Cron is a time-based job scheduler in Unix-like operating systems, which is used to automate repetitive tasks. It is a daemon (a background process) that runs continuously and executes commands at specified times, called cronjobs. A cronjob can be any command, script or program that needs to be executed at a specific time or interval.

The crontab is a file used by cron to schedule the execution of cronjobs. Each user on the system has their own crontab file, which is stored in the /var/spool/cron directory. The crontab file contains the instructions for the cron daemon on when to run a command, and what command to run. The syntax for the crontab file can seem a bit confusing at first, but it’s actually quite simple once you understand the structure.

The post CronTab Basic Commands With Examples appeared first on Automation Dojos.

One of the key benefits of PowerShell is its object-oriented nature. Instead of working with text-based output like traditional command-line interfaces, PowerShell returns objects that can be easily manipulated using its built-in cmdlets (pronounced “command-lets”). This makes it easy to automate complex tasks, as administrators can pipe the output of one cmdlet to another, building up a chain of commands that perform a series of operations on an object.

Commands To Find Other Commands

I consider this set of commands very useful because they are used to discover other commands. These commands help in discovering syntax, usage, and members of other commands so you don’t have to memorize the full commands catalog. Here are the most useful and frequently used commands that you must know:

Essential PowerShell Commands

Here is a list of basic PowerShell commands that you should know.

The post Basic PowerShell Commands That You Should Know appeared first on Automation Dojos.

The VSCode has rocketed its way to one of the top development IDEs due to its fresh look, usability, tons of feature sets, and customization options besides being very lightweight. But such extensive customization options at times do overwhelm the user and sometimes make it a tedious task to find the precise customization option to tweak to meet your goals.

Though the VSCode team has done an excellent job by introducing the ‘command palette’ (Ctrl+Shift+P), which indeed makes it very easy to find almost anything that VSCode has to offer, however, in order to make use of ‘command palette’ you still need to know the precise ‘keyword’ to search. I recently encountered one such problem and despite the ‘command palette’, I had to scan through several settings, eventually locating the solution.

1. Problem Description

I noticed whenever I opened any file in VSCode, it used to open the file in the already opened tab of the editor. Every time I clicked on any file to open it would replace the previously opened file with the new file in the same tab rather than opening the new file in a new tab. Because of this, I not only used to lose the previously opened file but was also stuck with a single tab.

My investigation revealed that this was happening due to the VSCode editor’s feature called ‘Preview Mode’. This mode is enabled by default and you can easily identify that you are opening the editor tab in ‘Preview Mode’ by noticing that the tab name is written in ‘italicized’ letters, as shown below.

Hence if you see your editor tab name is ‘italicized’ that means you are viewing in ‘Preview Mode’. This is the reason you are not able to open new

2. What is Preview Mode and Why?

I guess the problem description in the above section duly explains what is ‘Preview Mode’, so the next question arises, why? At the onset, it may seem an annoying feature and one may even assume that reason behind having this enabled by default must be a bug or design issue in VSCode release. However this is not the case and In fact, most likely this is a deliberately designed feature introduced for optimizing the user experience or even performance.

Consider the example, where a developer might click on a number of files to view/read the code or maybe during debugging but eventually ends up working on just a single file. This is a very usual scenario and may happen repeatedly and frequently. But this also means that the developer would have opened a lot of files (and hence tabs) during the course of work. Obviously, this would clutter the view of the editor gradually decreasing the usability or even efficiency. Hence the ‘Preview Mode’!

3. Open Files in New Tab While in Preview Mode

While in ‘Preview Mode’, you can still open files in a new tab. Given below are a couple of ways you can do this:

3.1. Open Files Using Double-Click

You can use the double click to open each successive file. Using double click the successive files would open in a new tab while retaining the existing tabs.

3.2. Right-Click Tab Options (Keep Open)

Another way to keep the existing ‘Preview Mode’ tab open is by right-clicking on the ‘Preview Mode’ tab and selecting the option called ‘Keep Open’ from right-click context menu.

