Password Protect a Directory with .htaccess
Protecting files on your website from unauthorized users can be very important. Even more important is the method by which you accomplish this task. You could use PHP to listen for login authorization information on each page, but that doesn’t protect your images, documents, and other media, does it? That’s why I’ve found the .htaccess method of protecting files and directories the most reliable. Oh, and it’s easy too!
The system requires two files — the .htaccess file and .htpasswd file.
The .htaccess Code
copyAuthType Basic AuthName "restricted area" AuthUserFile /home/davidwalsh/html/protect-me-dir/.htpasswd require valid-user
The above code protects a directory called “protect-me-dir” at root level. The “AuthUserFile” value is always specific to your hosting configuration. If you don’t know what the value should be, do a phpinfo() and find the DOCUMENT_ROOT value.
The .htpasswd Code
copydavidwalsh:daWHfZrDLB88. rodstewart:roFulYxC2.8ws cssexpert:csmnmq.M8T5ho
The .htpasswd file contains the usernames and passwords of allowed users. One per line. The passwords are MD5’d for security purposes.
To generate encrypted passwords for your .htpasswd file, you can use my .htaccess password generator.
Importing large SQL files through command line when using PHPMyAdmin/XAMPP
This tutorial is on how to import large SQL files when your sql dump file cannot be handled by PHPMyAdmin due to its large file size. Importing large SQL file sizes in PHPMyAdmin will produce an error if maximum file upload size has been reached and sometimes may cause the browser to freeze. You have to import this through the command line.
Here are the simple steps on how to do it.
1. First, let us say that my Mysql.exe is in D:\xampp\mysql\mysql.exe (I’m using XAMPP by the way) . I’m gonna put my large SQL file in that directory also, meaning the path for the SQL file will be D:\xampp\mysql\your_sql_file.sql
2. Create your database in your PhpMyAdmin interface(database name only).
3. Run your command prompt(Start -> Run -> then type “cmd”).
4. Type this in the command line, assuming that your MySQL installation and the SQL file locations are on the paths I had given in Step 1.
D:\xampp\mysql\mysql.exe -u root -p db_name < D:\xampp\mysql\your_sql_file.sqlwhere “root” is the username of your database and “db_name” is your database name. After the successful command, you will be asked to enter password, enter your password if it has then press Enter or just press Enter if none.
5. Go back to your PHPMyAdmin to check of the SQL dump file has been executed properly.
Parsing XML in an iPhone App Tutorial
This is a tutorial on parsing XML data in your iPhone app. I won’t be explaining things in great detail here because I assume if you are doing XML parsing you have some experience and don’t need to be shown a lot of the basics. At this point you most likely just want to see some code and implement it into your own app. If you have any questions feel free to ask.
What we will be doing here is calling my Twitter account through a URL and receiving an XML of my status tweets. We’ll then parse that XML and show the tweets in a table view. This really isn’t much different than the way a Web Service will work. We are calling a URL and then receiving some data back. In this case it is Twitter that has done the web service part for us on their servers and they are kind enough to return our data in an XML format. We could be calling a Web Service that we have written on one of our own servers and then parsing the returned XML.
Anyway, here we go.
1.) Create a new Navigation-based Application named XMLParserTutorial. We will be displaying our parsed data in the UITableView.
2.) We need to create a class to hold the individual data after it’s parsed. In this case the data will be a tweet. So we will create a class named Tweet. Right click on Classes, select Add > New File … and choose Objective-C class (Subclass of NSObject) click Next and name it Tweet.
3.) Open up our Tweet header file (Tweet.h) and add two NSStrings. One for the tweet’s actual content and one for the date it was created.
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#import <foundation foundation.h="">@interface Tweet : NSObject{ NSString *content; NSString *dateCreated;}@property (nonatomic, retain) NSString *content;@property (nonatomic, retain) NSString *dateCreated;@end</foundation> |
4.) Next open up the implementation file Tweet.m and synthesize our variables we just created.
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#import "Tweet.h"@implementation Tweet@synthesize content, dateCreated;@end |
5.) We need to create our XMLParser object. Right click on Classes, select Add > New File … and choose Objective-C class (Subclass of NSObject) click next and name it XMLParser.
6.) Open up XMLParser.h. Import Tweet.h and implement the NSXMLParserDelegate protocol.
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#import <foundation foundation.h="">#import "Tweet.h"@interface XMLParser : NSObject <nsxmlparserdelegate></nsxmlparserdelegate></foundation> |
Declare variables for an NSMutableString, NSMutableArray, NSXMLParser and Tweet. Then set the properties for our tweets array and define a loadXMLByURL action.
