

Recently I started having an issue with composer update or composer install on macOS. I ignored it for a bit and used Linux instead, but had to fix it eventually. When running composer update -n, the error was:

Mostly documenting for myself, but these are the steps it took to get quickly up to speed in macOS with php, composer, docker for development.

Disable blocking apps from the internet:

sudo spctl --master-disable

Now, install the applications that we want from known sources.

I had an issue on the weekend where the backup command, running in a docker container:

restic backup /shared

Would always report that all files were new, but when run repeatedly in the same container would work a treat.