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Tutorials

Get rid of .DS_Store files from GIT Repo on Mac OS X

Whether you are new to GIT repositories or an experienced developer, I am sure, at some point in using GIT, you must have come across these annoying .DS_Store files that seem to populate out of nowhere. It is a much apparent problem if you have enabled viewing hidden files.

What are they? DS_Store is a short form for Desktop Service Store that contains attributes of a folder and is created every single time a folder is navigated to. The more you navigate through your program source code, the more .DS_Store files you will end up finding. You can delete them but they will appear again.

I am okay with seeing them on my Mac but when you have an auto deployment script setup for GIT, you prefer not having these useless files on your Linux machine. We use a neat little auto deployment script which gets executed each time new updates are pushed to our repository. We have a repo for each of our business applications so it saves our developers plenty of time navigating their way through FTP programs and updating files through that.

To help address this issue, you can configure GIT globally to ignore .DS_Store files by executing this the following:

git config --global core.excludesfile ~/.gitignore

OR, if you already pushed some of these .DS_Store files, you can get rid of them from your repo in the following way. Go to the root of your app directory and execute the following command in terminal:

find . -name .DS_Store -print0 | xargs -0 git rm -f --ignore-unmatch

That will get rid of all recognition of .DS_Store in your repo. Next, add the .DS_Store to the ignore list. You can do that by simply creating a .gitignore file. Place the following in the .gitignore file at the root of your app directory.

.DS_Store

Save it as .gitignore and push the changes through. Voila! One less annoying problem to worry about 🙂 I am still giving thought towards publishing the source code for our Auto Deploy script 😉

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#DEV Tutorials Useful & Productive

Magento Slow Backend but A Fast Frontend

Past two days has been a nightmare. We recently migrated all of our websites to Amazon Web Services (AWS), and the speed has been good. We love it. The infrastructure is excellent and so is the service we’re getting. I wouldn’t have a lot to say about their support, though. Unless you are a reasonably big enterprise which is spending a lot of dollars, you can’t afford their support packages. What I suggest from my personal experience is to subscribe to their developer support. If you get into issues relating to operating websites on their servers, they usually point you in the right direction. You will get a response generally within 24 hours which is ok.

The reason why I am writing this post is not to address that. It’s actually due to our experience with Magento. Over the past two days, I have learned so much about Magento E-Commerce Platform. One of our client who runs one of the biggest online pharmacies in New Zealand – YourChemist.co.nz hosts with us. The database is big, and so are the files. Migrating to AWS took a while, but we got there eventually. Since this website was so busy all through the day, the only time we could migrate had to be at midnight when it has the least amount of site traffic.

After migrating, we started noticing a significant problem. The speed of Magento’s backend or as some would address it as admin panel was terrible. So I did my little research on tackling this issue.

Categories
Tutorials

Hopeful Flex Foundations – Newbie to Pro

Two years back, I was very interested in how Adobe Flex would change the way we build interactive sites. I was very fond of this software and still am interested in learning ‘mxml‘ whenever I find free time.

If you are like me (a beginner), then you would want to start somewhere basic and flexible. While searching through the World Wide Web (mainly Google), I found this article from Josh who concisely (arguable) lists tutorials that would take you from being a newbie to a ‘probable‘ pro.

Try it and tell me how you go with it!

10 Great Ways to Learn Flex « Josh Talks Flash.