WARNING! This is for advanced users of the shell, this is NOT a howto or tutorial. The thing is, I googled how to uninstall cpanel and for once in my life I came up empty.. And certainly the cpanel official sites themselves don't provide any instructions other than to say "Dont uninstall it, reinstall your entire operating system without it.".. they sure don't seem confident that they know exactly what their code is doing. Cpanel is great for most people, perfect for many situations, so don't get me wrong.. this is just for fun.

Why Uninstall?

Why? Because I have always built my servers, php installations, perl installs, ruby, iptables, everything from source. I read the INSTALL/README docs, I read the man pages, and I read the info pages as well. I google for configuration advice, I google for tips, and I don't need a web-based perl script messing my stuff up!

The main problems I had with cpanel, which really is a great bit of software for millions of website developers, is that it was incredibly sneaky! I used it for about 6 months and spent that entire time trying to figure out what the heck it was doing. A couple issues that I really disliked, it takes over your bind install, it takes over your apache install, it takes over your php install. And although it does let you configure some things (very few) for custom configurations and the like, I just don't need any of that. By removing the darn thing I am saving GIGS of space on my server, tons of bandwidth, and most importantly to me I am saving CPU and processing time along with RAM and IO speed.

Anything Else

Please.. I could go on for DAYS! Another reason I have wanted to be rid of cpanel is that I like my servers to be as lean and mean as possible. This means I like as few files and processes as possible. There are many benefits to this, like it's much easier for my integrity checking software and rootkit/antivirus software to run and drastically reduces the false positives. And there is that glaring security issue of constantly having cpanel run it's own software to create the WHM/Cpanel web interface, which is accessible online. I haven't researched cpanel security at all, it's possible that it never has security problems that are published, but for me, why take the chance?

Warning - Caution!

The following is just a quick reference of some of the commands I used to uninstall cpanel. This is for advanced users of the shell. If you aren't that advanced and you run a single one of these commands without fully understanding it, you will probably kill your server, probably lose everything on it permanently, probably not have a website or email for weeks.. So backup all your data FIRST. Also, if you aren't 100% sure you won't run into problems, you should contact your hosts technical support - but be prepared for some MAJOR negativity.. cpanel makes things very easy for hosts, and the last thing tech support wants is to fix a server broken by someone who doesn't know what they are doing.

Last Warning!

Unless you understand what theses commands do and the purpose they serve, do not try any of this. These are not the exact commands I used verbatim, they are also not in order. I only put them up here because I was so amazed that google didn't have any uninstall cpanel intructions. Hopefully it's not a conspiracy that will get my site taken down.. ;)

That said and out of the way, it really only took me about 10 minutes to uninstall cpanel completely. But keep in mind I have been closely monitoring and debugging cpanel for 6 months, so I knew what I was doing. And finally, I do apologize for not having better instructions.. but hey, if you don't get this then you have no business trying to figure out how to uninstall cpanel! It's great software and shouldn't be removed unless you are fully capable of managing email/dns/www/ftp and any/all other servers and services on your machine by hand.

Do This First

I have a few drafts I'm working on at the moment with specifics, but for now you will have to figure it out with google. Basically you want to make sure you don't totally knock your machine offline without being able to reconnect. What I do is compile a static version of openssh and a few other security-type shell tools, and configure this binary sshd to run by using inittab, which is the file run by init (pid 1) and makes sure if it dies it is restarted. Here is my /etc/inittab to run the static sshd binary:

hh:12345:respawn:/failover/os/sbin/aassh -D -q -u0 -f /failover/os/etc/aassh

Another trick is to keep a detached screen logged in to root. That way if you mess up your sudoers or securetty or pam or whatever, you can just reattach and fix it.

Finally, you may want to setup your syslog to start earlier than usual, and set up more than normal verbosity. ( I take it to the max ). Then you should setup a 2nd server or machine somewhere to act as a syslog server. Lastly, configure your web server syslog to copy all messages to the remote syslog you set up. I use a reverse ssh tunnel to encrypt the syslog packets, but when I do something serious like reboot after uninstalling cpanel, I prepare for it by adding additional networking routes on my machine to make sure I will get some logs even if sshd cant start or even if my network addresses aren't brought up correctly.

If that sounds easy to you, please continue. If you are saying: Wha??? Continue in read-only mode.

Also, you can't just uninstall cpanel, I have replaced a lot of cpanel already, like building my own bind, apache, php, syslog and making sure they work and aren't being tampered with by cpanel. Basically cpanel runs everything on your server in most cases, so you should prepare by creating your own static software to replace cpanel, and make sure it works.

Find files Accessing /var/cpanel

More than likely these will need to be killed.

lsof +w -Rg -nP +c15 -x f +D /var/cpanel
lsof +w -Rg -nP +c15 -x f +D /usr/local/cpanel

Killing cpanel

Just an example, your machine may have a lot more than these, I have been slowly taking control of my machine back from cpanel for 6 months, so it was easier for me.

for P in tailwatchd queueprocd cpanellogd exim; do pkill -9 $P; done

Commands and Shortcuts

alias NF='nice find $PWD -mount -depth ! -type d'
alias NFF='nice find $PWD -mount -depth ! -type d | xargs -IF87 file F87'
alias NA='nice find $PWD -mount -depth'
alias NAF='nice find $PWD -mount -depth | xargs -IF87 file F87'

Watch out for crontab

An example of the sneakiness (from my POV, from most it's called builtin robustness) that cpanel does is automagically adding crontab entries that make it behave similarly to a self-propagating virus. If you don't disable the cronjobs and kill the right processes within a short period of time, be prepared for a magic resurrection.

Here's my awesome crontab information function, you will need to check every file, it lists the default crons on my box, and every users crontab, but it can't account for other cron software like at and other crons.

function askapache_crontab()
{
  local GG i;
  for i in `getent passwd|cut -d ":" -f1`;
  do
    GG=$(sudo crontab -u $i -l 2>$N6 | tr -s '\n\000' | sed '/^#/d');
    [[ ${#GG} -gt 3 ]] && sleep 1 && echo -e "$i \n\n${GG}"
  done;
   sleep 4;
   ls -aLls1ch --color=always /etc/cron.{hourly,daily,weekly,monthly,d} | sed '/^total/d; /\ drwxr-xr-x/d';
}

grep -ir /var/spool cpan

#6 3 * * * /scripts/upcp
#0 1 * * * /scripts/cpbackup
#0 2 * * * /scripts/mailman_chown_archives
#35 * * * * /usr/bin/test -x /usr/local/cpanel/bin/tail-check && /usr/local/cpanel/bin/tail-check
#11,26,41,56 * * * * /usr/local/cpanel/whostmgr/bin/dnsqueue > /dev/null 2>&1
#30 */4 * * * /usr/bin/test -x /scripts/update_db_cache && /scripts/update_db_cache
#45 */8 * * * /usr/bin/test -x /usr/local/cpanel/bin/optimizefs && /usr/local/cpanel/bin/optimizefs
#*/5 * * * * /usr/local/cpanel/bin/dcpumon >/dev/null 2>&1
#25 1 * * * /usr/local/cpanel/whostmgr/docroot/cgi/cpaddons_report.pl --notify

Delete Crontabs

sudo crontab -u mailman -r

Find INIT scripts with cpanel

This is the main startup script: /usr/local/cpanel/etc/init/startup

I had no idea ruby-on-rails was being controlled by cpanel.. sneaky bugger. You can tell by all of these advanced unix commands just how difficult it would be to uninstall cpanel, its totally like the Alien!

