Linux

2 Comments

Ever had one of these issues with Pycharm 2018 and Docker?

Couldn't refresh skeletons for remote interpreter
The docker-compose process terminated unexpectedly: /usr/local/bin/docker-compose -f docker-compose.yml -f .PyCharm2018.3/system/tmp/docker-compose.override.8.yml run --rm --name skeleton_generator_643129755 python
Regenerate skeletons

or

can't open file '/opt/.pycharm_helpers/pycharm/django_test_manage.py' + "No such file or directory"

Then you should clear all pycharm helpers from your docker containers and images:

docker ps -a | grep -i pycharm | awk '{print $1}' | xargs docker rm
docker images | grep -i pycharm | awk '{print $3}' | xargs docker rmi

Sometimes I just love how the open source community works nowadays! Sometimes you  use your favourite search engine to find a package/repository/etc..., just to find out thatit contains a quickstart info, a proper package.json or docker-compose.yml. All you need to do is "npm install && npm run" or "docker-compose build && docker-compose up" and you are good to go.

This helps devs to contribute to open source software soooooo much!

TL;DR: Use Docker, package.json, requirements.txt, and for the love of god, write a Quickstart section into your Readme!

If you have ever gotten this error with your mod passenger installation:

$ passenger-config restart-app
*** ERROR: Phusion Passenger doesn't seem to be running. If you are sure that it
is running, then the causes of this problem could be one of:

1. You customized the instance registry directory using Apache's
 PassengerInstanceRegistryDir option, Nginx's
 passenger_instance_registry_dir option, or Phusion Passenger Standalone's
 --instance-registry-dir command line argument. If so, please set the
 environment variable PASSENGER_INSTANCE_REGISTRY_DIR to that directory
 and run this command again.
 2. The instance directory has been removed by an operating system background
 service. Please set a different instance registry directory using Apache's
 PassengerInstanceRegistryDir option, Nginx's passenger_instance_registry_dir
 option, or Phusion Passenger Standalone's --instance-registry-dir command
 line argument.

Then you most likely have SystemD running, which uses PrivateTmp folders instead of /tmp folders.

It's annoying, but easy to fix, see this blog post:
https://www.pistolfly.com/weblog/en/2016/01/passenger-config-and-passenger-status-result-in-an-error-on-centos7.html

Inspired by a recent commitstrip: http://www.commitstrip.com/en/2017/05/06/bugs-of-the-future/

Like almost everyone else I had to test my Single Page AngularJS Application, which uses Django Rest Framework as a Backend, with Internet Explorer (11, thankfully). While my SPA works fine in Chrome and Firefox, it does not work very well in Internet Explorer (shocking, lmao).

Anyway, the obvious errors, ranging from needing polyfils to some CSS quirks, were fixed quickly.

But at some point I noticed: Why the hell are changes I make via PUT/POST/PATCH not shown when I make a GET request (retrieving all instances of a model) to the same endpoint afterwards? It kept returning the same data again and again. Where the hell did my changes go? Is my database broken? Is Internet Explorer not firing the PUT/POST/PATCH calls properly?

None of that was true. As it turns out, Internet Explorer 11 caches almost all GET requests to my REST API. I submit a change, I reload the page, and the change has disappeared. Caching at its best.

So I googled and stackoverflowed (is that a word?), and I found some people talking about cache headers. And they are god damn right... Django aswell as Django Rest Framework do not set any cache headers in the response (most likely for a good reason, better be explicit than implicit).

So I tried a couple of the provided solutions, and I must say, I was really unhappy with those approaches. They were either very repetitive (like the ``@never_cache`` decorator added to all my viewsets), or required monkey patches and other sorts of things that I do not like to see. Btw, a cache buster within my JavaScript SPA was a no-go for me.

So I thought to myself: How about I make my whole Django Rest Framework Application "uncachable"? And so I did, with a very few lines of code and as a Django Middleware:

from django.utils.cache import add_never_cache_headers

class DisableClientSideCachingMiddleware(object):
    """
    Internet Explorer / Edge tends to cache REST API calls, unless some specific HTTP headers are added by our
    application.

    - no_cache
    - no_store
    - must_revalidate
    """
    def process_response(self, request, response):
        add_never_cache_headers(response)
        return response

Don't forget to also add this middleware to your settings.

MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES = (
    ...
    'yourapp.middlewares.DisableClientSideCachingMiddleware',
)

Please note that this disables caching of ALL requests coming to your Django Application. If you are serving static files from your Django Application (instead of serving them directly from your webserver), this will affect your performance.

This middleware works for me. I later discovered that somebody else has already had a similar idea, too. The obvious disadvantage here is that it disables caching for all parts of my Django Application. This is fine for me, as I am only using Django Rest Framework and I do not want caching on client side to happen at all, but it might not be okay for some other applications.

Nevertheless, I hope this piece of code helps people that have similar problems. Also, please feel free to share your experiences and solutions to such caching problems with Internet Explorer.

