Category: Knowledge Base

Drupal 7.14 Crashes Apache Server on a Windows Environment

I have experienced rare cases when visiting a particular URL where the Apache Server crashes on a fresh installation of Drupal 7.14 running WAMP on Windows XP or 7.

The common solution was to open the file causing the problem and re-save it. However, this did not explain why it was happening. Fortunately, I was able to consistently reproduce this problem when I installed the Internationalization module and visited admin/config/regional/language which would result in Apache crashing.

This information finally lead me to http://drupal.org/node/1562670

What I learned was it is actually a PHP 5.3.10 bug that triggers when processing include/require files with sizes that are exact multiples of 4096 bytes and causes PHP to segfault (!).

The reason why re-saving the files worked is because the line feeds in the file are re-formatted from \n (unix style) to \r\n (windows style) which changes the files size from the problematic value of 53248 (exactly 52 KB).

How to delete a remote tag in Git

My obsessive compulsive nature of having everything neat and tidy finally got the better of me and prompt me to delete some tags from a remote Git repository. Strangely, SourceTree and TortoiseGit do not provide an option for this in the GUI.

Thankfully, a quick trip to the command line helped solve the problem and it goes like this:

git tag -d name_of_tag
git push origin :refs/tags/name_of_tag

This should explicitly delete the tag name_of_tag on the remote repository.

How to enable libcurl in WAMP

Having developed mostly in a MAMP environment, I have taken many things for granted. Today, while working with WAMP, I was pleasantly surprised by a “Fatal error: Call to undefined function: curl_init()”.

It took a few extra steps to get cURL working. WAMP comes preinstalled with many extensions, including cURL, but for some reason many are not enabled by default and enabling php_curl from within the WAMP menu did not solve my problem.

How to enable libcurl in WAMP

  1. Find and open c:\wamp\bin\php\php5.2.6\php.ini
  2. Uncomment ;extension=php_curl.dll
  3. Do the same for c\:wamp\bin\apache\apache2.2.8\bin\php.ini
  4. Restart WAMP and happy coding.
Still not working? A good place to start is check if Apache is loading the extension. Open both php.ini and make sure extension_dir is pointing to c:\wamp\bin\php\php5.2.6\ext

How to import a large SQL dump into WAMP

Recently I had to import a 3GB database into a local Drupal installation using WAMP in a Windows XP environment. The following method I found has consistently performed and requires very minimal setup.

All you need are:

  1. Access to command line (DOS), and
  2. WAMP
Note: the following examples assumes you have WAMP installed in c:\wamp and your SQL dump is in c:\dump
  1. First, launch command prompt via All Programs -> Accessories -> Command Prompt.
  2. Then run the MySQL command below to connect to your specified database:C:\> c:\wamp\bin\mysql\mysql5.5.16\bin\mysql.exe -use databasename –u username -p password
  3. Lastly, run the following:mysql> source c:\dump\my_database_dump.sql

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