(1:3744)# find . ! -type d -print0|xargs -0 -I'F87' grep -Hi "cpan\|tailwat\|chkser" F87
./fastmail:# Author:       cPanel, Inc. <nick@cpanel.net>
./httpd:        HTTPD=/usr/local/cpanel/bin/chroothttpd
./cpanel:# cpanel8       Start Cpanel Services
./cpanel:# Author:       cPanel, Inc. <nick@cpanel.net>
./cpanel:# description: This is the cpanel webserver and chat.
./cpanel:# processname: cpaneld
./cpanel:# pidfile: /var/run/cpanel.pid
./cpanel:[ -f /usr/local/cpanel/etc/init/startup ] || exit 0
./cpanel:       if [ -f "/var/cpanel/smtpgidonlytweak" ]; then
./cpanel:       echo -n "Starting cPanel services: "
./cpanel:       daemon /usr/local/cpanel/etc/init/startcpsrvd
./cpanel:       echo -n "Starting cPanel brute force detector services: "
./cpanel:       daemon /usr/local/cpanel/etc/init/startcphulkd
./cpanel:    echo -n "Starting cPanel dav services: "
./cpanel:       daemon /usr/local/cpanel/etc/init/startcpdavd
./cpanel:               daemon /usr/local/cpanel/etc/init/startcppop
./cpanel:       echo -n "Starting cPanel Chat services: "
./cpanel:               daemon /usr/local/cpanel/entropychat/entropychat
./cpanel:               daemon /usr/local/cpanel/bin/startmelange
./cpanel:                       /usr/local/cpanel/bin/startinterchange
./cpanel:       echo -n "Starting cPanel ssl services: "
./cpanel:       daemon /usr/local/cpanel/startstunnel
./cpanel:    echo -n "Starting cPanel Queue services: "
./cpanel:       daemon /usr/local/cpanel/etc/init/startqueueprocd
./cpanel:    echo -n "Starting tailwatchd: "
./cpanel:    daemon /usr/local/cpanel/libexec/tailwatchd --start
./cpanel:       echo -n "Starting cPanel Log services: "
./cpanel:       daemon /usr/local/cpanel/cpanellogd
./cpanel:    action "Starting mailman services: " /usr/local/cpanel/etc/init/startmailman
./cpanel:    action "Stopping tailwatchd: " /usr/local/cpanel/libexec/tailwatchd --stop
./cpanel:    action "Stopping cPanel services: " /usr/local/cpanel/etc/init/stopcpsrvd
./cpanel:       action "Stopping cPanel dav services: " /usr/local/cpanel/etc/init/stopcpdavd
./cpanel:       action "Stopping cPanel queue services: " /usr/local/cpanel/etc/init/stopqueueprocd
./cpanel:       action "Stopping cPanel brute force detector services: " /usr/local/cpanel/etc/init/stopcphulkd
./cpanel:               action "Stopping pop3 services: " /usr/local/cpanel/etc/init/stopcppop
./cpanel:       echo -n "Stopping cPanel log services: "
./cpanel:       killproc cpanellogd
./cpanel:       echo -n "Stopping cPanel Chat services: "
./cpanel:       action "Stopping cPanel ssl services: " /usr/local/cpanel/etc/init/stopstunnel
./cpanel:       action "Stopping mailman services: " /usr/local/cpanel/etc/init/stopmailman
./cpanel:       if [ -e "/usr/local/cpanel/3rdparty/mailman/bin/mailmanctl" ]; then
./exim:if [ -e "/etc/chkserv.d" ]; then
./exim:        for file in `ls /etc/chkserv.d`
./exim:            if [ ! -e "/usr/local/cpanel/libexec/tailwatchd" ]; then
./exim:    if [ -x "/usr/local/cpanel/etc/init/startspamd" ]; then
./exim:        /usr/local/cpanel/etc/init/startspamd
./exim:        if [ ! -e "/usr/local/cpanel/libexec/tailwatchd" ]; then
./ror:  /usr/local/cpanel/bin/rormgr --startboot
./ror:  /usr/local/cpanel/bin/rormgr --stopall
./ror:  /usr/local/cpanel/bin/rormgr --stopall
./ror:  /usr/local/cpanel/bin/rormgr --startboot
./ror:  /usr/local/cpanel/bin/rormgr --statusall
./securetmp:# Author:       cPanel, Inc. <copyright@cpanel.net>

Turn off cpanel services

You should remove the below delete command and start by just disabling the inits by turning them off. Then reboot. Then delete. If your machine won't reboot, I told you so, Cpanel told you so, and likely your host told you so.

for S in cpanel ror securetmp fastmail exim; do R=$(command chkconfig --level 123456 $S off ||echo); R=$(command chkconfig --del $S ||echo); done

HTTPD

If you are running chrooted httpd then you'll need to make sure you don't delete your entire webserver on accident. Here's a relevant part from the /etc/init.d/httpd script.

# the path to your httpd binary, including options if necessary
if [ -e "/etc/chroothttpd" ]; then
        HTTPD=/usr/local/cpanel/bin/chroothttpd
else
        HTTPD=/usr/local/apache/bin/httpd
fi

Finding files owned by cpanel

Some super cool bash commands in this post.. let's start with one to find all the files and folders on your machine owned by cpanel. Check your /etc/passwd file for your machines specific usernames and groups. This command saves all the filenames to ~/cpanel-files-backup.txt, which is used by tar next to create a backup of all of them.

{ find / -mount -depth -maxdepth 150 \( -group cpanel -o   -group cpanel-phpmyadmin -o -group cpanel-phppgadmin   -o -group cpanelphpmyadmin   -o -group cpanelphppgadmin   -o -group cpanelhorde   -o -group cpanelroundcube \) -print; find / -mount -depth -maxdepth 150 \( -user cpanel -o   -user cpanel-phpmyadmin -o -user cpanel-phppgadmin   -o -user cpanelphpmyadmin   -o -user cpanelphppgadmin   -o -user cpanelhorde   -o -user cpanelroundcube \) -print; } > ~/cpanel-files-backup.txt

Here's another way to search directories.

 grep --color=always -Hir cpanel /var

Create the Backup

Note that you must have the latest version of tar for this exact command, also you should backup /var/cpanel and /usr/local/cpanel and /etc and heck the whole machine why dontcha!

tar -T ~/cpanel-files-backup.txt -cvz --checkpoint=1000 --checkpoint-action="ttyout=\rHit %s checkpoint #%u" -f /cpanel-files-backup.tgz --totals

Remove Files

Once you do this your upstream without a paddle, you better make sure you know what you're doing with this. This removes all those files.

cat ~/cpanel-files-backup.txt | xargs -I'F87' rm -vfr F87

Additionally you will want to remove /usr/local/cpanel and /var/cpanel - What I always do when running as root is alias my rm command to instead simply move the files to a .trash folder. That way if something goes bork you have a better chance at fixing it.

Find Group-Owned Files

find / -mount -depth -maxdepth 150 \
\(  -group cpanel -o \
  -group cpanel-phpmyadmin \
  -o -group cpanel-phppgadmin \
  -o -group cpanelphpmyadmin \
  -o -group cpanelphppgadmin \
  -o -group mailman \
  -o -group cpanelhorde \
  -o -group cpanelroundcube \
\) -fprintf /root/cpanel-group-files.log '%#8k %#5m %11M %#10u:%-10g %-5U:%-5G %p %f %Y %F\n'

Find User-Owned Files

find / -mount -depth -maxdepth 150 \(
  -user cpanel \
  -o -user cpanel-phpmyadmin \
  -o -user cpanel-phppgadmin \
  -o -user cpanelphpmyadmin \
  -o -user cpanelphppgadmin \
  -o -user mailman \
  -o -user cpanelhorde \
  -o -user cpanelroundcube
\) -fprintf /root/cpanel-users-files.log '%#8k %#5m %11M %#10u:%-10g %-5U:%-5G %p %f %Y %F\n'

