Enabling logging is an excellent way to debug WordPress code when something doesn’t behave as it should in our website. There’re two options to show us the log, thou. One is by presenting warnings and errors directly in the pages and the other is saving it to a file situated in wp-content directory, called debug.log.
To enable logging you should add the following code to your wp-config.php file:
The first line enables logging, next line activates debug.log file usage, and finally the third option specifies that these warnings won’t be shown on your site.
The problem is that, by default, this file is publicly accessible through http://mydomain.com/wp-content/debug.log what suppose a security risk.
But there’s a very simple way to avoid this access (if you’re using Apache webserver). You just need to create or edit your .htaccess file and add this code:
# Block debug.log access
<Files "debug.log">
Order Allow,Deny
Deny from all
</Files>
When you use sudo in Linux, a session that lasts 15 minutes by default, is created. This may be not enough time for a user to complete a task as root, in my case, everytime QownNotes package is updated (usually every day!) it last more than this time to finish it compilation process, so I need to reenter my password, but when this terminal window is in the background the time for asking the password also expires and I need to restart the update process.
How to make sudo sessions last longer
This is a really easy, you just need to use visudo tool
sudo visudo
and change the line:
Defaults env_reset
to:
Defaults env_reset,timestamp_timeout=30
Where, of course, timeout=30 refers to the number of minutes you want the session to be available. You can also change this value to 0 if you want to ask for the password every time sudo is used, or use -1 in case you don’t want to ask for the password at all.
Aster*sks
If you don’t like to be blind when typing your passwords in the terminal, you can also add a little ‘hack’ when editing /etc/sudoers to make the shell show you asterisks instead of a desert of emptiness 🙁
sudo visudo
adding:
Defaults env_reset,pwfeedback
Now when you use sudo command you will see cute asterisks!
All in one
Finally, you maybe would like to include all this in a script so here it is:
I’d been noticing for some time that my computer clock wasn’t showing the correct time. I realized about it by comparing it with server clocks I administer, so I thought my PC wasn’t using an NTP server for syncing time & date.
Today I remembered and it resulted easier than I thought. Firstly I issued this command in a terminal to check it:
> timedatectl
Local time: lun 2019-08-19 18:11:19 -03
Universal time: lun 2019-08-19 21:11:19 UTC
RTC time: lun 2019-08-19 21:11:19
Time zone: America/Montevideo (-03, -0300)
System clock synchronized: no
NTP service: no
RTC in local TZ: no
Here you can clearly see that NTP service is disabled, so I had to enable it by running the following command:
> sudo timedatectl set-ntp true
After that checking again with timedatectl we get:
Local time: lun 2019-08-19 20:43:43 -03
Universal time: lun 2019-08-19 23:43:43 UTC
RTC time: lun 2019-08-19 23:43:43
Time zone: America/Montevideo (-03, -0300)
System clock synchronized: yes
NTP service: active
RTC in local TZ: no