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#import <foundation foundation.h="">#import "Tweet.h"@interface XMLParser : NSObject <nsxmlparserdelegate>{ NSMutableString *currentNodeContent; NSMutableArray *tweets; NSXMLParser *parser; Tweet *currentTweet;}@property (readonly, retain) NSMutableArray *tweets;-(id) loadXMLByURL:(NSString *)urlString;@end</nsxmlparserdelegate></foundation> |
7.) Open up XMLParser.m. Import our Tweet.h file, synthesize the tweets array and implement our loadXMLByURL action.
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#import "XMLParser.h"#import "Tweet.h"@implementation XMLParser@synthesize tweets;-(id) loadXMLByURL:(NSString *)urlString{ tweets = [[NSMutableArray alloc] init]; NSURL *url = [NSURL URLWithString:urlString]; NSData *data = [[NSData alloc] initWithContentsOfURL:url]; parser = [[NSXMLParser alloc] initWithData:data]; parser.delegate = self; [parser parse]; return self;} |
We need to release the parser object we created so I am going to do that in a dealloc method that we’ll implement.
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- (void) dealloc{ [parser release]; [super dealloc];} |
8.) There are three methods we need to implement that follow the NSXMLParserDelegate protocol. They are parser:didStartElement:namespaceURI:qualifiedName:attributes, parser:didEndElement:namespaceURI:qualifiedName and parser:foundCharacters.
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- (void) parser:(NSXMLParser *)parser didStartElement:(NSString *)elementname namespaceURI:(NSString *)namespaceURI qualifiedName:(NSString *)qName attributes:(NSDictionary *)attributeDict{ if ([elementname isEqualToString:@"status"]) { currentTweet = [Tweet alloc]; }}- (void) parser:(NSXMLParser *)parser didEndElement:(NSString *)elementname namespaceURI:(NSString *)namespaceURI qualifiedName:(NSString *)qName{ if ([elementname isEqualToString:@"text"]) { currentTweet.content = currentNodeContent; } if ([elementname isEqualToString:@"created_at"]) { currentTweet.dateCreated = currentNodeContent; } if ([elementname isEqualToString:@"status"]) { [tweets addObject:currentTweet]; [currentTweet release]; currentTweet = nil; [currentNodeContent release]; currentNodeContent = nil; }}- (void) parser:(NSXMLParser *)parser foundCharacters:(NSString *)string{ currentNodeContent = (NSMutableString *) [string stringByTrimmingCharactersInSet:[NSCharacterSet whitespaceAndNewlineCharacterSet]];} |
I know the element name we are looking for because I have taken a peek at the XML that we will be parsing. If we were parsing a different XML we would need to know the names of the nodes in that XML we wanted to parse.
9.) Open up RootViewController.h. Import XMLParser.h and add our XMLParser and a UIImageView. The UIImageView is really just for cosmetics.
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#import <uikit uikit.h="">#import "XMLParser.h"@interface RootViewController : UITableViewController{ XMLParser *xmlParser; UIImageView *customImage;}@property (nonatomic, retain) UIImageView *customImage;@end</uikit> |
10.) Now open up the implementation file (RootViewController.m). We need to import our Tweet.h file and synthesize our variable. Then in our viewDidLoad method we are going to access my twitter status tweets as XML and load it into our XML Parser. And just because I like to keep things aesthetically pleasing, we’ll set the title to “Tweets”.
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#import "RootViewController.h"#import "Tweet.h"@implementation RootViewController@synthesize customImage;#pragma mark -#pragma mark View lifecycle- (void)viewDidLoad{ xmlParser = [[XMLParser alloc] loadXMLByURL:@"http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline/KentFranks.xml"]; [super viewDidLoad]; self.title = @"Tweets";} |
11.) Let’s set up our table to display the tweets. I’ve set the number of sections to 1.
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- (NSInteger)numberOfSectionsInTableView:(UITableView *)tableView{ return 1;} |
12.) I’m using the tweets array to set the number of rows in the sections.
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- (NSInteger)tableView:(UITableView *)tableView numberOfRowsInSection:(NSInteger)section{ return [[xmlParser tweets] count];} |
13.) And then all the real work will get done in the tableView:cellForRowAtIndexPath method.