       4  0755  drwxr-xr-x     cpanel:cpanel     32002:32004 /var/cpanel/userhomes/cpanel cpanel d reiserfs
       4  0700  drwx------ cpanel-phpmyadmin:cpanel-phpmyadmin 32005:32007 /var/cpanel/userhomes/cpanel-phpmyadmin/tmp tmp d reiserfs
       4  0644  -rw-r--r-- cpanel-phpmyadmin:cpanel-phpmyadmin 32005:32007 /var/cpanel/userhomes/cpanel-phpmyadmin/.cpanel/caches/featurelists/default.cache default.cache f reiserfs
       4  0700  drwx------ cpanel-phpmyadmin:cpanel-phpmyadmin 32005:32007 /var/cpanel/userhomes/cpanel-phpmyadmin/.cpanel/caches/featurelists featurelists d reiserfs
       4  0700  drwx------ cpanel-phpmyadmin:cpanel-phpmyadmin 32005:32007 /var/cpanel/userhomes/cpanel-phpmyadmin/.cpanel/caches caches d reiserfs
       4  0700  drwx------ cpanel-phpmyadmin:cpanel-phpmyadmin 32005:32007 /var/cpanel/userhomes/cpanel-phpmyadmin/.cpanel .cpanel d reiserfs
       4  0750  drwxr-x--- cpanel-phpmyadmin:cpanel-phpmyadmin 32005:32007 /var/cpanel/userhomes/cpanel-phpmyadmin/mail mail d reiserfs
       4  0711  drwx--x--x cpanel-phpmyadmin:cpanel-phpmyadmin 32005:32007 /var/cpanel/userhomes/cpanel-phpmyadmin cpanel-phpmyadmin d reiserfs
       4  0700  drwx------ cpanelphppgadmin:cpanelphppgadmin 32009:32011 /var/cpanel/userhomes/cpanelphppgadmin/sessions sessions d reiserfs
       4  0644  -rw-r--r-- cpanelphppgadmin:cpanelphppgadmin 32009:32011 /var/cpanel/userhomes/cpanelphppgadmin/.cpanel/caches/featurelists/default.cache default.cache f reiserfs
       4  0700  drwx------ cpanelphppgadmin:cpanelphppgadmin 32009:32011 /var/cpanel/userhomes/cpanelphppgadmin/.cpanel/caches/featurelists featurelists d reiserfs
       4  0700  drwx------ cpanelphppgadmin:cpanelphppgadmin 32009:32011 /var/cpanel/userhomes/cpanelphppgadmin/.cpanel/caches caches d reiserfs
       4  0700  drwx------ cpanelphppgadmin:cpanelphppgadmin 32009:32011 /var/cpanel/userhomes/cpanelphppgadmin/.cpanel .cpanel d reiserfs
       4  0750  drwxr-x--- cpanelphppgadmin:cpanelphppgadmin 32009:32011 /var/cpanel/userhomes/cpanelphppgadmin/mail mail d reiserfs
       4  0711  drwx--x--x cpanelphppgadmin:cpanelphppgadmin 32009:32011 /var/cpanel/userhomes/cpanelphppgadmin cpanelphppgadmin d reiserfs
       4  0750  drwxr-x--- cpanelroundcube:cpanelroundcube 514  :514   /var/cpanel/userhomes/cpanelroundcube/mail mail d reiserfs
       4  0700  drwx------ cpanelroundcube:cpanelroundcube 514  :514   /var/cpanel/userhomes/cpanelroundcube/sessions sessions d reiserfs
       4  0711  drwx--x--x cpanelroundcube:cpanelroundcube 514  :514   /var/cpanel/userhomes/cpanelroundcube cpanelroundcube d reiserfs
       4  0644  -rw-r--r--     cpanel:cpanel     32002:32004 /var/cpanel/.cpanel/caches/featurelists/default.cache default.cache f reiserfs
       4  0700  drwx------     cpanel:cpanel     32002:32004 /var/cpanel/.cpanel/caches/featurelists featurelists d reiserfs
       4  0700  drwx------     cpanel:cpanel     32002:32004 /var/cpanel/.cpanel/caches caches d reiserfs
       4  0700  drwx------     cpanel:cpanel     32002:32004 /var/cpanel/.cpanel .cpanel d reiserfs
       4  0700  drwx------ cpanelroundcube:cpanelroundcube 514  :514   /var/cpanel/roundcube/tmp tmp d reiserfs
       4  0700  drwx------ cpanelroundcube:cpanelroundcube 514  :514   /var/cpanel/roundcube/log log d reiserfs

Find Permissions

cat ~/cpanel-group-files.log ~/cpanel-users-files.log |tr -s '\000 \t'|cut -d' ' -f3|sort -u

Find files tailwatchd

(1:3732)# $NICE find ${1:-`pwd`} -mount -name '*tailwatch*'
/usr/local/cpanel/libexec/tailwatchd
/usr/local/cpanel/libexec/tailwatch
/usr/local/cpanel/libexec/tailwatch/tailwatchd
/usr/local/cpanel/etc/init/scripts/freebsd/tailwatchd.sh
/usr/local/cpanel/etc/init/scripts/trustix/tailwatchd
/usr/local/cpanel/etc/init/scripts/centos/tailwatchd
/usr/local/cpanel/etc/init/scripts/suse/tailwatchd
/usr/local/cpanel/etc/init/scripts/caos/tailwatchd
/usr/local/cpanel/etc/init/scripts/whitebox/tailwatchd
/usr/local/cpanel/etc/init/scripts/mandrake/tailwatchd
/usr/local/cpanel/etc/init/scripts/debian/tailwatchd
/usr/local/cpanel/etc/init/scripts/redhat/tailwatchd
/usr/local/cpanel/etc/init/scripts/fedora/tailwatchd
/usr/local/cpanel/etc/init/stoptailwatchd
/usr/local/cpanel/etc/init/starttailwatchd
/usr/local/cpanel/bin/tailwatchd
/usr/local/cpanel/logs/tailwatchd_log
/var/log/cpanel/tailwatchd_log
/var/cpanel/log_rotation/cp_tailwatchd_log.cpanellogd
/var/cpanel/tailwatch.positions
/var/run/tailwatchd.pid
/etc/chkserv.d/tailwatchd
/scripts/restartsrv_tailwatchd

Delete cpanel Users/Groups

for U in cpanel-phpmyadmin cpanel-phppgadmin cpanelphpmyadmin cpanelphppgadmin cpanelhorde cpanelroundcube machbuild; do userdel -fr $U; groupdel $U; done

Check for broken symlinks

find / -mount -depth -type l -print0 |xargs -0 -P0 -I'F87' file -s 'F87' | sed -n '/: broken symbolic link to/p'

Especially check /etc

$ find /etc -mount -depth -type l -print0 |xargs -0 -P0 -I'F87' file -s 'F87' | sed -n '/: broken symbolic link to/p'
/etc/ftpd-rsa.pem                   broken symbolic link to `/var/cpanel/ssl/ftp/ftpd-rsa.pem'
/etc/rc.d/rc1.d/K10chkservd         broken symbolic link to `../init.d/chkservd'
/etc/rc.d/rc1.d/K30antirelayd       broken symbolic link to `../init.d/antirelayd'
/etc/rc.d/rc1.d/K80dcc              broken symbolic link to `../init.d/dcc'
/etc/rc.d/rc3.d/K80dcc              broken symbolic link to `../init.d/dcc'
/etc/rc.d/rc3.d/S80chkservd         broken symbolic link to `../init.d/chkservd'
/etc/rc.d/rc3.d/S80antirelayd       broken symbolic link to `../init.d/antirelayd'
/etc/rc.d/rc6.d/K10chkservd         broken symbolic link to `../init.d/chkservd'
/etc/rc.d/rc6.d/K30antirelayd       broken symbolic link to `../init.d/antirelayd'
/etc/rc.d/rc6.d/K80dcc              broken symbolic link to `../init.d/dcc'
/etc/rc.d/rc5.d/K80dcc              broken symbolic link to `../init.d/dcc'
/etc/rc.d/rc5.d/S80chkservd         broken symbolic link to `../init.d/chkservd'
/etc/rc.d/rc5.d/S80antirelayd       broken symbolic link to `../init.d/antirelayd'
/etc/rc.d/rc2.d/K80dcc              broken symbolic link to `../init.d/dcc'
/etc/rc.d/rc2.d/S80chkservd         broken symbolic link to `../init.d/chkservd'
/etc/rc.d/rc2.d/S80antirelayd       broken symbolic link to `../init.d/antirelayd'
/etc/rc.d/rc4.d/K80dcc              broken symbolic link to `../init.d/dcc'
/etc/rc.d/rc4.d/S80chkservd         broken symbolic link to `../init.d/chkservd'
/etc/rc.d/rc4.d/S80antirelayd       broken symbolic link to `../init.d/antirelayd'
/etc/rc.d/rc0.d/K10chkservd         broken symbolic link to `../init.d/chkservd'
/etc/rc.d/rc0.d/K30antirelayd       broken symbolic link to `../init.d/antirelayd'
/etc/rc.d/rc0.d/K80dcc              broken symbolic link to `../init.d/dcc'
/etc/authlib/authProg               broken symbolic link to `/usr/local/cpanel/bin/courier-auth'

And delete if you are sure

find /etc -mount -depth -type l -print0 |xargs -0 -P0 -I'F87' file -s 'F87' | sed -n '/: broken symbolic link to/p' |cut -d' ' -f1|xargs -I'F87' rm -rvf 'F87'

Reinstall CSF

The only thing I actually used that came with cpanel is the CSF/LFD Firewall package, which is a fantastic piece of software. I had to reinstall this, and to get it working without cpanel add the following line to the csf.conf

GENERIC = "1"

Thats It

Now once you've cleaned up everything, you should try everything conceivable to get an error before rebooting. Like you should start and stop every service in /etc/init.d/, you should use telinit to check various runlevels (which keeps your sshd connection still live). Go all out, should take at least a full hour.

Another thing I like to do is rebuild alot of my source-built software again in case anything got messed up. I upgrade perl from cpanels 5.8.8 to 5.10, which is pretty thorough, and you know, reinstall anything else I think I might need. One of the benefits of compiling your own software is all I have to do is cd to the source directory and type make -B && ( { make test || make check || make checks || make tests; } || echo ) && sudo make install and that's it. The tests/checks are optional of course.

If anyone actually ever reads this and does it, please share your advice here.. everybody knows we need it! Good Luck

HOWTO: Uninstall CPANEL over SSH originally appeared on AskApache.com

Lightning Strikes Twice!

LOL..

3rd Dimension Broken with Bash!

So 3D... it'll hurt you eyes! lol.. Man I am cracking up here. Ha but seriously those really do look 3D for terminal though.. I am actually really impressed. Sweet. Here is the little function I wrote to output that grey marble.

Just a word to the wise, start learning and going over some of these concepts, especially the code used in functions, I will be back in a followup that details actually using this stu.

