apache

The following rewrite rule enables all requests to a site to go through via its www URL, theoretically improving search engine 'optimization' (if there is such a thing).

The important thing here is that any file or directory request following the url is kept during the redirect (I've seen poor rewrites on sites that just redirect from http://whatever.com to the front page and the user loses their path to the link they clicked on once already).

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example\.com$
RewriteRule ^.*$ http://www.example.com%{REQUEST_URI} [R=permanent,L]

Wrote this script today using the WWW::Curl::Easy example.

Background: Recently eaccelerator screwed up a dev server so that while Apache didn't die, php scripts weren't parsing, and I got no alerts.

This script parses a php script using curl, which contains a basic 'hello()' function that prints hello out.

The perl script checks the output for 'hello' and if it doesn't find it, it sends me an e-mail (it also sends me an SMS using our Clickatell account, but I'm not giving you the credentials, silly.)

#!/usr/bin/perl
#
# Checks a php script using curl and if there is a
# problem, e-mail me
#
use strict;
use WWW::Curl::Easy;
my $url = "http://localhost/test.php";
# Init the curl session
my $curl= WWW::Curl::Easy->new() or die "curl init failed!\n";
# Give curl the URL to use
$curl->setopt(CURLOPT_URL, $url);
# a subroutine which is called for each 'chunk' as the
# file is received.
sub body_callback {
my ($chunk,$context)=@_;
# add the chunk we received to the end of the array we've been given
push @{$context}, $chunk;
return length($chunk); # OK
}
# configure which subroutine to call when some data comes in
$curl->setopt(CURLOPT_WRITEFUNCTION, \&body_callback);
my @body;
# tell the subroutine which array to put the data into
$curl->setopt(CURLOPT_FILE, \@body);
if ($curl->perform() != 0) {
print "Failed ::".$curl->errbuf."\n";
};
my $output = join("",@body);
# Check if we got 'hello' out of the php script. If we did, ignore it
if ($output=~ m/hello/i) {
}
else {
#sms me, incidentally this is done with curl too, so I create another instance of WWW::Curl::Easy
my $alert_url = "http://the-clickatell-api-command-to-sms-me";
my $curl_alert= WWW::Curl::Easy->new() or die "curl init failed!\n";
$curl_alert->setopt(CURLOPT_URL, $alert_url);
$curl_alert->setopt(CURLOPT_WRITEFUNCTION, \&body_callback);
$curl_alert->setopt(CURLOPT_FILE, \@body);
if ($curl_alert->perform() != 0) {
print "Failed ::".$curl_alert->errbuf."\n";
};
# send me an e-mail now, using Sendmail
unless(open (MAIL, "|/usr/sbin/sendmail -t")) {
print "error.\n";
warn "Error starting sendmail: $!";
}
else {
print MAIL "From: web\@the-server.com\n";
print MAIL "To: miguel\@example.com\n";
print MAIL "Subject: PHP problem on the server\n\n";
print MAIL "The server has stopped parsing php! Panic! Panic!";
close(MAIL) || warn "Error closing mail: $!";
}
}