Bluehost Hacks

Delays…

Cade — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 19:31:16 +0000

A personal move and a local telco aquisition have slowed down progress on Bluehost Hacks. Once I get settled and a connection to the internet at home, things should pick up again.

1 Million Down, 10 Million to Go…

Cade — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 23:24:20 +0000

Matt Heaton (CEO of Bluehost) announced on his blog that Bluehost and related companies will soon reach 1 million domains hosted– a milestone to say the least.

How To Install PDFlib Lite (and the PHP .so)

Cade — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 03:22:25 +0000

I regularly get requests to install PDFlib Lite on servers, but have to turn them down due to licensing concerns (installing software licensed for personal use on a business machine with 450 users can be tricky), now you can install it on your own. Let’s get started by first installing PDFLib Lite.

Grab the source package

cd ~/tmp/
wget http://www.pdflib.com/binaries/PDFlib/703/PDFlib-Lite-7.0.3.tar.gz

Unpack the archive

tar xvzf PDFlib-Lite-7.0.3.tar.gz

Compile PDFlib Lite

cd PDFlib-Lite-7.0.3
./configure --prefix=$HOME/usr --without-java
make
make install

You may see an error about a failure to copy to /usr/local/lib for Python and Perl. You can safely ignore it. If it bothers you that much, add --without-python --without-perl to the configure and re-make install.

Build the PDFlib DSO for PHP

cd ~/tmp
pecl download pdflib
tar xvzf pdflib-*.tgz
cd pdflib-*
phpize
./configure --with-pdflib=$HOME/usr
make

At this point, you have a built pdf.so file in ~/tmp/pdflib-*/modules. Copy it somewhere safe. I like to create an extension directory locally for all my extensions (you need to create it if doesn’t already exist).

cp ~/tmp/pdflib-*/modules/pdf.so ~/extensions

Now to implement it. Add/ modify the following in your php.ini:

extension_dir=/home//extensions
extension=pdf.so

Note: If you depend on system installed extensions (ie. PDO_MySQL) you will need to copy them into your local extension directory.

cp /usr/lib/php/extensions/*/* ~/extensions

This copy may be unpredictable if there are multiple no-debug-non-zts- directories. If so, copy the extensions from the newer directory.

How To Enable SSH Access

Cade — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 09:02:13 +0000

Bluehost offers SSH access free with each hosting account, but you do have to jump through a hoop to enable it. In order to enable SSH access, you must either fax or email a copy of your government issued ID to them. There are a couple ways to make it happen:

Send a fax that includes your domain name and ID to (801) 765-1992.
Scan your ID and submit it via your control panel’s “SSH/ Shell Access” icon.

How To Install Git

Cade — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 08:26:38 +0000

GIT is a fast version control system that is gaining popularity. Since you can’t install via RPM as an unprivileged user, we will have to compile from source.

Download the source:

cd ~/tmp
wget http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/git-1.5.5.tar.gz

Unzip the package:

tar xvzf git-1.5.5.tar.gz

Build the package:

cd  git-1.5.5
./configure --prefix=$HOME/opt
make
make install

If ~/opt/bin isn’t currently part of your path, add it to your .bashrc file:

vi ~/.bashrc

PATH=$PATH:~/opt/bin

Then reload your .bashrc file to reload your path:

source ~/.bashrc

You will need a dedicated IP address to clone remote branches on standard GIT ports.