This function is one of my favorites because it is so fast and useful. Like when designing a 256color prompt.

aa_256 ()
{
    local o x=`tput op` y=`printf %$((${COLUMNS}-6))s`;
    for i in {0..256};
    do
        o=00$i;
        echo -e ${o:${#o}-3:3} `tputm "setaf $i" "setab $i"`${y// /=}$x;
    done
}

Ya this is actually not very helpful or useful, but there you have it.

tputm ()
{
    local a;
    for a in "$@";
    do
        echo -en "${a}\n";
    done | tput -S
}

Some people call this function the grey bringer of death. Not really.

a256 ()
{
    ( x=`tput op` y=`printf %$((${COLUMNS}-6))slocal `;
    for i in {242..232} 232 232;
    do
        echo -en "`tput setaf $i;tput setab $i`${y}${x}`tput op`";
    done )
}

Helpful Ncurses Programs

ALWAYS check out my functions!

This function will print out the terminal, show it's colors, etc.. I have some really nice ones in this article that I use for tmux, screen, and that sort of thing.

c ()
{
    tput clear;
    pm "$TERM: [colors:`tput colors`/`tput pairs`]";
    RC=`tput op` L1=$(L '=' $(( ${COLUMNS} - 25 )));
    for i in `seq ${1:-0} ${2:-16}`;
    do
        o="  $i";
        echo -e " ${o:${#o}-3:3} `tput setaf $i;tput setab $i`${L1}${RC}";
    done
}

Standard Capabilities

X.364 and iBCS2

• \033c - RIS - full reset
• \0337 - SC - save cursor
• \0338 - RC - restore cursor
• \033[r - RSR - not an X.364 mnemonic
• \033[m - SGR0 - not an X.364 mnemonic
• \033[2J - ED2 - clear page

Specified by ISO 2022

• \033(0 - ISO DEC G0 - enable DEC graphics for G0
• \033(A - ISO UK G0 - enable UK chars for G0
• \033(B - ISO US G0 - enable US chars for G0
• \033)0 - ISO DEC G1 - enable DEC graphics for G1
• \033)A - ISO UK G1 - enable UK chars for G1
• \033)B - ISO US G1 - enable US chars for G1

ISO 2022 charset switching:

• ISO/IEC 2022:1994
• "Character code structure and extension techniques"
• ECMA-035
• code structure
  • =00..=1F C0 set of control characters
  • =20..=7F G0 set of 94 or 96 graphic characters
  • =80..=9F C1 set of control characters "C1 controls"
  • =A0..=FF G1 set of 94 or 96 graphic characters
  • ... G2 and G3
• registration authority
  • ISO/IEC 2375:1985 Procedure for registration of escape sequences
  • "ECMA registry"
  • ISO-IR registration number
  • ftp://dkuug.dk/i18n/iso2375reg.txt
  • Internaltional register of coded character sets to be used with escape sequences
  • ISO/IEC JTC1/SC2/WG3
• ISO-2022 terminals from Siemens
• recode iso-2022..utf-8 not yet implemented
• CJK charsets
  • ISO-2022-JP
  • ISO-2022-JP-2
  • ISO-2022-KR
  • ISO-2022-CN
  • ISO-2022-CN-EXT

DEC private controls widely supported by emulators

• \033= - DECPAM - application keypad mode
• \033> - DECPNM - normal keypad mode
• \033< - DECANSI - enter ANSI mode
• \033[!p - DECSTR - soft reset
• \033 F - S7C1T - 7-bit controls

ECMA modes

ISO 2022

• 2 - AM - keyboard action mode
• 4 - IRM - insert/replace mode
• 12 - SRM - send/receive mode
• 20 - LNM - linefeed mode

DEC modes

• 1 - CKM - application cursor keys
• 2 - ANM - set VT52 mode
• 3 - COLM - 132-column mode
• 4 - SCLM - smooth scroll
• 5 - SCNM - reverse video mode
• 6 - OM - origin mode
• 7 - AWM - wraparound mode
• 8 - ARM - auto-repeat mode

ECMA attribute sequences

• 0 - NORMAL - normal
• 1 - +BOLD - bold on
• 2 - +DIM - dim on
• 3 - +ITALIC - italic on
• 4 - +UNDERLINE - underline on
• 5 - +BLINK - blink on
• 6 - +FASTBLINK - fastblink on
• 7 - +REVERSE - reverse on
• 8 - +INVISIBLE - invisible on
• 9 - +DELETED - deleted on
• 10 - MAIN-FONT - select primary font
• 11 - ALT-FONT-1 - select alternate font 1
• 12 - ALT-FONT-2 - select alternate font 2
• 13 - ALT-FONT-3 - select alternate font 3
• 14 - ALT-FONT-4 - select alternate font 4
• 15 - ALT-FONT-5 - select alternate font 5
• 16 - ALT-FONT-6 - select alternate font 6
• 17 - ALT-FONT-7 - select alternate font 7
• 18 - ALT-FONT-1 - select alternate font 1
• 19 - ALT-FONT-1 - select alternate font 1
• 20 - FRAKTUR - Fraktur font
• 21 - DOUBLEUNDER - double underline
• 22 - -DIM - dim off
• 23 - -ITALIC - italic off
• 24 - -UNDERLINE - underline off
• 25 - -BLINK - blink off
• 26 - -FASTBLINK - fastblink off
• 27 - -REVERSE - reverse off
• 28 - -INVISIBLE - invisible off
• 29 - -DELETED - deleted off

Init strings

Cap strings

Variable and Function Index

For stty

• BC: tgoto
• ospeed: Output Padding
• PC: Output Padding
• tgetent: Find
• tgetflag: Interrogate
• tgetnum: Interrogate
• tgetstr: Interrogate
• tgoto: tgoto
• tparam: tparam
• tputs: Output Padding
• UP: tgoto

Summary of Capability Names

Here are all the terminal capability names in alphabetical order with a brief description of each. For cross references to their definitions, see the index of capability names.

Variable and Function Index

• BC: tgoto
• ospeed: Output Padding
• PC: Output Padding
• tgetent: Find
• tgetflag: Interrogate
• tgetnum: Interrogate
• tgetstr: Interrogate
• tgoto: tgoto
• tparam: tparam
• tputs: Output Padding
• UP: tgoto

• ae: Standout
• AL: Insdel Line
• al: Insdel Line
• am: Wrapping
• as: Standout
• bc: Cursor Motion
• bl: Bell
• bs: Cursor Motion
• bt: Cursor Motion
• bw: Cursor Motion
• CC: Basic
• cd: Clearing
• ce: Clearing
• ch: Cursor Motion
• cl: Clearing
• CM: Cursor Motion
• cm: Cursor Motion
• co: Screen Size
• cr: Cursor Motion
• cS: Scrolling
• cs: Scrolling
• ct: Initialization
• cv: Cursor Motion
• da: Scrolling
• dB: Pad Specs
• db: Scrolling
• dC: Pad Specs
• DC: Insdel Char
• dc: Insdel Char
• dF: Pad Specs
• DL: Insdel Line
• dl: Insdel Line
• dm: Insdel Char
• dN: Pad Specs
• DO: Cursor Motion
• do: Cursor Motion
• ds: Status Line
• dT: Pad Specs
• ec: Clearing
• ed: Insdel Char
• ei: Insdel Char
• eo: Basic
• es: Status Line
• ff: Cursor Motion
• fs: Status Line
• gn: Basic
• hc: Basic
• hd: Half-Line
• ho: Cursor Motion
• hs: Status Line
• hu: Half-Line
• hz: Basic
• i1: Initialization
• i3: Initialization
• IC: Insdel Char
• ic: Insdel Char
• if: Initialization
• im: Insdel Char
• in: Insdel Char
• ip: Insdel Char
• is: Initialization
• it: Initialization
• K1...K5: Keypad
• k1...k9: Keypad
• kA...kT: Keypad
• ka...ku: Keypad
• km: Meta Key
• l0...l9: Keypad
• LE: Cursor Motion
• le: Cursor Motion
• li: Screen Size
• ll: Cursor Motion
• lm: Scrolling
• LP: Wrapping
• mb: Standout
• md: Standout
• me: Standout
• mh: Standout
• mi: Insdel Char
• mk: Standout
• mm: Meta Key
• mo: Meta Key
• mp: Standout
• mr: Standout
• ms: Underlining
• ms: Standout
• nc: Cursor Motion
• nd: Cursor Motion
• NF: Initialization
• nl: Cursor Motion
• ns: Scrolling
• nw: Cursor Motion
• os: Basic
• pb: Pad Specs
• pc: Pad Specs
• pf: Printer
• pO: Printer
• po: Printer
• ps: Printer
• rc: Cursor Motion
• RI: Cursor Motion
• rp: Basic
• rs: Initialization
• sa: Standout
• sc: Cursor Motion
• se: Standout
• SF: Scrolling
• sf: Scrolling
• sg: Standout
• so: Standout
• SR: Scrolling
• sr: Scrolling
• st: Initialization
• ta: Cursor Motion
• te: Initialization
• ti: Initialization
• ts: Status Line
• uc: Underlining
• ue: Underlining
• ug: Underlining
• ul: Underlining
• UP: Cursor Motion
• up: Cursor Motion
• us: Underlining
• vb: Bell
• ve: Cursor Visibility
• vi: Cursor Visibility
• vs: Cursor Visibility
• wi: Windows
• ws: Status Line
• xb: Basic
• xn: Wrapping
• xs: Standout
• xt: Standout
• xt: Cursor Motion