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- (UITableViewCell *)tableView:(UITableView *)tableView cellForRowAtIndexPath:(NSIndexPath *)indexPath{ static NSString *CellIdentifier = @"Cell"; UITableViewCell *cell = [tableView dequeueReusableCellWithIdentifier:CellIdentifier]; if (cell == nil) { cell = [[[UITableViewCell alloc] initWithStyle:UITableViewCellStyleSubtitle reuseIdentifier:CellIdentifier] autorelease]; } UIImage *twitterLogo = [[UIImage imageNamed:@"twitter-logo.png"]autorelease]; Tweet *currentTweet = [[xmlParser tweets] objectAtIndex:indexPath.row]; CGRect imageFrame = CGRectMake(2, 8, 40, 40); self.customImage = [[[UIImageView alloc] initWithFrame:imageFrame] autorelease]; self.customImage.image = twitterLogo; [cell.contentView addSubview:self.customImage]; CGRect contentFrame = CGRectMake(45, 2, 265, 30); UILabel *contentLabel = [[[UILabel alloc] initWithFrame:contentFrame] autorelease]; contentLabel.numberOfLines = 2; contentLabel.font = [UIFont boldSystemFontOfSize:12]; contentLabel.text = [currentTweet content]; [cell.contentView addSubview:contentLabel]; CGRect dateFrame = CGRectMake(45, 40, 265, 10); UILabel *dateLabel = [[[UILabel alloc] initWithFrame:dateFrame] autorelease]; dateLabel.font = [UIFont systemFontOfSize:10]; dateLabel.text = [currentTweet dateCreated]; [cell.contentView addSubview:dateLabel]; return cell;} |
We are setting the current tweet to the object in our tweets array that matches indexPath.row.
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Tweet *currentTweet = [[xmlParser tweets] objectAtIndex:indexPath.row]; |
Most of the rest of the code in here is just customizing the look of our cells. I’m not explaining this in detail because I’m assuming if you are mostly interested in parsing the XML. If you want to know more about customizing the table view cells you can take a look at the tutorial.
I have included one graphic in the display that you will need to add to your project “twitter-logo.png”. You can download the graphic from here, and then just right click on Resources and select Add > Existing Files … navigate to where you downloaded the file, then choose to copy the file into your project.
14.) The only other thing I’ve done here is set the height of our rows in the tableView:heightForRowAtIndexPath method. And the release our xmlParser object in dealloc.
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- (CGFloat)tableView:(UITableView *)tableView heightForRowAtIndexPath:(NSIndexPath *)indexPath{ return 55;}- (void)dealloc{ [xmlParser release]; [super dealloc];} |
That’s all there is to it. Make sure everything is saved, click Build and Run.
How to renew your Apple Push Notification Push SSL Certificate
If Apple push notification SSL certificate is expiring in a few weeks, It is necessary to renew it and install the new certificate on our servers so we can continue sending push notifications for server alerts, and this quick post will take you through the steps.
You can generate a new certificate without revoking the old one, and use them simultaneously to ensure they are working before revoking the old one.
1) Log in
Log into the Apple iPhone Developer website and click the iPhone Provisioning Portal link. From the left menu, click on App IDs and then Configure next to the app you want to regenerate the certificate for. You’ll see your existing certificates and the option to generate a new one. Click the Configure button to launch the wizard.
2) Generate a CSR
I used the CSR I generated for the original APNS certificate but you can generate a new one by following the instructions in the wizard.
3) Generate the certificate
After uploading the CSR, the wizard will generate your new certificate. The name will show up as your username rather than what you specify in the CSR. Download it to your system, it will be called aps_production_identity.cer. Double click it to import it into your Keychain.
4. Export certificates / keys
Launch Keychain Assistant from your local Mac and from the login keychain, filter by the Certificates category. You will see an expandable option called “Apple Development Push Services”. You’ll see your old certificate and the new one you just downloaded.
Click the triangle to expand the certificate. You’ll have 2 items – the certificate itself that you just expanded, and the private key that was revealed.
Right click on the certificate (not the private key) “Apple Development Push Services” > Export “Apple Development Push Services ID123″. Save this as apns-prod-cert.p12 file somewhere you can access it. Then do the same with the private key and save it as apns-prod-key.p12.
For both exports, you will be asked to specify a password, then asked for your keychain password. I did not specify a password on the first prompt.
5) Convert to PEM format
These files now need to be converted to the PEM format by executing these 2 commands from the terminal:
openssl pkcs12 -clcerts -nokeys -out apns-prod-cert.pem -in apns-prod-cert.p12 openssl pkcs12 -nocerts -out apns-prod-key.pem -in apns-prod-key.p12
You will be forced to set a PEM passphrase on the second command, so execute the following command to remove it:
openssl rsa -in apns-prod-key.pem -out apns-prod-key-noenc.pem
6) Merge files
Finally, you need to combine the key and cert files into a apns-prod.pem file we will use when connecting to APNS:
cat apns-prod-cert.pem apns-prod-key-noenc.pem > apns-prod.pem
And that’s it. You can replace your existing production certificate with the one you just created, and it’ll be valid for another year.
