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The other week, I wrote about introducing SQLite support to Known.

Seemingly, I was on a role, and because a client asked me to look in to Postgres support for a separate project, I thought I’d have a crack at implementing support for Known, which I’m glad has been merged in.

This turns out to have been useful to a bunch of folk, for which I am glad.

Installation

Postgres support is still in Beta, and MySQL is still the recommended database engine, so currently installation is a bit of a manual process.

First, you need to make sure you’ve got Postgres support built in to PHP:

apt-get install php5-pgsql
php5enmod pgsql

Then, you need to modify your config.ini

database = 'Postgres'
dbname = 'dbname'
dbpass = 'password'
dbuser = 'username'
dbhost = 'hostname'

filesystem = 'local'
uploadpath = '/path/to/upload_directory/

Once you’ve done that, you need to install the schema, which currently needs to be done from the command line.

psql -c 'create database ;' -U 
psql -U  -d  -a -f schemas/postgres/postgres.sql

Assuming you got no errors, you should now be good to go!

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SQLite is a SQL powered relational database that is implemented using a file on disk, rather than a client server. This means that, among other things, you don’t need a standalone process to run a database, and it also makes backups easier.

A few weeks ago, support for sqlite landed into Known.

I put together this patch primarily to scratch my own itch; I was having to set up a lot of Known based for testing as part of client projects, and I needed a way to quickly swap around configuration and data sets. I also figured it’d help out the number of folk out there who run their Known sites on devices like the Raspberry Pi.

Usage

Firstly, make sure you’ve got SQLite support built in to php:

apt-get install php5-sqlite
php5enmod sqlite

Then, you need to modify your config.ini

database = 'Sqlite3'
dbname = '/path/to/sqlite.db'

filesystem = 'local'
uploadpath = '/path/to/upload_directory/

The first two lines tell Known to use SQLite for the backend database, and where this database lives. Note, that this location needs to be writeable by your web server user (usually www-data) but, for obvious security reasons, should be somewhere outside of your Known docroot, so that it can’t be downloaded!

The last two lines tell Known to use a disk based file store for pictures and other uploads. This is important as the SQLite engine currently doesn’t support file storage in database like the Mongo engine does.

That’s it! Fire up your browser and visit your site. All being well, Known will automatically create the database and set up the schema.

Bug reports and patches to the usual place!

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So, a few weeks ago I hacked together some logs for the #knownchat IRC channel.

I accomplished this by hacking together a very simple IRC logging bot. This bot will sit on an IRC channel and output logs in github friendly Markdown (so you can post them to a repo and give people an easy way to read them).

Since it was just as easy to write a flexible bot than a single use bot, I thought others might be interest in it.

Usage

The bot isn’t fancy, but it does the job.

It only supports logging of a single channel per instance, but it will interface with a nickserv server to identify itself, and will log each day’s activity in a separate file (in nicely sortable YYYY-MM-DD.md format) in a directory per channel.

Fire it up in a screen on an always on machine and you should start collecting logs straight away. To create the logs for #knownchat, I turned it’s channel dir into a git repo, and periodically push on a cronjob, but you might find other ways of doing things.

To keep things quiet, it’ll only log chat, not channel messages (leave/join etc).

Hopefully someone else’ll find this useful!

» Visit the project on Github...