• Basic: Basic characteristics.
• Screen Size: Screen size, and what happens when it changes.
• Cursor Motion: Various ways to move the cursor.
• Wrapping: What happens if you write a character in the last column.
• Scrolling: Pushing text up and down on the screen.
• Windows: Limiting the part of the window that output affects.
• Clearing: Erasing one or many lines.
• Insdel Line: Making new blank lines in mid-screen; deleting lines.
• Insdel Char: Inserting and deleting characters within a line.
• Standout: Highlighting some of the text.
• Underlining: Underlining some of the text.
• Cursor Visibility: Making the cursor more or less easy to spot.
• Bell: Attracts user's attention; not localized on the screen.
• Keypad: Recognizing when function keys or arrows are typed.
• Meta Key: META acts like an extra shift key.
• Initialization: Commands used to initialize or reset the terminal.
• Pad Specs: Info for the kernel on how much padding is needed.
• Status Line: A status line displays background information.
• Half-Line: Moving by half-lines, for superscripts and subscripts.
• Printer: Controlling auxiliary printers of display terminals.

Translated Term Capabilities

This is helpful so you can understand what a term cap does, by looking at the long name.

List of All Terminals

You can view this list with the following command:

$ toe -a|sort -d

VT100 keypad Diagram

VT100 LINK

Here's a diagram of the VT100 keypad keys with their bindings. The top line is the name of the key (some DEC keyboards have the keys labelled somewhat differently, like GOLD instead of PF1, but this is the most "official" name). The second line is the escape sequence it generates in Application Keypad mode (where "$" means the ESC character). The third line contains two items, first the mapping of the key in terminfo, and then in termcap.

   _______________________________________
  |   PF1   |   PF2   |   PF3   |   PF4   |
  |   $OP   |   $OQ   |   $OR   |   $OS   |
  |_kf1__k1_|_kf2__k2_|_kf3__k3_|_kf4__k4_|
  |    7         8         9         -    |
  |   $Ow   |   $Ox   |   $Oy   |   $Om   |
  |_kf9__k9_|_kf10_k;_|_kf0__k0_|_________|
  |    4    |    5    |    6    |    ,    |
  |   $Ot   |   $Ou   |   $Ov   |   $Ol   |
  |_kf5__k5_|_kf6__k6_|_kf7__k7_|_kf8__k8_|
  |    1    |    2    |    3    |         |
  |   $Oq   |   $Or   |   $Os   |  enter  |
  |_ka1__K1_|_kb2__K2_|_ka3__K3_|  $OM    |
  |         0         |   .     |         |
  |        $Op        |  $On    |         |
  |___kc1_______K4____|_kc3__K5_|_kent_@8_|

A better adaptation to modern keyboards such as the PC's, which have a dozen function keys and the keypad 2,4,6,8 keys are labeled with arrows keys, is to use the 5-key arrangement to model the arrow keys as suggested in the terminfo guidelines:

   _______________________________________
  |   PF1   |   PF2   |   PF3   |   PF4   |
  |   $OP   |   $OQ   |   $OR   |   $OS   |
  |_kf1__k1_|_kf2__k2_|_kf3__k3_|_kf4__k4_|
  |    7         8         9         -    |
  |   $Ow   |   $Ox   |   $Oy   |   $Om   |
  |_ka1__K1_|_________|_ka3__K3_|_________|
  |    4    |    5    |    6    |    ,    |
  |   $Ot   |   $Ou   |   $Ov   |   $Ol   |
  |_________|_kb2__K2_|_________|_________|
  |    1    |    2    |    3    |         |
  |   $Oq   |   $Or   |   $Os   |  enter  |
  |_kc1__K4_|_________|_kc3__K5_|  $OM    |
  |         0         |   .     |         |
  |        $Op        |  $On    |         |
  |___________________|_________|_kent_@8_|