Parsing XML in an iPhone App Tutorial
This is a tutorial on parsing XML data in your iPhone app. I won’t be explaining things in great detail here because I assume if you are doing XML parsing you have some experience and don’t need to be shown a lot of the basics. At this point you most likely just want to see some code and implement it into your own app. If you have any questions feel free to ask.
What we will be doing here is calling my Twitter account through a URL and receiving an XML of my status tweets. We’ll then parse that XML and show the tweets in a table view. This really isn’t much different than the way a Web Service will work. We are calling a URL and then receiving some data back. In this case it is Twitter that has done the web service part for us on their servers and they are kind enough to return our data in an XML format. We could be calling a Web Service that we have written on one of our own servers and then parsing the returned XML.
Anyway, here we go.
1.) Create a new Navigation-based Application named XMLParserTutorial. We will be displaying our parsed data in the UITableView.
2.) We need to create a class to hold the individual data after it’s parsed. In this case the data will be a tweet. So we will create a class named Tweet. Right click on Classes, select Add > New File … and choose Objective-C class (Subclass of NSObject) click Next and name it Tweet.
3.) Open up our Tweet header file (Tweet.h) and add two NSStrings. One for the tweet’s actual content and one for the date it was created.
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#import <foundation foundation.h="">@interface Tweet : NSObject{ NSString *content; NSString *dateCreated;}@property (nonatomic, retain) NSString *content;@property (nonatomic, retain) NSString *dateCreated;@end</foundation> |
4.) Next open up the implementation file Tweet.m and synthesize our variables we just created.
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#import "Tweet.h"@implementation Tweet@synthesize content, dateCreated;@end |
5.) We need to create our XMLParser object. Right click on Classes, select Add > New File … and choose Objective-C class (Subclass of NSObject) click next and name it XMLParser.
6.) Open up XMLParser.h. Import Tweet.h and implement the NSXMLParserDelegate protocol.
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#import <foundation foundation.h="">#import "Tweet.h"@interface XMLParser : NSObject <nsxmlparserdelegate></nsxmlparserdelegate></foundation> |
Declare variables for an NSMutableString, NSMutableArray, NSXMLParser and Tweet. Then set the properties for our tweets array and define a loadXMLByURL action.
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#import <foundation foundation.h="">#import "Tweet.h"@interface XMLParser : NSObject <nsxmlparserdelegate>{ NSMutableString *currentNodeContent; NSMutableArray *tweets; NSXMLParser *parser; Tweet *currentTweet;}@property (readonly, retain) NSMutableArray *tweets;-(id) loadXMLByURL:(NSString *)urlString;@end</nsxmlparserdelegate></foundation> |
7.) Open up XMLParser.m. Import our Tweet.h file, synthesize the tweets array and implement our loadXMLByURL action.
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#import "XMLParser.h"#import "Tweet.h"@implementation XMLParser@synthesize tweets;-(id) loadXMLByURL:(NSString *)urlString{ tweets = [[NSMutableArray alloc] init]; NSURL *url = [NSURL URLWithString:urlString]; NSData *data = [[NSData alloc] initWithContentsOfURL:url]; parser = [[NSXMLParser alloc] initWithData:data]; parser.delegate = self; [parser parse]; return self;} |
We need to release the parser object we created so I am going to do that in a dealloc method that we’ll implement.
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- (void) dealloc{ [parser release]; [super dealloc];} |
8.) There are three methods we need to implement that follow the NSXMLParserDelegate protocol. They are parser:didStartElement:namespaceURI:qualifiedName:attributes, parser:didEndElement:namespaceURI:qualifiedName and parser:foundCharacters.
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- (void) parser:(NSXMLParser *)parser didStartElement:(NSString *)elementname namespaceURI:(NSString *)namespaceURI qualifiedName:(NSString *)qName attributes:(NSDictionary *)attributeDict{ if ([elementname isEqualToString:@"status"]) { currentTweet = [Tweet alloc]; }}- (void) parser:(NSXMLParser *)parser didEndElement:(NSString *)elementname namespaceURI:(NSString *)namespaceURI qualifiedName:(NSString *)qName{ if ([elementname isEqualToString:@"text"]) { currentTweet.content = currentNodeContent; } if ([elementname isEqualToString:@"created_at"]) { currentTweet.dateCreated = currentNodeContent; } if ([elementname isEqualToString:@"status"]) { [tweets addObject:currentTweet]; [currentTweet release]; currentTweet = nil; [currentNodeContent release]; currentNodeContent = nil; }}- (void) parser:(NSXMLParser *)parser foundCharacters:(NSString *)string{ currentNodeContent = (NSMutableString *) [string stringByTrimmingCharactersInSet:[NSCharacterSet whitespaceAndNewlineCharacterSet]];} |
I know the element name we are looking for because I have taken a peek at the XML that we will be parsing. If we were parsing a different XML we would need to know the names of the nodes in that XML we wanted to parse.
