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This article is part of the CakeDC Advent Calendar 2024 (December 11th 2024) In this article we'll show how to easily monitor the queue jobs in CakePHP 5.0 using the CakePHP Queue Monitor plugin. Queue Monitor Plugin is a companion plugin for the official CakePHP Queue plugin .

Why I should monitor the queues

Monitoring queue jobs is crucial for maintaining the health and efficiency of your application's background processing. Here are some compelling reasons why you should monitor queue jobs:

• Performance and Throughput: Monitoring helps ensure that your jobs are processed within acceptable time frames, preventing bottlenecks and ensuring that your application runs smoothly.
• Error Detection and Handling: By keeping an eye on your queue jobs, you can quickly identify and address errors or failures in the jobs. This allows you to reduce the potential downtime.
• Scalability: As your application grows, monitoring helps you understand how the queue system is handling the increased load, guiding decisions about scaling up or distributing workloads among multiple workers to speed up the job processing.
• User Experience: Ensuring that background tasks are processed efficiently directly impacts the user experience. For example, timely processing of tasks like email notifications or data updates keeps users satisfied.

By monitoring your queue jobs, you can maintain a robust and efficient application that enhances performance and ensures reliability.

Key Features

This plugin will allow you to monitor the queue, in particular:

• monitor and notify about jobs that exceed the specified working time
• check if configured queues are working correctly
• clear the queue of queued jobs
• inspect job messages that have been processed

Getting Started

Before we discuss the functionality, we will go through the installation and configuration of the plugin.

Step 1: Installing the plugin

First you need to install the plugin into your CakePHP 5 application. To do this, you will need to run this command in the root of your project: composer require cakedc/queue-monitor When the plugin is installed please load it into your application: bin/cake plugin load CakeDC/QueueMonitor After the plugin is loaded please run the required migrations: bin/cake migrations migrate -p CakeDC/QueueMonitor

Step 2: Configuring the monitoring

To configure monitoring, place the following directives in your config/app_local.php and adjust values if needed. // ... 'QueueMonitor' => [ 'disable' => false, 'mailerConfig' => 'default', 'longJobInMinutes' => 30, 'purgeLogsOlderThanDays' => 7, 'notificationRecipients' => '[email protected],[email protected],[email protected]', ], // ... Options explained:

• QueueMonitor.disable - With this setting you can enable or disable the queue monitoring, as the queue monitoring is enabled by default.
• QueueMonitor.mailerConfig - mailer config used for notification, the default is default mailer.
• QueueMonitor.longJobInMinutes - This is the time in minutes after which the job will be considered as working too long, and will be taken into account when sending notifications. The default values is 30 minutes.
• QueueMonitor.purgeLogsOlderThanDays - This is the time in days after which logs will be deleted from the database to keep the log table small. The default value is 7 days.
• QueueMonitor.notificationRecipients - This is a comma-separated list of recipients of notifications about jobs exceeding the configured working time.

Step 3: Configuring queue to use the monitoring

To enable the monitoring capabilities to a queue, you will need to add the listener to the queue configurations that you want monitor: 'Queue' => [ 'default' => [ // ... 'listener' => \CakeDC\QueueMonitor\Listener\QueueMonitorListener::class, // ... ] ],

Step 4: Configure notification cronjob

To receive emails about jobs that take too long to process, you need to add the following command to cron: bin/cake queue-monitor notify It is best to configure this command to run every few minutes.

Step 5: Configure the log purging

To keep the log table size small, you need to add automatic log purging to cron: bin/cake queue-monitor purge-logs It is best to configure this command to run every day.

Features

Continuous queue job monitoring

With the Queue Monitoring plugin installed and configured, all of your queued jobs are logged with time points and full message content. The entire processing of each job is also logged, starting from the moment the job is enqueued until one of the many ways the job ends. When any of the jobs exceeds the configured working time, you will be notified by email.

Inspecting the queue logs

Using CakeDC\QueueMonitor\Model\Table\LogsTable you can view all logged job messages. This functionality will be expanded in subsequent versions of the plugin.