SGR parameter values

Sequence     Sequence                             Parameter   or
Mnemonic     Name              Sequence           Value      Mode   terminfo
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
APC  Applicatn Program Command \E _                -         Delim  -
BEL  Bell *                    ^G                  -         -      bel
BPH  Break Permitted Here *    \E B                -         *      -
BS   Backpace *                ^H                  -         EF     -
CAN  Cancel *                  ^X                  -         -      -   (A)
CBT  Cursor Backward Tab       \E [ Pn Z           1         eF     cbt
CCH  Cancel Previous Character \E T                -         -      -
CHA  Cursor Horizntal Absolute \E [ Pn G           1         eF     hpa (B)
CHT  Cursor Horizontal Tab     \E [ Pn I           1         eF     tab (C)
CMD  Coding Method Delimiter * \E
CNL  Cursor Next Line          \E [ Pn E           1         eF     nel (D)
CPL  Cursor Preceding Line     \E [ Pn F           1         eF     -
CPR  Cursor Position Report    \E [ Pn ; Pn R      1, 1      -      -   (E)
CSI  Control Sequence Intro    \E [                -         Intro  -
CTC  Cursor Tabulation Control \E [ Ps W           0         eF     -   (F)
CUB  Cursor Backward           \E [ Pn D           1         eF     cub
CUD  Cursor Down               \E [ Pn B           1         eF     cud
CUF  Cursor Forward            \E [ Pn C           1         eF     cuf
CUP  Cursor Position           \E [ Pn ; Pn H      1, 1      eF     cup (G)
CUU  Cursor Up                 \E [ Pn A           1         eF     cuu
CVT  Cursor Vertical Tab       \E [ Pn Y           -         eF     -   (H)
DA   Device Attributes         \E [ Pn c           0         -      -
DAQ  Define Area Qualification \E [ Ps o           0         -      -
DCH  Delete Character          \E [ Pn P           1         eF     dch
DCS  Device Control String     \E P                -         Delim  -
DL   Delete Line               \E [ Pn M           1         eF     dl
DLE  Data Link Escape *        ^P                  -         -      -
DMI  Disable Manual Input      \E \                -         Fs     -
DSR  Device Status Report      \E [ Ps n           0         -      -   (I)
DTA  Dimension Text Area *     \E [ Pn ; Pn SPC T  -         PC     -
EA   Erase in Area             \E [ Ps O           0         eF     -   (J)
ECH  Erase Character           \E [ Pn X           1         eF     ech
ED   Erase in Display          \E [ Ps J           0         eF     ed  (J)
EF   Erase in Field            \E [ Ps N           0         eF     -
EL   Erase in Line             \E [ Ps K           0         eF     el  (J)
EM   End of Medium *           ^Y                  -         -      -
EMI  Enable Manual Input       \E b                          Fs     -
ENQ  Enquire                   ^E                  -         -      -
EOT  End Of Transmission       ^D                  -         *      -
EPA  End of Protected Area     \E W                -         -      -   (K)
ESA  End of Selected Area      \E G                -         -      -
ESC  Escape                    ^[                  -         -      -
ETB  End Transmission Block    ^W                  -         -      -
ETX  End of Text               ^C                  -         -      -
FF   Form Feed                 ^L                  -         -      -
FNK  Function Key *            \E [ Pn SPC W       -         -      -
GCC  Graphic Char Combination* \E [ Pn ; Pn SPC B  -         -      -
FNT  Font Selection            \E [ Pn ; Pn SPC D  0, 0      FE     -
GSM  Graphic Size Modify       \E [ Pn ; Pn SPC B  100, 100  FE     -   (L)
GSS  Graphic Size Selection    \E [ Pn SPC C       none      FE     -
HPA  Horz Position Absolute    \E [ Pn `           1         FE     -   (B)
HPB  Char Position Backward    \E [ j              1         FE     -
HPR  Horz Position Relative    \E [ Pn a           1         FE     -   (M)
HT   Horizontal Tab *          ^I                  -         FE     -   (N)
HTJ  Horz Tab w/Justification  \E I                -         FE     -
HTS  Horizontal Tab Set        \E H                -         FE     hts
HVP  Horz & Vertical Position  \E [ Pn ; Pn f      1, 1      FE     -   (G)
ICH  Insert Character          \E [ Pn @           1         eF     ich
IDCS ID Device Control String  \E [ SPC O          -         *      -
IGS  ID Graphic Subrepertoire  \E [ SPC M          -         *      -
IL   Insert Line               \E [ Pn L           1         eF     il
IND  Index                     \E D                -         FE     -
INT  Interrupt                 \E a                -         Fs     -
JFY  Justify                   \E [ Ps SPC F       0         FE     -
IS1  Info Separator #1 *       ^_                  -         *      -
IS2  Info Separator #1 *       ^^                  -         *      -
IS3  Info Separator #1 *       ^]                  -         *      -
IS4  Info Separator #1 *       ^\                  -         *      -
LF   Line Feed                 ^J                  -         -      -
LS1R Locking Shift Right 1 *   \E ~                -         -      -
LS2  Locking Shift 2 *         \E n                -         -      -
LS2R Locking Shift Right 2 *   \E }                -         -      -
LS3  Locking Shift 3 *         \E o                -         -      -
LS3R Locking Shift Right 3 *   \E |                -         -      -
MC   Media Copy                \E [ Ps i           0         -      -   (S)
MW   Message Waiting           \E U                -         -      -
NAK  Negative Acknowledge *    ^U                  -         *      -
NBH  No Break Here *           \E C                -         -      -
NEL  Next Line                 \E E                -         FE     nel (D)
NP   Next Page                 \E [ Pn U           1         eF     -
NUL  Null *                    ^@                  -         -      -
OSC  Operating System Command  \E ]                -         Delim  -
PEC  Pres. Expand/Contract *   \E Pn SPC Z         0         -      -
PFS  Page Format Selection *   \E Pn SPC J         0         -      -
PLD  Partial Line Down         \E K                -         FE     -   (T)
PLU  Partial Line Up           \E L                -         FE     -   (U)
PM   Privacy Message           \E ^                -         Delim  -
PP   Preceding Page            \E [ Pn V           1         eF     -
PPA  Page Position Absolute *  \E [ Pn SPC P       1         FE     -
PPB  Page Position Backward *  \E [ Pn SPC R       1         FE     -
PPR  Page Position Forward *   \E [ Pn SPC Q       1         FE     -
PTX  Parallel Texts *          \E [ \              -         -      -
PU1  Private Use 1             \E Q                -         -      -
PU2  Private Use 2             \E R                -         -      -
QUAD Typographic Quadding      \E [ Ps SPC H       0         FE     -
REP  Repeat Char or Control    \E [ Pn b           1         -      rep
RI   Reverse Index             \E M                -         FE     -   (V)
RIS  Reset to Initial State    \E c                -         Fs     -
RM   Reset Mode *              \E [ Ps l           -         -      -   (W)
SACS Set Add. Char. Sep. *     \E [ Pn SPC /       0         -      -
SAPV Sel. Alt. Present. Var. * \E [ Ps SPC ]       0         -      -   (X)
SCI  Single-Char Introducer    \E Z                -         -      -
SCO  Sel. Char. Orientation *  \E [ Pn ; Pn SPC k  -         -      -
SCS  Set Char. Spacing *       \E [ Pn SPC g       -         -      -
SD   Scroll Down               \E [ Pn T           1         eF     rin
SDS  Start Directed String *   \E [ Pn ]           1         -      -
SEE  Select Editing Extent     \E [ Ps Q           0         -      -   (Y)
SEF  Sheet Eject & Feed *  \E [ Ps ; Ps SPC Y  0,0       -      -
SGR  Select Graphic Rendition  \E [ Ps m           0         FE     sgr (O)
SHS  Select Char. Spacing *    \E [ Ps SPC K       0         -      -
SI   Shift In                  ^O                  -         -      -   (P)
SIMD Sel. Imp. Move Direct. *  \E [ Ps ^           -         -      -
SL   Scroll Left               \E [ Pn SPC @       1         eF     -
SLH  Set Line Home *           \E [ Pn SPC U       -         -      -
SLL  Set Line Limit *          \E [ Pn SPC V       -         -      -
SLS  Set Line Spacing *        \E [ Pn SPC h       -         -      -
SM   Select Mode               \E [ Ps h           none      -      -   (W)
SO   Shift Out                 ^N                  -         -      -   (Q)
SOH  Start Of Heading *        ^A                  -         -      -
SOS  Start of String *         \E X                -         -      -
SPA  Start of Protected Area   \E V                -         -      -   (Z)
SPD  Select Pres. Direction *  \E [ Ps ; Ps SPC S  0,0       -      -
SPH  Set Page Home *           \E [ Ps SPC G       -         -      -
SPI  Spacing Increment         \E [ Pn ; Pn SPC G  none      FE     -
SPL  Set Page Limit *          \E [ Ps SPC j       -         -      -
SPQR Set Pr. Qual. & Rapid. *  \E [ Ps SPC X       0         -      -
SR   Scroll Right              \E [ Pn SPC A       1         eF     -
SRCS Set Reduced Char. Sep. *  \E [ Pn SPC f       0         -      -
SRS  Start Reversed String *   \E [ Ps [           0         -      -
SSA  Start of Selected Area    \E F                -         -      -
SSU  Select Size Unit *        \E [ Pn SPC I       0         -      -
SSW  Set Space Width *         \E [ Pn SPC [       none      -      -
SS2  Single Shift 2 (G2 set)   \E N                -         Intro  -
SS3  Single Shift 3 (G3 set)   \E O                -         Intro  -
ST   String Terminator         \E \                -         Delim  -
STAB Selective Tabulation *    \E [ Pn SPC ^       -         -      -
STS  Set Transmit State        \E S                -         -      -
STX  Start pf Text *           ^B                  -         -      -
SU   Scroll Up                 \E [ Pn S           1         eF     indn
SUB  Substitute *              ^Z                  -         -      -
SVS  Select Line Spacing *     \E [ Pn SPC \       1         -      -
SYN  Synchronous Idle *        ^F                  -         -      -
TAC  Tabul. Aligned Centered * \E [ Pn SPC b       -         -      -
TALE Tabul. Al. Leading Edge * \E [ Pn SPC a       -         -      -
TATE Tabul. Al. Trailing Edge* \E [ Pn SPC `       -         -      -
TBC  Tab Clear                 \E [ Ps g           0         FE     tbc
TCC  Tabul. Centered on Char * \E [ Pn SPC c       -         -      -
TSR  Tabulation Stop Remove  * \E [ Pn SPC d       -         FE     -
TSS  Thin Space Specification  \E [ Pn SC E        none      FE     -
VPA  Vert. Position Absolute   \E [ Pn d           1         FE     vpa
VPB  Line Position Backward *  \E [ Pn k           1         FE     -
VPR  Vert. Position Relative   \E [ Pn e           1         FE     -   (R)
VPR  Vert. Position Relative   \E [ Pn e           1         FE     -   (R)
VT   Vertical Tabulation *     ^K                  -         FE     -
VTS  Vertical Tabulation Set   \E J                -         FE     -

Basic Characteristics

This section documents the capabilities that describe the basic and nature of the terminal, and also those that are relevant to the output of graphic characters.

7bit vs. 8bit

These recommendations are optional. IBCS2 allows the leading escape to # be either the 7-bit \E[ or 8-bit \0233 introducer, in accordance with # the ANSI X.364/ISO 6429/ECMA-48 standard.

1.6.1 Describing the Encoding

For example, the cm string for a standard ANSI terminal is written as \E[%i%d;%dH. (\E stands for .) cm by convention always requires two parameters, the vertical and horizontal goal positions, so this string specifies the encoding of two parameters. Here %i increments the two values supplied, and each %d encodes one of the values in decimal. If the cursor position values 20,58 are encoded with this string, the result is \E[21;59H.

First, here are the %-sequences that generate output. Except for %%, each of them encodes one parameter and advances the pointer to the following parameter.

• %% Output a single %. This is the only way to represent a literal % in a terminal command with parameters. %% does not use up a parameter.
• %d As in printf, output the next parameter in decimal.
• %2 Like %02d in printf: output the next parameter in decimal, and always use at least two digits.
• %3 Like %03d in printf: output the next parameter in decimal, and always use at least three digits. Note that %4 and so on are _not_ defined.
• %. Output the next parameter as a single character whose ASCII code is the parameter value. Like %c in printf.
• %+CHAR Add the next parameter to the character CHAR, and output the resulting character. For example, %+ represents 0 as a space, 1 as !, etc.

The following %-sequences specify alteration of the parameters (their values, or their order) rather than encoding a parameter for output. They generate no output; they are used only for their side effects on the parameters. Also, they do not advance the "next parameter" pointer except as explicitly stated. Only %i, %r and %> are defined in standard Unix termcap. The others are GNU extensions.