9.) Open up RootViewController.h. Import XMLParser.h and add our XMLParser and a UIImageView. The UIImageView is really just for cosmetics.
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#import <uikit uikit.h="">#import "XMLParser.h"@interface RootViewController : UITableViewController{ XMLParser *xmlParser; UIImageView *customImage;}@property (nonatomic, retain) UIImageView *customImage;@end</uikit> |
10.) Now open up the implementation file (RootViewController.m). We need to import our Tweet.h file and synthesize our variable. Then in our viewDidLoad method we are going to access my twitter status tweets as XML and load it into our XML Parser. And just because I like to keep things aesthetically pleasing, we’ll set the title to “Tweets”.
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#import "RootViewController.h"#import "Tweet.h"@implementation RootViewController@synthesize customImage;#pragma mark -#pragma mark View lifecycle- (void)viewDidLoad{ xmlParser = [[XMLParser alloc] loadXMLByURL:@"http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline/KentFranks.xml"]; [super viewDidLoad]; self.title = @"Tweets";} |
11.) Let’s set up our table to display the tweets. I’ve set the number of sections to 1.
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- (NSInteger)numberOfSectionsInTableView:(UITableView *)tableView{ return 1;} |
12.) I’m using the tweets array to set the number of rows in the sections.
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- (NSInteger)tableView:(UITableView *)tableView numberOfRowsInSection:(NSInteger)section{ return [[xmlParser tweets] count];} |
13.) And then all the real work will get done in the tableView:cellForRowAtIndexPath method.
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- (UITableViewCell *)tableView:(UITableView *)tableView cellForRowAtIndexPath:(NSIndexPath *)indexPath{ static NSString *CellIdentifier = @"Cell"; UITableViewCell *cell = [tableView dequeueReusableCellWithIdentifier:CellIdentifier]; if (cell == nil) { cell = [[[UITableViewCell alloc] initWithStyle:UITableViewCellStyleSubtitle reuseIdentifier:CellIdentifier] autorelease]; } UIImage *twitterLogo = [[UIImage imageNamed:@"twitter-logo.png"]autorelease]; Tweet *currentTweet = [[xmlParser tweets] objectAtIndex:indexPath.row]; CGRect imageFrame = CGRectMake(2, 8, 40, 40); self.customImage = [[[UIImageView alloc] initWithFrame:imageFrame] autorelease]; self.customImage.image = twitterLogo; [cell.contentView addSubview:self.customImage]; CGRect contentFrame = CGRectMake(45, 2, 265, 30); UILabel *contentLabel = [[[UILabel alloc] initWithFrame:contentFrame] autorelease]; contentLabel.numberOfLines = 2; contentLabel.font = [UIFont boldSystemFontOfSize:12]; contentLabel.text = [currentTweet content]; [cell.contentView addSubview:contentLabel]; CGRect dateFrame = CGRectMake(45, 40, 265, 10); UILabel *dateLabel = [[[UILabel alloc] initWithFrame:dateFrame] autorelease]; dateLabel.font = [UIFont systemFontOfSize:10]; dateLabel.text = [currentTweet dateCreated]; [cell.contentView addSubview:dateLabel]; return cell;} |
We are setting the current tweet to the object in our tweets array that matches indexPath.row.
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Tweet *currentTweet = [[xmlParser tweets] objectAtIndex:indexPath.row]; |
Most of the rest of the code in here is just customizing the look of our cells. I’m not explaining this in detail because I’m assuming if you are mostly interested in parsing the XML. If you want to know more about customizing the table view cells you can take a look at the tutorial.
I have included one graphic in the display that you will need to add to your project “twitter-logo.png”. You can download the graphic from here, and then just right click on Resources and select Add > Existing Files … navigate to where you downloaded the file, then choose to copy the file into your project.
14.) The only other thing I’ve done here is set the height of our rows in the tableView:heightForRowAtIndexPath method. And the release our xmlParser object in dealloc.
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- (CGFloat)tableView:(UITableView *)tableView heightForRowAtIndexPath:(NSIndexPath *)indexPath{ return 55;}- (void)dealloc{ [xmlParser release]; [super dealloc];} |
That’s all there is to it. Make sure everything is saved, click Build and Run.
G@ur@v Borole 