3.3. Double-Click the Tab

If the tab you are working on is already open in ‘Preview Mode’ and you want this tab to remain open then you can do so by simply double-clicking on the tab. Doing so would make the tab to lose ‘Preview Mode’ and next time when you click on another file, that file would open in a new tab.

4. Set VSCode To Always Open Files in New Tab

If you are not a big fan of ‘Preview Mode’ and you want to permanently get rid of this feature, you can turn this feature off. Once the ‘Preview Mode’ is turned off, every file you open would open in a new tab. Here are couple of ways you can achieve this.

4.1 VSCode Settings UI

You can turn off ‘Preview Mode’ via the VSCode settings UI. To do so, open VSCode settings and search for ‘enable preview’. Locate the two settings named the following:

Workbench › Editor: Enable Preview
Workbench › Editor: Enable Preview from Quick Open

 Uncheck both the settings and this would disable the ‘Preview Mode’.

4.2 VSCode Settings Json

Finally, if you prefer to turn off ‘Preview Mode’ via modifying the settings.json for the user. Open the settings.json and look for the following two keys and set their value to ‘false’ as shown below:

"workbench.editor.enablePreview": false,
"workbench.editor.enablePreviewFromQuickOpen": false

The post How To Always Open Files in New Tab in VSCode appeared first on Automation Dojos.

Oh-My-Posh is a powerful custom prompt engine for any shell that has the ability to adjust the prompt string with a function or variable. It does not only beautify the terminal, but it also increases the work efficiency by adding lot of features related to usability, hints, history etc. It also comes with a good number of pre-built themes for your prompt, so you can either choose one, customize a pre-built theme or even create a new one.

The post How To Install Oh-My-Posh On Windows PowerShell appeared first on Automation Dojos.

Secure Shell, sometimes referred to as Secure Socket Shell (SSH), is a protocol which allows you to connect securely to a remote computer or a server by using a text-based interface. OpenSSH is an an open source SSH tool—widely used for Linux distributions. The same OpenSSH tool is also supplied/packaged by default with Git and enables Git authentication via SSH protocol. A common example of this is GitHub authentication and workflows using SSH. Here’s a quick look at some common SSH commands.

The post Common OpenSSH Commands Reference appeared first on Automation Dojos.

1. Why You Need Older WordPress Versions

Of course, running the latest version of WordPress is the best option for any website, but at times, there could be specific scenarios that may require working with an ‘older’ version of WordPress.

For example, a very common scenario is when you may want to test a WordPress version upgrade on your localhost or dev/staging environment before upgrading the live environment. Similarly, there could be a variety of other reasons for installing older WordPress versions.

In our earlier article, we already saw How To Install WordPress Locally using XAMPP, however, the installation steps discussed in that post do not apply to installing an ‘older’ WordPress version. By older we mean WordPress version 5.6 and above.

Hence, in this article, we will specifically go through the steps for installing WordPress version 5.6 and above, locally on Windows using XAMPP.

2. Why Installation Ends Up As Latest Version

Though installing WordPress locally using XAMPP is a fairly simple process, however, when installing any WordPress versions starting WordPress 5.6, there is a catch!

The catch is the ‘automatic-update’ feature of WordPress, which is ‘ON’ by default since v5.6, and that is the reason for users starting out the WordPress installation using older WordPress versions (> v5.6 but not the latest) but still ending up with the latest WordPress version soon after the installation process.

Because by the time installation using an older version is completed, in the backend WordPress automatically upgrades the core version to the latest available version at the time. Of course, for this to happen your localhost needs an active internet connection.

3. WordPress Automatic Update Feature

There are four types of WordPress updates:

The Core updates are further subdivided into three types:

The ‘automatic updates’ feature for ‘minor’ releases was introduced in WordPress 3.7 version. This allowed WordPress to automatically install new minor and security releases to improve your website security.