• %i Increment the next two parameters. This is used for terminals that expect cursor positions in origin 1. For example, %i%d,%d would output two parameters with 1 for 0, 2 for 1, etc.
• %r Interchange the next two parameters. This is used for terminals whose cursor positioning command expects the horizontal position first.
• %s Skip the next parameter. Do not output anything.
• %b Back up one parameter. The last parameter used will become once again the next parameter to be output, and the next output command will use it. Using %b more than once, you can back up any number of parameters, and you can refer to each parameter any number of times.
• %>C1C2 Conditionally increment the next parameter. Here C1 and C2 are characters which stand for their ASCII codes as numbers. If the next parameter is greater than the ASCII code of C1, the ASCII code of C2 is added to it.
• %a OP TYPE POS Perform arithmetic on the next parameter, do not use it up, and do not output anything. Here OP specifies the arithmetic operation, while TYPE and POS together specify the other operand.

Spaces are used above to separate the operands for clarity; the spaces don't appear in the data base, where this sequence is exactly five characters long. The character OP says what kind of arithmetic operation to perform. It can be any of these characters:

• = - assign a value to the next parameter, ignoring its old value. The new value comes from the other operand.
• + - add the other operand to the next parameter.
• - - subtract the other operand from the next parameter.
• * - multiply the next parameter by the other operand.
• / - divide the next parameter by the other operand.

The "other operand" may be another parameter's value or a constant; the character TYPE says which. It can be:

• p - Use another parameter. The character POS says which parameter to use. Subtract 64 from its ASCII code to get the position of the desired parameter relative to this one. Thus, the character A as POS means the parameter after the next one; the character ? means the parameter before the next one.
• c - Use a constant value. The character POS specifies the value of the constant. The 0200 bit is cleared out, so that 0200 can be used to represent zero.

The following %-sequences are special purpose hacks to compensate for the weird designs of obscure terminals. They modify the next parameter or the next two parameters but do not generate output and do not use up any parameters. %m is a GNU extension; the others are defined in standard Unix termcap.

• %n - Exclusive-or the next parameter with 0140, and likewise the parameter after next.
• %m - Complement all the bits of the next parameter and the parameter after next.
• %B - Encode the next parameter in BCD. It alters the value of the parameter by adding six times the quotient of the parameter by ten. Here is a C statement that shows how the new value is computed: PARM = (PARM / 10) * 16 + PARM % 10;
• %D - Transform the next parameter as needed by Delta Data terminals. This involves subtracting twice the remainder of the parameter by 16. PARM -= 2 * (PARM % 16);

Terminal Type Name Conventions

Here is a list of standard suffixes and their conventional meanings:

• -w - Short for "wide". This is a mode that gives the terminal more columns than usual. This is normally a user option.
• -am - "Automatic margins". This is an alternate description for use when the terminal's margin-wrap switch is on; it contains the am flag. The implication is that normally the switch is off and the usual description for the terminal says that the switch is off.
• -nam - "No automatic margins". The opposite of -am, this names an alternative description which lacks the am flag. This implies that the terminal is normally operated with the margin-wrap switch turned on, and the normal description of the terminal says so.
• -na - "No arrows". This terminal description initializes the terminal to keep its arrow keys in local mode. This is a user option.
• -rv - "Reverse video". This terminal description causes text output for normal video to appear as reverse, and text output for reverse video to come out as normal. Often this description differs from the usual one by interchanging the two strings which turn reverse video on and off.

This is a user option; you can choose either the "reverse video" variant terminal type or the normal terminal type, and termcap will obey.

• -s - "Status". Says to enable use of a status line which ordinary output does not touch (*note Status Line::).

Some terminals have a special line that is used only as a status line. For these terminals, there is no need for an -s variant; the status line commands should be defined by default. On other terminals, enabling a status line means removing one screen line from ordinary use and reducing the effective screen height. For these terminals, the user can choose the -s variant type to request use of a status line.

• -NLINES - Says to operate with NLINES lines on the screen, for terminals such as the Ambassador which provide this as an option. Normally this is a user option; by choosing the terminal type, you control how many lines termcap will use.
• -NPAGESp - Says that the terminal has NPAGES pages worth of screen memory, for terminals where this is a hardware option.
• -unk - Says that description is not for direct use, but only for reference in tc capabilities. Such a description is a kind of subroutine, because it describes the common characteristics of several variant descriptions that would use other suffixes in place of -unk.

MS-DOS ANSI.SYS

Here is a description of the color and attribute controls supported in the ANSI.SYS driver under MS-DOS. Most console drivers and ANSI terminal emulators for Intel boxes obey these. They are a proper subset of the ECMA-48 escapes.

Bright black becomes gray, bright brown becomes yellow. These coincide with the prescriptions of the ISO 6429/ECMA-48 standard. * If the 5 attribute is on and you set a background color (40-47) it is supposed to enable bright background.

0        all attributes off
1        foreground bright
4        underscore on
5        blink on/background bright (not reliable with brown)
7        reverse-video
8        set blank (non-display)
10       set primary font
11       set first alternate font (on PCs, display ROM characters 1-31)
12       set second alternate font (on PCs, display IBM high-half chars)
3n       set foreground color       / 0=black, 1=red,     2=green, 3=brown,
4n       set background color       \ 4=blue,  5=magenta, 6=cyan,  7=white

STTY

Stty Control Settings

Stty Input settings

Stty Output settings

These arguments specify output-related operations.

Stty Local settings

Stty Combination settings

cread -ignbrk brkint -inlcr -igncr icrnl -ixoff -iuclc -ixany imaxbel opost -olcuc -ocrnl onlcr -onocr -onlret -ofill -ofdel nl0 cr0 tab0 bs0 vt0 ff0 isig icanon iexten echo echoe echok -echonl -noflsh -xcase -tostop -echoprt echoctl echoke

-ignbrk -brkint -ignpar -parmrk -inpck -istrip -inlcr -igncr -icrnl -ixon -ixoff -iuclc -ixany -imaxbel -opost -isig -icanon -xcase min 1 time 0

Special characters

The special characters' default values vary from system to system. They are set with the syntax name value, where the names are listed below and the value can be given either literally, in hat notation (^C), or as an integer which may start with 0x to indicate hexadecimal, 0 to indicate octal, or any other digit to indicate decimal.

For GNU stty, giving a value of ^- or undef disables that special character. (This is incompatible with Ultrix stty, which uses a value of u to disable a special character. GNU stty treats a value u like any other, namely to set that special character to .)

Special settings

• min N - Set the minimum number of characters that will satisfy a read until the time value has expired, when -icanon is set.
• time N - Set the number of tenths of a second before reads time out if the minimum number of characters have not been read, when -icanon is set.
• ispeed N - Set the input speed to N.
• ospeed N - Set the output speed to N.
• rows N - Tell the tty kernel driver that the terminal has N rows. Non-POSIX.
• cols N, columns N - Tell the kernel that the terminal has N columns. Non-POSIX.
• size - Print the number of rows and columns that the kernel thinks the terminal has. (Systems that don't support rows and columns in the kernel typically use the environment variables LINES and COLUMNS instead; however, GNU stty does not know anything about them.) Non-POSIX.
• line N - Use line discipline N. Non-POSIX.
• speed - Print the terminal speed.
• N - Set the input and output speeds to N. N can be one of: 0 50 75 110 134 134.5 150 200 300 600 1200 1800 2400 4800 9600 19200 38400 exta extb. exta is the same as 19200; extb is the same as 38400. 0 hangs up the line if -clocal is set.

Color Terminals

color256 ()
{
    local L=$(sed 's/[0-9]//g; s/./#/g' <<<`seq -s+0 $(($COLUMNS - 10))`);
    for i in `seq 0 $(tput colors)`;
    do printf " %.3d `tput setab $i`${L}${R} %.3d `tput setab 0;tput setaf 7`\n" $i $i | tr '#' ' ';
    done
}

for F in `find ~/.terminfo/ -type f | sed 's/^.*\///' | xargs -P0 -I'TT' sh -c 'echo "$(tput -T TT colors): TT"'|sed '/^-/d'| grep ^16:|cut -d: -f2`; do
echo -e "\n\n";
pm $F; export TERM=$F; tput -T $F initc; color256; done

find ~/.terminfo/ -type f | sed 's/^.*\///' | xargs -I'TT' sh -c 'echo "$(tput -T TT colors): TT"'|sed '/^-/d'

Terminals with 16 Colors

• aixterm-16color
• amiga-vnc
• hp2397
• hp2397a
• hp+color
• ibm+16color
• konsole-16color
• nsterm-16color
• nsterm-7-c
• nsterm-7-c-s
• nsterm-acs-c
• nsterm-acs-c-s
• nsterm-c
• nsterm+c
• nsterm-c-7
• nsterm-c-acs
• nsterm-c-s
• nsterm-c-s-7
• nsterm-c-s-acs
• rxvt-16color
• screen-16color
• screen-16color-bce
• screen-16color-bce-s
• screen-16color-s
• xterm-16color

