Surid – Page 10 – Mellowhost Blog

How to Install Let’s Encrypt in Cpanel

Let’s Encrypt is a popular tool to use free SSL for your website. Cpanel comes with Sectigo free ssl service through requesting and pooling system. Although, you might feel interested in getting the SSL released immediately without a queue based approach, and would prefer to use Let’s Encrypt that’s why.

There are two ways, you may install Let’s Encrypt in Cpanel.

Using Cpanel Plugin

First one would be using the plugin created by Cpanel. Login to your server as root:

ssh root@server_ip

Then, run the following to install Let’s Encrypt in your cpanel system

/usr/local/cpanel/scripts/install_lets_encrypt_autossl_provider

It might take a couple of minutes, then it should install Let’s Encrypt as a provider in AutoSSL.

Now, go to WHM >> Manage AutoSSL and select Let’s Encrypt as the provider instead of Sectigo Cpanel default. You need to check the Agreement rules under the Let’s Encrypt selection and you may create the account in Let’s Encrypt using the same tool.

Once done, your new SSLs would be issued using the Let’s Encrypt tool through Cpanel AutoSSL plugin.

2. Using FleetSSL

There is a 3rd party tool, existed before Cpanel provided a plugin for Let’s Encrypt. It’s FleetSSL. One key benefit of using FleetSSL is that, it allows the Cpanel end users to control issuing and renewing the SSL from Cpanel. One key cons of using FleetSSL is that, it is not free of charge, it comes with 30$ one time fees. But mainly hosting provider would not mind to use this as it is a nice addition for the end user feature set in a hosting provider’s point of view.

You may check for details here:

https://letsencrypt-for-cpanel.com/

Now, once you complete installing Let’s Encrypt SSL, you may now use Let’s Encrypt for different cpanel services like webmail/cpanel/whm/calenders/MTA services. You may check the following to know how to:

How To: Install AutoSSL for Server Hostname – Cpanel Server

dial unix /tmp/padapter.usk: socket: too many open files

Error Definition

There are times, when your application may throw error like the following in Linux:

dial unix /tmp/padapter.usk: socket: too many open files

It could only contain the following, without relating the fast message:

socket: too many open files

How to Fix

This error appears because Linux file system puts a limit of amount of open files you may use at a time. It is calculated based on a variable system set is called ‘file-max’. File System also keeps a variable called ‘file-nr’ to count the number of file you have in usage. To quickly look at your usage, you may run the following:

[root@server-sg ~]# cat /proc/sys/fs/file-nr
4512    0       265535

The first number is the amount of file descriptions in use in your linux system. Here the last number is your hard limit and the second number is your soft limit. The hard limit is your file-max. To know your file-max value, you may run the following:

[root@server-sg ~]# cat /proc/sys/fs/file-max
265535

As we see, the limit is set to 265535 and the usage is 4512. If the usage goes up for some reason, for example an infinite loop on the cache creation, you may run out of file system open limit and hit the error. To set the value fir file-max, we will take sysctl.conf in consideration.

First open sysctl.conf file with the following:

nano /etc/sysctl.conf

Add the following line and save:

fs.file-max = 524280

This will increase your open file limit to 524280. Now to reflect the change immediately, you need to run the following:

sysctl -p

You should be done now.

How To Find : If two different date ranges intersects

I was making a Odoo module today, it had a requirement to find the products that has offering within two ranges. Each of the product has different range for discounts/offers. It is sort of like the following:

For example, a shampoo discount starts from 01-06-2020 and ends at 20-06-2020, while another product like a soap discount starts from 10-06-2020 and ends at 22-06-2020. Now if I look for discounted credit notes to apply within a range, then we need to provide some time range, that these ranges intersect. For example, if I want to find discounts that were given within 02-06-2020 – 11 – 06 – 2020, then we should get both the discounts available here, as the discounts were still available for a day to the Soap and a few days for Shampoo. That means, we need to find if any of the given two ranges intersects with the ranges we have discounts for.

