Adventures in IT

Image: Pixabay Although I'm currently playing with Elixir and its HTTP servers like Cowboy at the moment Nginx is still my go-to server for production PHP. If you haven't already swapped your web-server from Apache then you really should consider installing Nginx on a test server and running some stress tests on it.  I wrote about stress testing in my book on scaling PHP . Redirecting non-www traffic to www in nginx is best accomplished by using the "return" verb.  You could use a rewrite but the Nginx manual suggests that a return is better in the section on " Taxing Rewrites ". Server blocks are cheap in Nginx and I find it's simplest to have two redirects for the person who arrives on the non-secure non-canonical form of my link.  I wouldn't expect many people to reach this link because obviously every link that I create will be properly formatted so being redirected twice will only affect a small minority of people. Anyway, here's...

Image: https://www.pexels.com Logging is such an important part of my approach to debugging that I sometimes struggle to understand how programmers avoid including logging in their applications. Having sufficiently detailed logs enables me to avoid having to make assumptions about variable values and program logic flow. For example, when a customer wants to know why their credit card was charged twice I want to be able to answer with certainty that we processed the transaction only once and be able to produce the data that I sent to the payment provider. I have three very simple rules for logging that I follow whenever I'm feeling like being nice to future me.  If I hate future me and want him to spend more time answering queries than is needed then I forget these rules: The first command in any function I write is a debug statement confirming entry into the function Any time that the script terminates with an error then the error condition is logged, along with the e...