However, starting WordPress 5.6, by default, every WordPress site has ‘automatic updates’ enabled for both minor and major releases. This meant, that if you install any version starting WordPress 5.6 onwards (i.e., 5.6, 5.7, 5.8, etc.), your WordPress instance would automatically get updated to the latest available WordPress version at the time.

4. How To Install Older WordPress Version

In order to install any older (>v5.6 but not latest) version of the WordPress, you would need to stop the ‘automatic update’ feature even before the WordPress installation begins else as soon as you finish the installation, the WordPress would automatically get updated to the latest version available at the time, without notifying you. Here are the steps you should take to install an earlier version of WordPress other than the latest.

5. Launch XAMPP and Start Servers

5.1. Start Apache and MySQL Servers

Launch the XAMPP Control Panel as ‘Administrator’ and start the Apache Server as well as MySQL Server. You can do that by clicking on “Start” next to the modules.

6. Creating Database using XAMPP

Next, let us start by creating a database for WordPress using PHPMyAdmin.

6.1. Launch PHPMyAdmin

Open a new browser tab and type the following URL to launch PHPMyAdmin, http://localhost/phpmyadmin/ . This should launch the following web interface

6.2. Create Database for your WordPress

Navigate to the Databases tab at the top of the page of phpMyAdmin. Provide a name for your new database. In my case here, I am creating a database with the name ‘mywebsite_db’. After you have filled in your database name, click on the ‘Create’ button to continue.

This step concludes your database creation for the WordPress website. Now let us move on to install and configure the WordPress site.

7. Download and Set Up WordPress Folder

7.1. Download WordPress from Archives

Download an older WordPress version of your choice from the WordPress release archives page as shown.

7.2. Create project folder to host WordPress

Create your project folder inside XAMPP’s htdocs to host your WordPress files. Proceed with creating a new folder into XAMPP’s htdocs folder for your site and provide a name of your choice. For example, I am going to name it as ‘mywebsite’.

7.3. Extract WordPress files into folder

To install WordPress locally, you need to extract WordPress files (unzip) into the newly created folder inside ‘htdocs’, in our case we will copy it into ‘mywebsite’ folder which we created.

8. Edit WordPress Configuration File

As mentioned earlier, just before we start the WordPress installation, we should disable the ‘automatic-update’ feature of WordPress so that it does not automatically upgrade our chosen version.

If we skip this step, then WordPress would automatically upgrade itself to the latest version available at the time (provided it has access to the internet) soon after the installation completes.

8.1. Make a Copy of Sample Config File

Navigate to the WordPress project folder and locate the sample configuration file with the name ‘wp-config-sample.php’.

Make a copy of the ‘wp-config-sample.php’ in the same folder and name it as ‘wp-config.php’. This will be our WordPress configuration file which we will edit in the next step.

8.2. Input database details into config file

Open the WordPress configuration file you created in the earlier step, for editing. Fill in the values for the following parameters as per your database environment credentials.

Leave all other parameters in the configuration file to default as-is. Save the file and move to the next step.

8.3. Disable ‘auto-update’ WordPress feature

As discussed earlier, since we want to install an earlier version of WordPress (not the latest), hence we need to disable the ‘automatic-update’ feature of WordPress. You can do this by adding the following parameter in your ‘wp-config.php’ file.

/** Disable Development, Minor, and Major updates */
define( 'WP_AUTO_UPDATE_CORE', 'false' );

Since WP_AUTO_UPDATE_CORE can be defined with one of three values, each producing a different behavior:

Hence, rather than disabling all kinds of updates, a better option is to at least enable minor and security auto-updates. We can do so using the following:

/** Enables Automatic Minor Updates Only */
define( 'WP_AUTO_UPDATE_CORE', 'minor' );

So let us add the above parameter and values in our ‘wp-config.php’ file. You can add these lines towards the end of your configuration file as shown in the screenshot.

