Tools


How to generate SSH keys for Git authorization

SSH keys © Some rights reserved by @boetter / flickr

Securing your Git interactions with SSH keys is a fundamental aspect of software development today, offering a secure and convenient way to authenticate with remote repositories. Whether you’re an experienced developer or just starting your coding journey, understanding how to generate SSH keys for Git authorization is an essential skill to ensure the integrity and privacy of your code. In this quick guide, we’ll walk you through the process of creating SSH keys on Windows, Mac, and Linux systems, empowering you to access and collaborate on your Git projects with enhanced security.

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Local development with Valet+

Valet Plus

Development has been rapidly growing. In fact, at this stage, it has grown so much that it puts a lot of pressure on developers to become super-humans. However, the developers should do what they’re best at, and that is writing code without having to struggle with a local setup. Luckily, there are tools that help developers focus more on code and less on the environment.

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Version control systems in UI design

Version control systems in UI design

Our design team switched to working in Sketch a while ago but it wasn’t until version 43 we really started seeing some opportunities to change our workflows more significantly. It was also an opportunity for more designers to work on the same project as well as collaborate with developers more easily. If you’re looking for professional Magento web design services, feel free to check out our Magento Web Design Service for more information.

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Sass Output Styles

Sass Output Styles

Sass has four different CSS output style. By changing setting for :style option or using the --style command-line flag.

I will show you how Sass outputs this piece of SCSS code in all style options with style option explanation.

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Mitigating Facebook’s “x-fb-http-engine: Liger” site hammering using Apache or nginx

Mitigating Facebook’s “x-fb-http-engine: Liger” site hammering using Apache or nginx

Facebook is using a sort of web page prerendering mechanism in it’s in-app browser for mobile users [see disclosure here]. It is used by Facebook’s in-app browser to speed up page rendering for web link content shared on Facebook. But it can cause serious headaches, and this post should explain how to mitigate it with Apache or nginx.

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A simple frontend workflow for Gulp

A simple frontend workflow for Gulp

What is Gulp?

Gulp is a task/build runner which uses Node.js for web development. In this tutorial, I will not explain how to create your Gulp plugin but I will show you how you can create a simple, basic, customized build process for your frontend workflow to ease your job.

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Magento without an IDE? Say hello to Sublime!

Magento without an IDE? Say hello to Sublime!

We are all aware of the Magento codebase size and its complexity. That is one of the reasons most people use full-fledged IDEs for Magento programming. Most answers regarding the “what IDE should I be using for Magento?” or “what is the best Magento development environment?” include big boys like Eclipse, NetBeans and PhpStorm. Since you’ve already read the title, you may be wondering: “what can a text editor like Sublime Text offer me for my Magento development?”. Vanilla installation? Not much, but with the help of a few plugins, well… Keep reading and you just may be in for a treat.

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Using Redis cache backend and session storage in Magento

Using Redis cache backend and session storage in Magento

Combined with the power of Zend Framework, Magento currently supports many cache backends with file system, APC and Memcached being the most widely used. Every supported cache backend brings it’s own set of upsides and downsides, but since there’s a lot to choose from, one could easily assume that as far as cache backends are concerned, Magento is very well covered. To some degree this might be true, but when you seriously up the number of requests, none of the cache backends scale well. Besides poor scaling, some of the cache backend implementations also suffer from serious limitations like not having support for grouping of related cache entries, a.k.a. tagging. With this in mind, and in order to provide support for stable and scalable cache backend, latest versions of Magento are turning to Redis key-value store. In this article I’ll do my best to describe process of implementing Redis as cache and session backend with recent versions of Magento Community and Enterprise Edition.

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Easily manage LAMP name based virtual hosts

Easily manage LAMP name based virtual hosts

I’ve been developing inside LAMP environment since the day one of my web development adventure. Reason for this is that all of the web development tools like web server, database management system, source code revision control systems are at home when I log into the Linux powered workstation. Of course there are some downsides to developing inside LAMP, most importantly the sheer complexity of LAMP environment configuration. With this in mind I’ve created tool designed to simplify management of name based virtual hosts on Debian based Linux operating systems. In this article I’ll give my best to provide an overview of this tool and present you with a few clear examples illustrating its usage.

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Setup automatic per-folder subdomains on your local linux based computer

rusek@sxc.hu © rusek@sxc.hu

WARNING: this is a fully linux-based tutorial. I’m pretty sure that this is possible on Micro$oft Windows and OS/X, but unfortunately I’m not using them, neither I know a good DNS server for them and the impact on XAMPP and MAMP.

As you probably already know, one of the main problems when you’re doing multiple projects is to organize them properly, first for fast local testing of changes, second for your own sake, to not get lost on your own computer.
One more problem are the testing local domains. Well, the easiest way when you create a project is to create a new project folder, put a new domain (and every subdomain you’ll use) into your /etc/hosts file, create a new virtual host in the apache config, run a2ensite #### (or however you enable a new site on your distribution), restart the webserver… Which means, you need to do that everytime when you’re creating a new project. Not a very convenient way if you ask me, as you’re bloating your /etc/hosts file and your Apache2 virtualHost file(s).

So, one day, I was thinking about that and looking for a solution for it. I’m sure there are a bunch of ways to get rid of this problem, and this solution which I’ll show you is how I managed to do it.

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Magento mobile theme – imobile

Magento mobile theme – imobile

Magento meets jQuery mobile (ver 1.1.0), before we start please note this is only experiment, use this theme on your own, this is not (yet) production ready. In a nutshell we have “package” under which we place all edited files. For start we use magento iphone theme and then add some “extra stuff”.

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Using custom php.ini file with php CLI

Using custom php.ini  file with php CLI © pk2000@sxc.hu

Considering that I have never been real Linux user before, there was few things that I had to learn to successfully handle my code on server through SSH.

One of these things is forcing php CLI to use my custom php.ini file on server.

Let me start this story from beginning …

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How difficult is Git branching?

How difficult is Git branching?

Well, in short – it isn’t! But, when it comes to branching, it comes to “merging problem”. I say problem although it isn’t, and if you’re interested, I’ll show you why.

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Basic Git usage from console

Basic Git usage from console

Hi! Today I’m going to write an article about basic Git usage in practice. I’m not going to go into depth of Git repository setup, but rather on developer’s side – what’s important to understand to start using it?

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How to limit web services so they don’t kill CPU

How to limit web services so they don’t kill CPU © by groenmen/sxc

Hi! As any developer, I’ve encountered a small problem when working with PHP under Apache. It’s all good until you have to test the “real life” situations. For example – if you use imagemagick library in your application. It can get quite heavy on server load. So if you want to read a solution for it, read on.

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Dynamic grids anyone?

Dynamic grids anyone?

For my second 🙂 article I’m again writing about Ext.js. Ext.js has one great part for showing data – grids. These look really nice and you can style them pretty easily. It all works like a charm when you’re using them for static data. But what when things get dynamic? What when you don’t know the number of the headers that you need in the table and not just rows? Here’s where this article will help.

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PhpStorm IDE overview

PhpStorm IDE overview

Developing sites and applications demands the best tool you can afford. PhpStorm is by far the best friend you can get when dealing with web development. Here’s why.

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Git vs SVN A.K.A. Everyone likes control

Git vs SVN A.K.A. Everyone likes control

Hi! Today I’ll try to make an objective overview of both SVN’s and Git’s pros and cons from developer side. I won’t go into depth of configuration of any of them neither will discuss specific commands, but rather functionality itself.

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