Testing the queues

To quickly test if all queues are running correctly, run this command (replace [email protected] with working email address: bin/cake queue-monitor test-enqueue [email protected] This command will send the email through all configured queues.

Purging the queues

To purge the content of a specified queue you can use the purge queue command: bin/cake queue-monitor purge-queue your-queue-name The above command will remove all pending queue jobs from the specified queue. To purge all queues you can use command: bin/cake queue-monitor purge-queue --all

Conclusion

And that's it, you have successfully enabled queue monitoring and troubleshooting tools in your application. This plugin is in active development and more features will be added to it soon, some of them are:

• browsing the content of messages in the queue
• deleting a specified number of messages from the queue
• deleting the first job in the queue
• CRUD for queue logs
• asynchronous queue logging to prevent degradation of job processing performance in case of high job frequency

We look forward to your feedback and contributions as we continue to enhance this plugin for the benefit of the entire CakePHP community. This article is part of the CakeDC Advent Calendar 2024 (December 11th 2024)

This article is part of the CakeDC Advent Calendar 2024 (December 9th 2024) Want to add a Telegram bot to interact with your users? TeBo is a great plugin that simplifies the process. In this guide, I’ll walk you through integrating a Telegram bot into your CakePHP 5 application with a practical example using the Pokémon public API. The bot will respond with details about a Pokémon when users send the command /pokemon <name>. TeBo is a plugin designed specifically for managing bots in CakePHP, focusing on easy configuration and custom commands. GitHub Repository for TeBo

Step 1: Install the Plugin

Start by installing the TeBo plugin in your CakePHP project. You’ll need Composer, the PHP dependency manager. Run this command in the root of your project: composer require arodu/tebo After the plugin is installed, load it into your application: bin/cake plugin load TeBo That’s it! You’re ready to use the plugin.

Step 2: Set Up the Telegram Token

Every Telegram bot requires an authentication token, which you get by creating a bot on Telegram. Follow these steps:

1. Open Telegram and search for BotFather, the official bot for creating and managing other bots.
2. Send the command /newbot and follow the instructions. BotFather will ask for a bot name and a unique username.
3. When you’re done, BotFather will give you an authentication token that looks like this: 1234567890:ABCDefghIJKlmNoPQRstuVWXyz.

Add this token to your .env file in your project: export TELEGRAM_TOKEN="1234567890:ABCDefghIJKlmNoPQRstuVWXyz"

Step 3: Configure the Webhook

For your bot to receive updates from Telegram, you need to set up a webhook. This tells Telegram where to send messages for your bot in real time. TeBo provides commands to easily manage webhooks from the terminal:

• Get webhook URL: Shows the current webhook URL.
• Set webhook: Links your bot to a URL.
• Remove webhook: Deletes the webhook configuration.
• Get webhook info: Displays connection details.
• Get bot info: Shows basic bot information.

To manage the webhook, use the following command and select option 2 from the menu: bin/cake tebo Or, set the webhook directly with this command: bin/cake tebo webhook -s

Step 4: Create a Custom Command

Now that your bot is set up, let’s create a command to respond with Pokémon information when it receives /pokemon <name>.

4.1 Create the Command Action

In your project’s src/Actions folder, create a file named PokemonAction.php with the following code: <?php declare(strict_types=1); namespace App\TeBo\Action; use Cake\Cache\Cache; use Cake\Http\Client; use Cake\Utility\Hash; use TeBo\Action\Action; use TeBo\Action\Command\MessageCommandTrait; use TeBo\Response\HtmlMessage; use TeBo\Response\TextMessage; class PokemonAction extends Action { use MessageCommandTrait; public function description(): ?string { return __('Get information about a Pokémon'); } public function execute(): void { $pokemonName = $this->getMessageCommand()->getArgument(0); if (!$pokemonName) { $this->getChat()->send(new TextMessage(__('Please provide a Pokémon name.'))); return; } $pokemonData = $this->getPokemonData($pokemonName); if (isset($pokemonData['name'])) { $types = Hash::extract($pokemonData, 'types.{n}.type.name'); $message = [ 'Name: ' . $pokemonData['name'], 'Order: ' . $pokemonData['order'], 'Types: ' . implode(', ', $types), ]; $this->getChat()->send(new HtmlMessage($message)); } else { $this->getChat()->send(new TextMessage(__('Pokémon not found.'))); } } private function getPokemonData($pokemonName) { return Cache::remember('pokemon_' . $pokemonName, function () use ($pokemonName) { $url = "https://pokeapi.co/api/v2/pokemon-form/{$pokemonName}"; $http = new Client(); return $http->get($url)->getJson(); }); } }