9. Start WordPress Installation

Since we have now set up our database as well as the WordPress config (wp-config.php), we are all set to start the WordPress installation.

9.1. Start WordPress install process

Launch your web browser and enter the following URL in your browser –

In my case, this is – http://localhost/mywebsite/

This will load the WordPress installation wizard and you’ll be asked to provide your website and website admin details. Fill in the required details and click on the ‘Install WordPress’ button.

Once the installation is complete, you should see the following screen.

9.2. Log on to WordPress Dashboard & Verify

Next, enter your credentials and login to your WordPress site dashboard.

Finally, you’ll reach your admin dashboard. It looks like this. Now verify the WordPress version. It should be the same version that you started with.

The post Why WordPress Installation Ends Up with latest version? appeared first on Automation Dojos.

One of the common use cases for accessing Git repositories on Github is authentication via SSH keys. This offers a secure way of working with Github repositories using SSH protocol.

If you use Eclipse IDE for development and want to use the same for Git workflows like ‘commit’, ‘pull’, ‘push’ etc. you can easily do so by installing one of the Git plugins for Eclipse for example ‘EGit’. By default Eclipse (EGit) would prompt you for username/password while doing Git workflows like ‘push’, you also have the option to save your Git credentials within Eclipse so you don’t have to provide your credentials every time.

However, if you use SSH keys for Git workflows rather than username/password, here is how you can add SSH keys to Eclipse so Eclipse does not prompt you for credentials while doing Git workflows.

Open Eclipse Preferences

Open the Eclipse Preferences via Window > Preferences

Navigate to SSH Preferences

Now type in ‘SSH’ in the search box on the ‘Preferences’ window

Open General SSH2 Settings

Click on ‘SSH’ under, General > Network Connections > SSH2 and open Tab named ‘General’

Set SSH Home Location

On the SSH preferences window, check that you have correctly set your ‘SSH2 Home’ location (path).

Assuming you have local Git installation on your system, the standard path to .ssh home would usually be ‘.ssh’ folder in the user home directory e.g <userhome>/<.ssh>

In case you store your keys somewhere else other than the standard SSH home then you can specify that location as path to SSH home.

Set SSH Private Key/s

While on the SSH window, now click on the ‘Add Private Key’ button and browse to the location of your SSH private key and select your SSH key.

You can specify/load multiple SSH keys using this window separated by commas.

Click Apply to save your changes.

Set/Verify Authentication Method

Next, while on the SSH preferences window, select the tab named ‘Authentication Methods’ and make sure you select/check the ‘publickey’ option. Click Apply to save your changes.

Optional: Save SSH Key ‘Passphrase’ in Secure Store

If you have a ‘passphrase’ (password) set on your SSH key then you also have the option to save your passphrase in Secure Store using Eclipse. If you save your passphrase using this option then Eclipse would not prompt you for a passphrase while doing Git workflows.

For storing your passphrase within Eclipse Secure Store, type ‘Git’ in the search box on the ‘Preferences’ window and navigate to Version Control (Team) > Git and select (check) the option ‘Store SSH Key Passphrase in secure store’

Click Apply and Close to save your changes. DONE!

The post How To Add SSH Private Keys to Eclipse appeared first on Automation Dojos.

Git is the most popular distributed version control system which is currently an actively maintained open-source project. Git supports many command-line tools and graphical user interfaces. Since there are many Git commands you can use, mastering Git takes time. The following set of commands are probably the most commonly used commands that you should know as you may use it quite frequently.

The post Common Git Commands Reference appeared first on Automation Dojos.

The shell is a program that accepts and interprets commands. Besides bash, Linux supports many other shell programs, such as ksh, zsh, csh, and fish. Each of these shells have some unique features that sets them apart from other shells. In this article, we shall see multiple methods you could use to change a user’s shell in Linux

The post How To Change Your Default Linux Shell appeared first on Automation Dojos.