The easiest way to calculate this, is to check which date is max among the lower boundaries and which date is minimum in the lower boundaries. This should follow that the starting date would be less than or equal to the ending date, but never greater than the ending date. If greater than, then it does not intersect logically. In python, we can do this like the following:

# first we find all the vendor discounts, it has property start_date and end_date
vendor_discounts = self.env['vendor.discount'].search([])

# list to keep the vendor discount instances
vendor_discount_id_in_range = []

# from the form, we get date_from and date_to, where the dates intersect
for vendor_discount in vendor_discounts:
   # here is the logic to find intersects
    if max(self.date_from, vendor_discount.start_date) <= min(self.date_to, vendor_discount.end_date):
        vendor_discount_id_in_range.append(vendor_discount.id)

So, the logic going to be like the following:

if max(input_date_from, start_date_to_match) <= min(input_date_to, end_date_to_match)

How to Enable Logging in Odoo

There are two ways to see the Odoo Logs. One is rough and can be used to see the latest Odoo logs, it’s the Journal tools. You may do this using the following if your Odoo service is installed as odoo13 for example

journalctl -u odoo13

Note: If you are having trouble primarily in installing Odoo properly, you may check the following:

How to Install Odoo 13 in CentOS 7

The other way, is the enable logging to a file. This has to be enabled from the odoo.conf file which is located under /etc/ folder. First we open the /etc/odoo.conf file:

nano /etc/odoo.conf

Now, search to see if you have a directive called ‘logfile’. If you don’t, you may add the following to /etc/odoo.conf:

logfile = /var/log/odoo13/odoo.log

If you already have the directive, but commented out, like this:

; logfile = /var/log/odoo13/odoo.log

You may remove the ‘;’ in front of the logfile directive and save the file. Now you may restart your Odoo instance to allow odoo log the information to the file /var/log/odoo13/odoo.log

systemctl restart odoo13

If the restart showing some errors, probably because it is failing to put permission to odoo13 folder. You may try the following:

mkdir /var/log/odoo13
chown -Rf odoo:odoo /var/log/odoo13
systemctl restart odoo13

How to Install Odoo 13 in CentOS 7

Odoo is currently one of the most popular tool for business purposes. It has a community edition, that allows managing ERP at very low cost. Odoo was previously known as OpenERP. Odoo requires to be installed on a dedicated server or VPS. Odoo 13 had come out on October, 2019. Odoo 14 hasn’t been released yet for production. I will have a straight forward how to on installing the latest Odoo 13 in CentOS 7.

Log in to your system and update

First step would be to login to your system and then update the system using yum.

ssh root@server_ip

You may check the CentOS version from the redhat release file using the following:

cat /etc/redhat-release

It should show you something like the following if you

CentOS Linux release 7.8.2003 (Core)

Now, you may try updating the system with yum

yum update -y

Once done, now install the EPEL repository as we need it to satisfy a couple of dependecies:

yum install epel-release

Install Python 3.6 packages and Odoo dependencies

We need Python 3.6 at least to run Odoo 13. Odoo 12 had support for Python 3.5, unfortunately, Odoo 13 doesn’t. We will use ‘Software Collection (scl)’ repository to install and use Python 3.6. To find the available Python versions in SCL, you may check the following:

SCL Repository for Python

Now, to install Python 3.6 using SCL, we first need to install the SCL repository for Centos:

yum install centos-release-scl

Once the SCL is loaded, now, you may install the python 3.6 using the following command:

yum install rh-python36

Once the Python is installed, now we will install several tools and packages for Odoo dependencies with the following command:

yum install git gcc nano wget nodejs-less libxslt-devel bzip2-devel openldap-devel libjpeg-devel freetype-devel

Create Odoo User

We now need to create a system user and group for Odoo and define a home directory to /opt/odoo

useradd -m -U -r -d  /opt/odoo -s /bin/bash odoo

You may use any username here, but remember to create the same username for the PostgreSQL as well.

Install PostgreSQL

CentOS base repository unfortunately, comes with Postgresql 9.2. But we want to use PostgreSQL 9.6 for our Odoo installation. You may check the available PostgreSQL for CentOS 7 using the following command:

yum list postgresql*

As by default CentOS 7 does not provide the PostgreSQL 9.6, we would use PostgreSQL official repository to download and install the 9.6 version.