4.2 Register the Command

Add this command to your plugin configuration file (config/tebo.php): return [ 'tebo.actions.command' => [ 'pokemon' => \App\TeBo\Action\PokemonAction::class, ], ]; This associates the pokemon command with the action you just created, you can add as many commands as you need.

4.3 Test the Command

Send the command /pokemon pikachu to your bot, and it should respond with details about Pikachu.

4.4 Customize the Response

You can make the response more engaging by including images or additional details: if (isset($pokemonData['name'])) { $sprite = $pokemonData['sprites']['front_default']; $message = new \TeBo\Response\Photo($sprite, [ 'Name: ' . $pokemonData['name'], 'Types: ' . implode(', ', $types), ]); }

Step 5: Deploy the Bot to Production

For production, ensure your server is HTTPS-enabled, as Telegram requires secure webhooks. During development, you can use a tool like ngrok to temporarily expose your local server. Update your .env file with your server’s domain: export WEBHOOK_BASE="mydomain.com" Make sure to test your bot thoroughly in the production environment.

Additional Resources

• TeBo Documentation
• Pokémon API
• Telegram Bot API
• ngrok

Conclusion

And that’s it! You’ve successfully integrated a Telegram bot into your CakePHP application. Your bot can now interact with users and provide useful information, like Pokémon details. TeBo makes it easy to add custom commands and manage user interactions. Feel free to explore and expand your bot with more features! This article is part of the CakeDC Advent Calendar 2024 (December 9th 2024)

This article is part of the CakeDC Advent Calendar 2024 (December 8th 2024) We live without a doubt in a digital era, where everything is now taking place online. From shopping, entertainment, and information to self development, studies in general, and a way of living. As our world moves into this era, testing of these digital products is indeed a need that is sometimes overlooked by the client... but that is why we as IT professionals must emphasize and create awareness. Testing is a crucial part of the software development lifecycle. It involves not only proving that something is working fine now, it is an action that we can do many times accidentaly and as we work more and more on that project. We have to be reviewing constantly. Luckily, with some tools we can now do as much as needed by creating automated tests.

But what should we be testing?

Everything! I know, time is precious, but clients are too. We have to think about a project like it is someone else's baby. They have something in mind and the team delivers it. For starters, when it is the testers' time to work on that project, we carefully inspect all the product. We have to act like a regular user by browsing the page following primarily the main workflows and when they are done, we start writing a document with the procedure of testing a functionality, then, is coding time baby!

Automated testing with cypress: coding time!

Although testers must not per se know any coding language, it is helpful to have a notion of JavaScript (because cypress is a frontend web automation tool) which will help us improve our coding with some logic for testing more complex functionalities. For most test you only use commands from cypress for selecting items and performing actions, but sometimes you will need to add some logic for your test to be more reusable and reliable. If you are new to cypress, check out variables, loops, and functions on JS. Gain a basic knowledge on these topics, and you are set to code test on cypress!

Tip: Something new to me while coding on cypress:

Cypress never stops surprising me. Something that I found very interesting while creating some code is that cypress cannot natively open a new tab or window that usually opens when browsing a webpage. So here is a simple solution for this problem. You can stub the process with this simple function, and it will still do all the process needed on that second page, but you will be kept on the main page. Then, if all is good with the action, your test will succeed cy.window().then((win) => { cy.stub(win, 'open').callsFake((url) => { win.location.href = url; }).as('windowOpen'); });

Useful links:

Here you'll find endless information provided from cypress platform, and you can always check forums when you have a specific question and need some clarity on a topic:

• Why Cypress?
• Stack Overflow
• Detailed Documentation (Google Docs)

This article is part of the CakeDC Advent Calendar 2024 (December 8th 2024)