1. Introduction

Installing WordPress on your computer helps you try out WordPress, test themes and plugins, and learn WordPress development.  It lets you operate a website within your own computer. The website isn’t visible to other people. So, you can make an experiment with the design components, plugins, settings, etc. there.

However, WordPress is not something that can be installed on your computer on its own. For installing you would need a web server and database. That is where XAMPP comes into the picture.

2. What is XAMPP?

XAMPP is a local server that you can install on your laptop/desktop to mimic an actual web server.

It’s a completely free, open-source Apache server distribution with MariaDB (formerly MySQL), PHP, and Perl. XAMPP is available for all major operating systems and is extremely easy to install and use. Here is what XAMPP stands for:

Apart from the core components mentioned above, XAMPP usually comes with other useful tools such as Mercury mail server, phpMyAdmin for database administration, Webalizer for web server log analysis, OpenSSL, Apache Tomcat for running Java code, and FileZilla FTP server.

3. Installing XAMPP on Windows

3.1. Download XAMPP installer for windows

Download the latest XAMPP installer for windows from Apache Friends Website

3.2. Plan location of XAMPP binaries (Root)

Before running the installer. Carefully plan/choose the location for XAMPP binaries or root folders. Make a note of the following while choosing the location –

Your Website and Project files would reside inside the XAMPP folder. Best to choose data drive or partition with Admin access. Prefer not to install in ‘Program Files’ due to UAC and Windows security restrictions may potentially cause problems.

3.3. Run Installer and complete installation

Run the XAMPP installer as ‘Administrator’ and complete the installation process.

3.4. Start Apache and MySQL Servers

Launch the XAMPP Control Panel as ‘Administrator’ and start the Apache Server as well as MySQL Server. You can do that by clicking on “Start” next to the modules.

3.5. Verify your server installations

Launch browser and type in localhost to check if Apache service is running fine. If you see the above webpage loading properly that means our installation has been successful.

4. Creating Database using XAMPP

Next, let us create a database for WordPress using PHPMyAdmin.

4.1. Launch PHPMyAdmin

Open a new browser tab and type the following URL to launch PHPMyAdmin, http://localhost/phpmyadmin/ . This should launch the following web interface

4.2. Create Database for your WordPress

Navigate to the Databases tab at the top of the page of phpMyAdmin. Provide a name for your new database. After that, click on the ‘Create’ button to continue.

This step concludes your database creation for the WordPress website. Now let us move on to install and configure the WordPress site.

5. Installing WordPress Locally with XAMPP

5.1. Download the latest version of WordPress

First, you need to go to wordpress.org and download the latest version of WordPress. Download the zip folder on your local system.

5.2. Create Project Folder to Host WordPress

Create your project folder inside XAMPP’s htdocs to host your WordPress files. Proceed with creating a new folder into XAMPP’s htdocs folder for your site and provide a name of your choice. For example, I am going to name it as ‘mywebsite’.

5.3. Extract WordPress Files into Project Folder

To install WordPress locally, you need to extract WordPress files (unzip) into the newly created folder inside ‘htdocs’, in our case we will copy it into ‘mywebsite’ folder which we created.

5.4. Start WordPress Setup & Install Process

Launch your web browser and enter the following URL in your browser –

In my case, this is – http://localhost/mywebsite/

This will load the WordPress installation wizard and you’ll be asked to select a language. After selecting a language, click on the ‘Continue’ button.

5.5. Enter database details

When you get to the database details, enter the following:

5.6. Confirm the installation start

Once everything is done, click on “Submit” and you’ll be taken to the WordPress installation page. Just run the installation

5.7. Setup your Site and Admin Credentials

Continue onto the next screen and fill in all of the details — including your admin username and password — and complete the installation.

Once the installation is complete, you should see the following screen.

5.8. Log on to your WordPress Dashboard

Next, enter your credentials and login to your WordPress site dashboard.

Finally, you’ll reach your admin dashboard. It looks like this:

The post How To Install WordPress Locally using XAMPP appeared first on Automation Dojos.