First, we install the Postgres Yum Repository using the following command:

yum install https://download.postgresql.org/pub/repos/yum/9.6/redhat/rhel-7-x86_64/pgdg-redhat-repo-latest.noarch.rpm

Now, you may install PostgreSQL 9.6 and related required packages using the following command:

yum install postgresql96 postgresql96-server postgresql96-contrib postgresql96-libs

Now, we need to initialize the postgres database and start it. You may do that using the following:

# Initialize the DB
/usr/pgsql-9.6/bin/postgresql96-setup initdb

# Start the database
systemctl start postgresql-9.6.service

Now you may enable Postgres to start when booting up using the systemctl enable command:

systemctl enable postgresql-9.6.service

Now, we need to create a database user for our Odoo installation. You may do that using the following:

su - postgres -c "createuser -s odoo"

Note: If you have created a different user for Odoo installation other than ‘odoo’ than you should change the username here as well.

Install Wkhtmltopdf

Wkhtmltopdf is a open source tool to make html in pdf format so that you may print pdf reports. This tool is used by Odoo and requires to be installed as dependency. CentOS 7 repository does not provide the latest version of this tool, and Odoo requires you to use the latest version. Hence, we require to download the latest version from the Wkhtmltopdf website and install it. To do that, you may first visit the page:

https://wkhtmltopdf.org/downloads.html

The page gives you the direct rpm download link for each version of CentOS/Ubuntu/Mac etc. Download the stable version for CentOS 7. At the time of writing, the URL for CentOS 7 x86_64 bit is the following:

https://github.com/wkhtmltopdf/packaging/releases/download/0.12.6-1/wkhtmltox-0.12.6-1.centos7.x86_64.rpm

You may install this using the following:

cd /opt/
wget https://github.com/wkhtmltopdf/packaging/releases/download/0.12.6-1/wkhtmltox-0.12.6-1.centos7.x86_64.rpm
yum localinstall wkhtmltox-0.12.6-1.centos7.x86_64.rpm

Install and Configure Odoo 13

If you have come all through here, that means you are done with the all dependency installations before starting to download Odoo 13 source code. We will download Odoo 13 from it’s Github repo and use virtualenv to create an isolated python environment to install this python software.

First, login as odoo from root:

su - odoo

Clone the Odoo source code from Github repository:

git clone https://www.github.com/odoo/odoo --depth 1 --branch 13.0 /opt/odoo/odoo13

This will bring the Odoo 13 branch from the Odoo repository and put it inside the folder /opt/odoo/odoo13

Now, we need to enable software collections in order to access python binaries:

scl enable rh-python36 bash

Then we need to create a virtual environment to complete the installation:

cd /opt/odoo
python3 -m venv odoo13-venv

Now, you may activate the virtual environment you have just created:

source odoo13-venv/bin/activate

Now, we upgrade the pip and install the wheel library:

pip install --upgrade pip
pip3 install wheel

Once done, now we can using pip3 to install all the required Python modules from the requirements.txt file:

pip3 install -r odoo13/requirements.txt

Once the installation is complete, now we can deactivate the virtual environment and get back to the root user

deactivate && exit ; exit

If you think, you will create custom modules, you may now create it and give odoo the permission accordingly:

mkdir /opt/odoo/odoo13-custom-addons
chown odoo: /opt/odoo/odoo13-custom-addons

Now, we can fill up the odoo configuration file. First open the odoo.conf file:

nano /etc/odoo.conf

You may paste the following inside:

[options]
; This is the password that allows database operations:
admin_passwd = set_the_password_to_create_odoo_database
db_host = False
db_port = False
db_user = odoo
db_password = False
addons_path = /opt/odoo/odoo13/addons,/opt/odoo/odoo13-custom-addons
; You can enable log file with uncommenting the next line
; logfile = /var/log/odoo13/odoo.log

Please do not forget to change the password ‘set_the_password_to_create_odoo_database’ with a new strong password. This would be used to create Odoo databases from the login screen.

Create the systemd service file and start Odoo 13

Now, we will create a service file, to be able to start, stop and restart Odoo daemon. To do that, first create a service file using the following:

nano /etc/systemd/system/odoo13.service

and paste the following:

[Unit]
Description=Odoo13
Requires=postgresql-9.6.service
After=network.target postgresql-9.6.service

[Service]
Type=simple
SyslogIdentifier=odoo13
PermissionsStartOnly=true
User=odoo
Group=odoo
ExecStart=/usr/bin/scl enable rh-python35 -- /opt/odoo/odoo13-venv/bin/python3 /opt/odoo/odoo13/odoo-bin -c /etc/odoo.conf
StandardOutput=journal+console

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Now, save the file and exit.