ForeignKeys need to have the on_delete Attribute set (e.g., to models.CASCADE for a cascading delete)

This also affects existing migrations. If you have migrations that you created with Django 1.8, you will run into errors (as they do not have that attribute set in the migration).

Also see this Ticket: https://code.djangoproject.com/ticket/28677

Apps should specify the "app_name" attribute in their urls.py

If you don't do this, you might run into an error when you include that urls.py in another urls.py

Also see this Ticket: https://code.djangoproject.com/ticket/28691

SessionAuthenticationMiddleware is no longer available

If you have SessionAuthenticationMiddleware MIDDLEWARE listed (you most likely do if you are upgrading from an older Django Version), you will have to remove it from your middleware list (or tuple).

user.is_authenticated() and user.is_anonymous() are no longer available as functions

They are now properties and have to be called without the function parantheses!

More Info

 

 

Ever wondered why a certain python package was installed?

E.g., when you are installing WeasyPrint you will find that it installs a lot of other libraries, such as cffi, cariocffi and html5lib. With pipdeptree you can visualize this 🙂

pip install pipdeptree

pipdeptree

WeasyPrint==0.40
  - cairocffi [required: >=0.5, installed: 0.8.0]
    - cffi [required: >=1.1.0, installed: 1.11.0]
      - pycparser [required: Any, installed: 2.18]
  - CairoSVG [required: >=1.0.20, installed: 2.0.3]
    - cairocffi [required: Any, installed: 0.8.0]
      - cffi [required: >=1.1.0, installed: 1.11.0]
        - pycparser [required: Any, installed: 2.18]
    - cssselect [required: Any, installed: 1.0.1]
    - lxml [required: Any, installed: 3.8.0]
    - pillow [required: Any, installed: 4.2.1]
      - olefile [required: Any, installed: 0.44]
    - tinycss [required: Any, installed: 0.4]
  - cffi [required: >=0.6, installed: 1.11.0]
    - pycparser [required: Any, installed: 2.18]
  - cssselect2 [required: >=0.1, installed: 0.2.0]
    - tinycss2 [required: Any, installed: 0.6.0]
      - webencodings [required: >=0.4, installed: 0.5.1]
  - html5lib [required: >=0.999999999, installed: 0.999999999]
    - setuptools [required: >=18.5, installed: 36.5.0]
    - six [required: Any, installed: 1.11.0]
    - webencodings [required: Any, installed: 0.5.1]
  - Pyphen [required: >=0.8, installed: 0.9.4]
  - tinycss2 [required: >=0.5, installed: 0.6.0]
    - webencodings [required: >=0.4, installed: 0.5.1]

I needed a quick way of converting videos to gifs on Linux -ffmpeg and this post on stackexchange to the rescue!

The result is this neat little bash script:

#!/bin/bash

if [[ $# -eq 0 ]] ; then
 echo "Usage: videoToGif inputFile [outputFile] [FPS] [WIDTH]"
 echo "Example: videoToGif inputFile.ext outputFile.gif 60 360"
 exit 0
fi

inputFile=$1
outputFile=${2:-output.gif}

FPS=${3:-30}
WIDTH=${4:-360}

#Generate palette for better quality
ffmpeg -i $inputFile -vf fps=$FPS,scale=$WIDTH:-1:flags=lanczos,palettegen tmp_palette.png

#Generate gif using palette
ffmpeg -i $inputFile -i tmp_palette.png -loop 0 -filter_complex "fps=$FPS,scale=$WIDTH:-1:flags=lanczos[x];[x][1:v]paletteuse" $outputFile

rm tmp_palette.png

I used it to convert a Screencast created with "recordMyDesktop" (from OGV format) to a GIF.

The Android SDK and also AVD Manager can be started from the commandline, if you have the Android SDK Tools installed.

For instance, on my system I have android-sdk-tools in ~/android-sdk-tools, therefore I only need to go into that directory (cd ~/android-sdk-tools) and use the following command:

./Tools/android avd # start android avd manager
# or
./Tools/android sdk # start android sdk manager

This can be used for creating start menu entries, e.g., for XFCE. Mine look as follows:
~/.local/share/applications/menulibre-android-avd-manager.desktop
[Desktop Entry]
Version=1.0
Type=Application
Name=Android AVD Manager
Icon=phone-apple-iphone-symbolic
Exec=./android avd
Path=/home/ckreuzberger/android-sdk-linux/tools/
NoDisplay=false
Categories=Development;Utility;X-XFCE;X-Xfce-Toplevel;
StartupNotify=false
Terminal=false

~/.local/share/applications/menulibre-android-sdk-manager.desktop
[Desktop Entry]
Version=1.0
Type=Application
Name=Android SDK Manager
Icon=phone-apple-iphone-symbolic
Exec=./android sdk
Path=/home/ckreuzberger/android-sdk-linux/tools/
NoDisplay=false
Categories=Development;Utility;X-XFCE;X-Xfce-Toplevel;
StartupNotify=false
Terminal=false