Hi,
Our development teams have updated our security certificates in our Live environment.
You can access our site (https://t.co/5lQwoXMCGP) in a browser and pull the latest root certificate down for this.

Apologies for any disruption this may have caused.

We had a Craft/Craft Commerce store that started throwing a warning yesterday:

ERROR! [CURL] 60: SSL CERTIFICATE PROBLEM: SELF SIGNED CERTIFICATE IN CERTIFICATE CHAIN [URL] HTTPS://LIVE.SAGEPAY.COM/GATEWAY/SERVICE/VSPSERVER-REGISTER.VSP

It turned out after much panicing that Sagepay had updated their SSL, and our implementation of Sagepay (using Omnipay/Guzzle) had a cached root certificate file which was failing validation.

We simply searched for the cacert.pem files (ours were located vendor/guzzle/guzzle/src/Guzzle/Http/Resources/cacert.pem) and removed them. When browsing again, this re-cached the root certificates which resolved.

My weekend project set, silent doorbell! : https://t.co/rbvz34P4As

Cc @mattclementsuk @bseymour

— Christian Hambly (@ChristianHambly) 7 January 2017

Myself and my eldest set about installing Node, developing the required code mainly based upon the original article, and working with Pushover which I have already used previously for notifications, the final code looks as follows:

function send_pushover_notification() {

  var push = require( 'pushover-notifications' );

  var p = new push( {
      user: "xxxx",
      token: "xxxx"
  });

  var msg = {
      message: "Somebody is at the door!",
      title: "Doorbell",
      sound: 'pushover',
      priority: 1
  };

  p.send( msg, function( err, result ) {
      if ( err ) {
          return false;
      }

      if(result.status == 1) {
        return true;
      }
  });

  return false;
}

var dash_button = require('node-dash-button'),
    dash = dash_button('xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx'),
    exec = require('child_process').exec;

dash.on('detected', function() {
    console.log('Button pushed!');

    send_pushover_notification();
});


console.log('Ready');

We have a server fitted in the loft which I installed Node onto, then installed PM2 in order to run the application as a service.

The eldest installed Pushover on his iPod Touch which means he knows exactly when the doorbell rings!

The final result:

Also worth considering when it comes out in the UK Amazon IOT Button

Apple has quietly created an energy subsidiary, “Apple Energy” LLC, registered in Delaware but run from its Cupertino headquarters. The company was seemingly formed to allow it to sell excess electricity generated by its solar farms in Cupertino and Nevada, with plans to sell electricity across the whole of the US.

I guess it makes sense, to cover their own needs and sell any excess back. It will be interesting to see what rolls out across the rest of the world (if anything).

And who says that Apple aren’t a services company…?

Photos from The Verge

Laravel has CSRF enabled by default for all requests that come through your app. This is included and handled automatically to make life easier.

However, one issue that comes up is when you are using external services where you do not have the ability to set a token. An example of this is with web hooks from third parties.

Read more at Laravel News

What an awesome addition to Laravel

• Podcast & Video
• Transcript

Jeffrey Way’s fantastic Integrated package has given integration tests in Laravel superpowers for a while now, and it’s now a part of the Laravel core.

Matt Stauffer

Awesome to see this land within Laravel 5.1 and nice to see Laravel lowering the barrier to entry for testing.

1. The project needed some rapid development to push it into production as soon as possible
2. Whilst rapid development was necessary, the project was going to be maintained ongoing by our small team
3. We had only a very small number of external dependancies such as other codebases to interface with
4. We had no external database administrators to maintain

Previously we as a team had not used a “full-stack” framework within a team, writing mainly vanilla PHP code, often stemming back to PHP4 era; it was time for change!

From a long hard review at the myriad of frameworks available we settled on Laravel, primarily due to the LTS that is coming with Version 5.1 and the huge support from the community that Laravel is currently receiving.

We are building a large scale CRUD application, with a number of external applications hooking into this application (most of which are under our control) to follow our business needs.

Writing less code to do more

We found that using Laravel meant that we wrote less code overall to achieve more. Our application is built around 2 main models which are very similar to each other, but with minor differences in their relationships with other models. Using a framework has allowed us to build reusable parts of our application which can be shared across these 2 models.

Improving our Coding Quality

Using Laravel (or generally a framework) has massively improved our teams coding quality. Whilst using a framework does not instantly mean that the code is good quality, it requires you to think a little more about where your code sits in the stack, how it interacts with other parts of the application, and the chance for reusability and whether this is likely to be required and therefore should abstracted. We found this extra time to think, along with the ability to write less code meaning that our application is far better quality than it would have otherwise been.

Better Source Control

We have always struggled with keeping code maintainable, and managing our application in source control (especially as previously we had not kept the database in source control, and had to rely on diff-ing database exports to compare changes).

With using Migrations within Laravel we are now able to keep our Local, Staging & Production environments correctly up to date, and manage any changes across a team.

Packages

Having the huge number of packages available from the community both in the form of “normal” composer packages and Laravel specific composer packages has meant that we can often use community provided code (and spend our time helping with these rather than re-developing our own) and rapidly develop our application.

Overall the use of a framework (and specifically Laravel) has meant that our team has improved code quality, provided us with better management over our application and massively helped us rapidly develop our latest application!

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