Now, you need to reload the systemd daemon to be able to read the latest changes you have made to services. To do that, run:

systemctl daemon-reload

Finally, now we can start Odoo 13 instance using the following command:

systemctl start odoo13

If you are interested to check the status of the instance, you may do this:

systemctl status odoo13

[root@hr ~]# systemctl status odoo13
● odoo13.service - Odoo13
   Loaded: loaded (/etc/systemd/system/odoo13.service; enabled; vendor preset: disabled)
   Active: active (running) since Sun 2020-09-13 08:26:46 EDT; 23h ago
 Main PID: 24502 (scl)
   CGroup: /system.slice/odoo13.service
           ├─24502 /usr/bin/scl enable rh-python36 -- /opt/odoo/odoo13-venv/bin/python3 /opt/odoo/odoo13/odoo-bin -c /etc/odoo.conf
           ├─24503 /bin/bash /var/tmp/sclSWH04z
           └─24507 /opt/odoo/odoo13-venv/bin/python3 /opt/odoo/odoo13/odoo-bin -c /etc/odoo.conf

It show green active running, if everything worked out. If you see no error, you may now enable Odoo to start during the boot:

systemctl enable odoo13

If you would like to see the logs, you may either use the journal tools like the following:

journalctl -u odoo13

or uncomment the following line to log the debugs in /etc/odoo.conf

logfile = /var/log/odoo13/odoo.log

After making any change to /etc/odoo.conf, do not forget the restart the Odoo13 instance using systemctl.

Test the Installation

You may now test the installation using http://your_server_ip:8069. If everything worked, it should come up. If it doesn’t, you may try stopping your ‘firewalld’ to see if firewall is blocking the port or not:

systemctl stop firewalld

At Mellowhost, we provide Odoo installation and configuration assistance for absolute free of charge. If you are willing to try out any of our VPS for Odoo, you may do so and talk with us through the Live chat or the ticket for Odoo assistance.

Furthermore, Good luck.

How to Add SRV Records

SRV are ‘service’ type records added in dns zone files. These are added to indicate a certain kind of service runs on a specific port, on a specific domain/subdomain. Many control panel, will give clear distinction to make you select the following items in a srv record:

Protocol Type (TCP/UDP)
Weight
Port
Target Host

Now, if by any chance, you are doing it in a panel like Cyberpanel, or some other zone files, it is highly likely you will have a way to distinct any of these. This simple How to, is for them specially.

If for example, your domain is ‘nanotools.com’, and you are trying to add something like autodiscover.nanotools.com with the following details:

Protocol: TCP
Weight: 0
Port: 443
Target Host: fortinet.yourmails.com

Let’s start with is going to be your ‘name’ field. Usually you would use ‘autodiscover’ as the name field, but in this case, you would have to use it with the protocol with a underscore and a dot (._) in front as following:

autodiscover._tcp

Next, you enter TTL, Prioriy as you would also do. But at the end, you have 3 more fields to enter, but you have one content/value section in your zone. For the SRV records, we fill it like the following:

weight port target_host

It means, we first give the weight, then a space, then the port, then a space, then the target hostname and then a dot to end the section. In our case, it would be:

0 443 fortinet.yourmails.com.

So the whole record going to be as following: (expects priority is 10)

autodiscover._tcp 3600 IN SRV 10 0 443 frotinet.yourmails.com.

How to Call a Controller Method from Tinker – Laravel

LARAVEL TINKER

If you love to debug and test things in an app shell like me, then you are also a big fan of Tinker in laravel. Tinker is the shell prompt for Laravel and can be used to test and run different commands in php inside the app. You may run the following to hop into the tinker shell in a laravel environment:

php artisan tinker

Once you hop in the tinker, you can call any model or run any php command from the shell.

HOW TO RUN CONTROLLER METHOD FROM TINKER

There are times, you might feel more interest into evaluating a large controller method. To run a controller method, we first need to enter the service container of laravel. Laravel providers a helper method called ‘app()’ to enter the service container. It can then use a method called ‘call’ to access and execute a method inside a controller namespace, like the following:

app()->call('App\Http\Controllers\AdminControllers@yourmethod');

Repace your controller name and the method name after @. One thing, you need to realize is that the method ‘call’ takes the method reference, not the function itself. That means, you can not add brackets () at the end of method name while giving it in the call method.

