Category: Linux

ngrok can be used to provide access to a local homestead or vagrant site remotely i.e. to a client.

You need to use header rewriting to work with the homestead configuration, the syntax for using a single site looks like:

ngrok http -host-header=rewrite mysite.app:80

If you have multiple sites then you will need to use ngrok with a config file, stored in ~/.ngrox.config.yml. The docs are vague on how to do the rewriting in the config file so here it is for reference:

tunnels:
    mysite:
        addr: mysite.app:80
        proto: http
        host_header: rewrite
    myapi:
        addr: myapi.app:80
        proto: http
        host_header: rewrite

Note that host header rewriting doesn’t work nicely with cookies which seriously limits this.

See http://stackoverflow.com/questions/41523847/fail-to-create-cookies-while-using-ngrok-with-header-rewrite

Running Laravel 5 on a shared host subdomain (I use Vidahost) is a little daunting because Laravel requires the web root to point to the /public folder and generally with a subdomain the website root is the root folder that is created for you.

My solution was to create a directory in the subdomain root folder and copy all the code into there. I then copied the contents of the /public folder into the subdomain root folder and edited index.php.

The two require lines need modifying to remove the ‘..’ characters and replace with the actual path.

//require __DIR__.'/../bootstrap/autoload.php';
require __DIR__.'/mysubdirectory/bootstrap/autoload.php';

It’s not pretty but it worked OK.

The little application I wrote is to help with non-verbal reasoning tests, to memorise the numeric equivalents of the alphabet: Alphabet to Numbers.

Stop box checking for updates

If you want to stop your VM from checking for updates to the Vagrant box add the following immediately after the Vagrant.configure line:

# don't check for VM updates
config.vm.box_check_update = false

Update Guest Additions

There is a plugin: vagrant-vbguest which will check if your VirtualBox Guest Additions are out of date in your VM and automatically update if necessary. You can install it with:

vagrant plugin install vagrant-vbguest

Once the Guest Additions have been installed you may want to use the following to prevent further updates (add just after the Vagrant.configure line):

# don't update guest additions
config.vbguest.auto_update = false

Better synced folder permissions

Instead of the default synced folder settings which may cause problems when your server tries to change the files (e.g. WordPress updating itself) I use the following with Ubuntu:

config.vm.synced_folder "./", "/vagrant", id: "vagrant-root",
owner: "vagrant",
group: "www-data",
mount_options: ["dmode=775,fmode=664"]

If you are using CentOS then the group should be apache instead of www-data.

Magento performance

You can boost Magento performance (or any complicated PHP app) when running from a VM by changing the PHP OPcache revalidate frequency. It defaults to 2 seconds which means when you are navigating a site all the PHP files are recompiled with every click. With tens of thousands of PHP files that’s a hefty penalty.

Changing this to something like 20 seconds means you’ll be using cached code. Do this with:

sudo nano /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini

and set

opcache_revalidate_freq = 20