Installing the Postgres extension for Hiphop

PostGres is rapidly gaining traction as a solid relational database manager. It provides transaction reliability (ACID), standards compliance, and has a better reputation for handling large datasets than MariaDB / mySQL.

Luckily installing it for Hiphop is painless and there is an externally provided extension for it.

There was not a prebuilt package available for the PocketRent/hhvm-pgsql extension for my version of Hiphop so I built it following the advice in the project readme. Their instructions worked first time.

I did not have success with using the "ini" method of including the extension so had to create a Hiphop configuration file.

 DynamicExtensionPath = /path/to/hhvm/extensions  
 DynamicExtensions {  
   * = pgsql.so  
 }

I placed the snippet they provide (above) into a file called config.hdf in my Hiphop location. I'm using Mint on my dev box so this was /etc/hhvm/config.hdf for me.

Then I edited /etc/default/hhvm and set Hiphop up to use the config file. This snippet shows the change:

 ## Add additional arguments to the hhvm service start up that you can't put in CONFIG_FILE for some reason.  
 ## Default: ""  
 ## Examples:  
 ##  "-vLog.Level=Debug"        Enable debug log level  
 ##  "-vServer.DefaultDocument=app.php" Change the default document  
 ADDITIONAL_ARGS="-c /etc/hhvm/config.hdf"

After that I restarted my hhvm service and was able to use Postgres in my Laravel project. Hurray :)

Comments

Solving Doctrine - A new entity was found through the relationship

There are so many different problems that people have with the Doctrine error message: exception 'Doctrine\ORM\ORMInvalidArgumentException' with message 'A new entity was found through the relationship 'App\Lib\Domain\Datalayer\UnicodeLookups#lookupStatus' that was not configured to cascade persist operations for entity: Searching through the various online sources was a bit of a nightmare. The best documentation I found was at http://www.krueckeberg.org/ where there were a number of clearly explained examples of various associations. More useful information about association ownership was in the Doctrine manual , but I found a more succinct explanation in the answer to this question on StackOverflow . Now I understood better about associations and ownership and was able to identify exactly what sort I was using and the syntax that was required. I was implementing a uni-directional many to one relationship, which is supposedly one of the most simpl...

Translating a bit of the idea behind domain driven design into code architecture

I've often participated in arguments discussions about whether thin models or thin controllers should be preferred. The wisdom of a thin controller is that if you need to test your controller in isolation then you need to stub the dependencies of your request and response. It also violates the single responsibility principal because the controller could have multiple reasons to change. Seemingly, the alternative is to settle on having fat models. This results in having domain logic right next to your persistence logic. If you ever want to change your persistence layer you're going to be in for a painful time. That's a bit of a cargo cult argument because honestly who does that, but it's also a violation of the single responsibility principal. One way to decouple your domain logic from both persistence and controller is to use the "repository pattern". Here we encapsulate domain logic into a data service. This layer deals exclusively with imple...

Separating business logic from persistence layer in Laravel

There are several reasons to separate business logic from your persistence layer. Perhaps the biggest advantage is that the parts of your application which are unique are not coupled to how data are persisted. This makes the code easier to port and maintain. I'm going to use Doctrine to replace the Eloquent ORM in Laravel. A thorough comparison of the patterns is available here . By using Doctrine I am also hoping to mitigate the risk of a major version upgrade on the underlying framework. It can be expected for the ORM to change between major versions of a framework and upgrading to a new release can be quite costly. Another advantage to this approach is to limit the access that objects have to the database. Unless a developer is aware of the business rules in place on an Eloquent model there is a chance they will mistakenly ignore them by calling the ActiveRecord save method directly. I'm not implementing the repository pattern in all its ...

Adventures in IT

Search This Blog