Forcing composer to use https connections to Packagist

Been having problems with composer from behind a company firewall. The firewall was blocking us from accessing a particular package.json file from the http://packagist.org website

What was strange though was that it was only blocked over http:// connections and perfectly accessible from https:// connections.

However, I have, after much trial and error and research, found a workaround. It's not a particularly graceful workaround but it takes advantage of the fact that composer does not recursively resolve repository locations and only takes commands from the main project's composer.json configuration.

I realised when reading the documentation on the composer github site that you could disable the default packagist configuration. In addition, of course you can add your own repositories to the composer.json in your project.

So, adding the following to the composer.json solves the problem and I'm able to bypass the blocks put in place by the firewall.

    
    "repositories": [
        {
             "type": "composer", 
             "url": "https://packagist.org" 
        },
        { "packagist": false }
    ]

Of course, this does solve a problem that was only relevant in a particular scenario and probably won't be relevant to the vast majority of people. But if you have a similar situation, hopefully this will help.

Conversion of UTF-8 form fields in Multi Part Form

Got to say a big thanks to Abhishek at Running Commentary for the solution to this problem.

While using the Apache Commons File Upload Library on a Spanish Language form, I was having problems with the UTF-8 characters that were being submitted in people's names etc. Everything else was working properly, the rest of the Spanish characters on the page were displaying properly but the input was being translated into garbage when submitted.

The solution ultimately was to change

item.getString()

to

item.getString("UTF-8").trim()

While extracting the items from the List element that the FileUploadHandler returned after parsing the request object.

Bear in mind, it doesn't matter what you do before calling this, if you don't explicitely tell the FUH what encoding you want to you use, you'll always get standard ASCII back (and subsequently garbage if your form fields contain anything other than standard ASCII...

Hope this helps.

Learning Java now :)

So, the company where I am working at the moment has made the move into a Java based web environment. Lots of reasons and I'm not going into them here as this is a personal blog (despite the technical nature) and I'm not going to discuss work decisions or anything that may be confidential in nature of course.

But - I have a blog, I'm learning a lot of new stuff and it makes sense to switch the focus of the blog to whatever I'm using/doing/learning rather than a single focus on Symfony as I originally planned.

So watch out for a lot of new posts as I go... most of what I learn will posted here for my future reference