HOW TO PASS PARAMETERS TO CONTROLLER FROM TINKER

As discussed earlier, you are passing reference only, not the function, hence you can not pass parameters like we usually do in methods/functions. We need to pass this as an argument in array.

Here is a more constructive way to do this:

# let's make an instance of controller first, can be done using make method of service container
$controller = app()->make('App\Http\Controllers\AdminControllers');

# now let's call the method, inside the container, method name is 'getNewsByCatId'
app()->call([$controller, 'getNewsByCatId']);

# pass a parameter called id = 5
app()->call([$controller, 'getNewsByCatId'], ['id' => 5]);

How to get the string/part/word/text within brackets in Python using Regex

PROBLEM DEFINITION

For example, you have a string like the following:

[lagril] L.A. Girl Pro. Setting HD Matte Finish Spray

While you are scanning the line, you would like to extract the following word from it ‘lagril’, which you are interested in. How to do that?

GETTING TEXT WITHIN BRACKETS USING REGEX IN PYTHON

Our problem falls into a common string extraction problem we face in software engineering. We usually do this using Regular Expressions. Let’s build the regular expression logic first, using regex101.com

We need to find a string that starts with ‘[‘ bracket and ends with ‘]’ bracket, and in the middle, we expect alphanumeric word with small or capital letters, and they can be anything from 0 to any. So, this should be as simple as the following:

\[[A-Za-z0-9]*\]

Now, this should help us target the words that comes within bracket in a sentence/large string. But the trick to grab the text within the bracket is to group them. To use group in regex, we use () brackets without back slash in front. So if the regex is as following:

\[([A-Za-z0-9]*)\]

This will put the matching string in group 1. Now, how can you get what is in the group 1 of a regular expression engine? Let’s dive into python now:

# let's import regular expression engine first
import re

# our string
txt = '[lagril] L.A. Girl Pro. Setting HD Matte Finish Spray'

# our regex search would be as following:
x = re.search(r"\[([A-Za-z0-9]*)\]", txt)

# we know this will put the inner text in group 1. regex object that returned by re.search, has a method called 'group()' to catch the groups matches regex. You may use the following

x.group(1) # prints lagril

How to Install Zimbra Universal UI Theme on Zimbra 8.8.*

WHAT IS ZIMBRA UNIVERSAL UI

Zimbra universal UI is a theme by Zimbra, that is much more modern, professional looking theme, looks much near to Outlook theme. According to Zimbra, this is still in Beta since 2017, and not available anywhere unfortunately to install/download it from Zimbra until you are using one of the Zimbra Cloud by Zimbra Inc.

HOW DID WE MANAGE TO GET ZIMBRA UNIVERSAL UI?

Zeta Alliance had released an unofficial Zimbra 8.8.5 with the Zimbra Universal UI theme in it, that is downloadable here:

zcs-8.8.5_GA_2000.RHEL7_64.20171222124635.tgz

We installed it and tweaked the ZUU theme to be able to use in any Zimbra 8.8.* version available.

HOW TO INSTALL ZIMBRA UNIVERSAL UI

First keep a copy of zimbra folder:

rsync -vrplogDtH /opt/zimbra/jetty/webapps/zimbra /root/zimbra_backup

Then, download a copy of the zimbra UI from here:

wget https://mellowhost.com/downloads/zimbra-ui.tgz

Untar and migrate to zimbra folder:

tar -xvzf zimbra-ui.tgz
rsync -vrplogDtH zimbra/ /opt/zimbra/jetty/webapps/zimbra/

(Optional) This will install a new theme called ‘clarity’ which is our Zimbra Universal UI theme. You may either use this, and advise your users to choose this as a theme, or replace the default Harmony with this one. To do this, you may do the following:

cd /opt/zimbra/jetty/webapps/zimbra/skins
mv harmony harmony_old
ln -sf clarity harmony

This is done only by creating a softlink for old harmony to clarity theme

Now fix the permissions and restart zimbra to make everything work:

# Fix permission
/opt/zimbra/libexec/zmfixperms -v
service zimbra restart

You may now access Zimbra from your browser to see the new theme loading. If you are having trouble with the http access for your webmail, you may use the following to redirect your http webmail to https webmails

How to Redirect HTTP to HTTPs Zimbra 8.8.*