development posts

Swap file for composer out of memory problems

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PHP’s defacto package manager, composer, has long required large amounts of memory to do updates for larger projects, often more than servers or virtual machines have. The script will die with an out of memory error, or more recently, the simple message “Killed”, and do no work in these situations. The normal procedure is to develop locally, deploy local lock file (composer.lock) to the server, and run composer install instead of update. But I’ve recently moved to doing most of my development in VMs, so I have had to work around this problem to get things installed or updated. A swap file is the solution for Linux machines provided in the official docs and expanded in a StackOverflow answer.

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JS: ES Modules and Node bare specifiers via response rewrite

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I’ve been playing with JS lately, including ES modules and building with Rollup, Babel, and Terser, along with other accessories. One thing I’m disappointed with of ES modules in the Nodejs ecosystem is dealing with third party imports. Using the “bare” specifiers that Node expects works fine in that environment and thus tools running in it (possibly needing helpers), but they don’t work at all directly in the browser. This is discussed in this post by Jake Archibold, for instance.

Import maps are one solution in the works, but that requires explicitly mapping every dependency, which could get complicated fast when dependencies have dependencies. It also is only in draft stage and only works in Blink based browsers currently.

I eventually gave in to the idea of having server code rewrite the paths in the js file responses to point to a symlinked node_modules folder, similar to what is mentioned in this post by the Polymer project. I created a PHP test server for one of my projects that does this.

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