When running tests on a server using the recent versions of the MongoDB module for Drupal, and more specifically the MongoDB simpletests, the simpletest runner may leave droppings in your MongoDB Drupal database, which have no business remaining there. How to remove them while keeping the good collections ?
The typical case will be after a failed test runs, looking like this:
When auditing or reviewing an unknown code base, I often have to decide which files to examine in priority. Beyond the usual heuristics for Drupal projects (hint: look at templates in D7), how can one find the parts most likely to contain problems ? This simple command set can help pinpoint troublemaking files quickly.
One of the big trends during the Drupal 8 creation has been the replacement of info hooks by two main mechanisms: annotations, and YAML files. In that light, hook_drush_command(), as the CLI equivalent of the late hook_menu, replaced by various YAML files, looks just like a perfect candidate for replacement by a commands section in some mymodule.drush.yml configuration file. Turns out it is incredibly easy to achieve. Let's see how to kill some hundred lines of code real fast !
UPDATE 2015-12-04 : Tinytest is now documented, for the upcoming Meteor 1.3 release. See the official README.md. Better use the official information than my unofficial cheatsheet.
hook_requirements(), which is supposed to be present in the module install file, not the module itself: when called at runtime for the site report page, the module is loaded and the PSR/4 autoloader works fine. However, when that hook is fired during install to ensure the module can indeed be enabled, the module is not yet enabled, and the autoloader is not yet able to find code from that module, meaning the hook_requirements('install') implementation cannot use namespaced classes from the module, as they will not be autoloadable. What are the solutions ?
One nice thing during Drupal 7/8 development is the ability, thanks to the devel module, to get a list of all SQL queries ran on a page. As I've been working quite a bit on MongoDB in PHP recently, I wondered how to obtain comparable results when using MongoDB in PHP projects. Looking at the D7 implementation, the magic happens in the Database class:
With DBTNG, that's all it takes, and devel puts it to good use UI-wise. So is there be an equivalent mechanism in MongoDB ? Of course there is !
While porting (well, actually rewriting) an old PHP library to Go, I had to use a CRC (cyclic redundancy check) on a buffer. In old-school PHP, the standard is well established since PHP 4: just use crc32 from the strings package, and beware of the sign bit or, to be a bit more current while still compatible, use the hash() function from the hash package, like this example:
One of the interesting aspects of the revamped menu/links system in Drupal 8 is the fact that menu links are now in easily parseable YAML files, the "(module).links.menu.yml" in each module, in which each menu link can be bound to its parent link, hopefully producing a tree-like structure.
If you program in Go, you've probably written a lot of packages, and probably split packages in subpackages. Maybe even more than idiomatic Go would really advise... And you may have been grumbling just like I did at the fact that the go test command requires a list of packages, and does not recursively dive into all the subpackages, like PHPunit would, and does not seem to have a working recursion flag.
Call a method on a nil pointer (null object) ? This is a classical bug. What if it somehow turned out to be a valid and useful construct in some languages, say in Go ? And what about PHP ?