Terminals with 52 Colors

• d430c-dg-ccc
• d430c-unix-25-ccc
• d430c-unix-ccc
• d430c-unix-s-ccc
• d430c-unix-sr-ccc
• d430c-unix-w-ccc
• d430-dg-ccc
• d430-unix-25-ccc
• d430-unix-ccc
• d430-unix-s-ccc
• d430-unix-sr-ccc
• d430-unix-w-ccc
• dg+ccc
• dgunix+ccc

Terminals with 64 Colors

• hpterm-color
• wy370
• wy370-101k
• wy370-105k
• wy370-EPC
• wy370-nk
• wy370-rv
• wy370-vb
• wy370-w
• wy370-wvb
• wyse370
• Eterm-88color
• rxvt-88color
• xterm-88color
• xterm+88color

Terminals with 256 colors

• Eterm-256color
• gnome-256color
• konsole-256color
• putty-256color
• rxvt-256color
• screen-256color
• screen-256color-bce
• screen-256color-bce-s
• screen-256color-s
• xterm-256color
• xterm+256color

View All tput capabilities

http://blogs.msdn.com/adioltean/articles/271063.aspx

function tputs(){ infocmp -1|sed 's/^[   ]*//; /=/!d; s/=.*//g; /[#\|]/d'; }

Some common terminfo parameter sequences, their termcap equivalents, and some terminal types which commonly have such sequences, are:

terminfo                    termcap   Representative Terminals
---------------------------------------------------------------
%p1%c                       %.        adm
%p1%d                       %d        hp, ANSI standard, vt100
%p1%+%c                 %+x       concept
%i                          %iq       ANSI standard, vt100
%p1%?%>%t%p1%+%;    %>xy      concept
%p2 is printed before %p1   %r        hp

Installing your Own Terminfo

MostLike, or if that is offline I uploaded a copy: mostlike - manpages with color looking like most

rm -rvf ~/.terminfo
mkdir -pv ~/.terminfo
curl -o terminfo.master http://nion.modprobe.de/mostlike.txt; curl -Ss ftp://invisible-island.net/ncurses/terminfo.src.gz
export TERMINFO=~/.terminfo;
sudo tic -e screen-256color,screen-256color-s,screen-256color-bce,screen-256color-bce-s,xterm+256color,xterm,xterm-pcolor terminfo.src

256 Colors in Terminal

256 Colors (Background)

W=`tput setaf 7` RC="\E[0;0;0m" L=$(sed 's/[0-9]//g; s/./ /g' <<<`seq -s+0 $(($COLUMNS/2))`);
 
for i in `seq 0 256`;
do
  printf "${W}\n%.3d `tput setab $i`${L}${RC}" $i;
done

256 Colors (Foreground)

W=`tput setaf 7` WB=`tput setab 0` RC="\E[0;0;0m" L=$(sed 's/[0-9]//g; s/./#/g' <<<`seq -s+0 $(($COLUMNS/2))`);
for i in `seq 0 256`;
do
  printf "${WB}\n%.3d `tput setaf $i`${L}${RC}" $i;
done

Terminal Capabilities - Infocmp

infocmp -1Lq|grep -v "$TERM\|#"|tr -d '  '

DEC/ANSI special sequences

List of the DEC/ANSI special sequences recognized:

Term Sorted

./MKtermsort.sh |sed 's/.*\/\*  \(.*\)  \*\//\1/g'|sort -u|grep ^[a-zA-Z]|sortwc|grep -v ^static|sort -d|tr " " ','|sed 's/\([^,]\{1,\}\),/<var>\1<\/var>,/g'

AB,ac,acs_btee,acsc,acs_chars,acs_hline,acs_llcorner,acs_lrcorner,acs_ltee,acs_plus,acs_rtee,acs_ttee,acs_ulcorner,acs_urcorner,acs_vline,ae,AF,al,AL,alt_scancode_esc,am,apstr,arrow_key_map,as,auto_left_margin,auto_right_margin,back_color_erase,backspace_delay,backspace_if_not_bs,backspaces_with_bs,back_tab,batt1,batt2,bc,bce,bel,bell,bicr,binel,birep,bit_image_carriage_return,bit_image_entwining,bit_image_newline,bit_image_repeat,bit_image_type,bitwin,bitype,bl,blink,bold,box1,box2,box_chars_1,bs,bt,BT,btml,btns,buffer_capacity,bufsz,buttons,bw,bx,can_change,carriage_return,carriage_return_delay,cb,cbt,cc,CC,ccc,cd,ce,ceol_standout_glitch,ch,change_char_pitch,change_line_pitch,change_res_horz,change_res_vert,change_scroll_region,char_padding,char_set_names,chr,chts,ci,civis,cl,clear,clear_all_tabs,clear_margins,clear_screen,clr_bol,clr_eol,clr_eos,cm,CM,cmdch,cnorm,co,Co,code_set_init,col_addr_glitch,colb0,colb1,colb2,colb3,colb4,colb5,colb6,colb7,colf0,colf1,colf2,colf3,colf4,colf5,colf6,colf7,color_names,colornm,colors,cols,column_address,columns,command_character,cpi,cpi_changes_res,cpix,cps,cr,cr_cancels_micro_mode,create_window,crt_no_scrolling,crxm,cs,csin,csnm,csr,ct,cub,cub1,cud,cud1,cuf,cuf1,cup,cursor_address,cursor_down,cursor_home,cursor_invisible,cursor_left,cursor_mem_address,cursor_normal,cursor_right,cursor_to_ll,cursor_up,cursor_visible,cuu,cuu1,cv,cvr,cvvis,CW,cwin,da,daisy,db,dB,dc,dC,DC,dch,dch1,dclk,defbi,defc,define_bit_image_region,define_char,delete_character,delete_line,dest_tabs_magic_smso,device_type,devt,DI,dial,dial_phone,dim,dispc,display_clock,display_pc_char,dis_status_line,DK,dl,DL,dl1,dm,dN,do,DO,docr,dot_horz_spacing,dot_vert_spacing,down_half_line,ds,dsl,dT,dv,eA,eat_newline_glitch,ec,ech,ed,ehhlm,ei,el,el1,elhlm,elohlm,ena_acs,enacs,endbi,end_bit_image_region,enter_alt_charset_mode,enter_am_mode,enter_blink_mode,enter_bold_mode,enter_ca_mode,enter_delete_mode,enter_dim_mode,enter_doublewide_mode,enter_draft_quality,enter_horizontal_hl_mode,enter_insert_mode,enter_italics_mode,enter_left_hl_mode,enter_leftward_mode,enter_low_hl_mode,enter_micro_mode,enter_near_letter_quality,enter_normal_quality,enter_pc_charset_mode,enter_protected_mode,enter_reverse_mode,enter_right_hl_mode,enter_scancode_mode,enter_secure_mode,enter_shadow_mode,enter_standout_mode,enter_subscript_mode,enter_superscript_mode,enter_top_hl_mode,enter_underline_mode,enter_upward_mode,enter_vertical_hl_mode,enter_xon_mode,eo,erase_chars,erase_overstrike,erhlm,es,eslok,ethlm,evhlm,exit_alt_charset_mode,exit_am_mode,exit_attribute_mode,exit_ca_mode,exit_delete_mode,exit_doublewide_mode,exit_insert_mode,exit_italics_mode,exit_leftward_mode,exit_micro_mode,exit_pc_charset_mode,exit_scancode_mode,exit_shadow_mode,exit_standout_mode,exit_subscript_mode,exit_superscript_mode,exit_underline_mode,exit_upward_mode,exit_xon_mode,F1,F2,F3,F4,F5,F6,F7,F8,F9,Fa,FA,Fb,FB,Fc,FC,Fd,FD,Fe,FE,ff,Ff,FF,Fg,FG,fh,Fh,FH,Fi,FI,fixed_pause,Fj,FJ,Fk,FK,Fl,FL,flash,flash_hook,flash_screen,fln,Fm,FM,Fn,FN,Fo,FO,font0,font1,font2,font3,font4,font5,font6,font7,form_feed,Fp,FP,Fq,FQ,Fr,FR,from_status_line,fs,FS,fsl,FT,FU,FV,FW,FX,FY,FZ,G1,G2,G3,G4,GC,GD,generic_type,getm,get_mouse,GH,GL,Gm,gn,gnu_has_meta_key,goto_window,GR,GU,GV,hangup,hard_copy,hard_cursor,has_hardware_tabs,has_meta_key,has_print_wheel,has_status_line,hc,HC,hd,hl,hls,ho,home,hook,horizontal_tab_delay,hpa,hs,ht,hts,hu,HU,hue_lightness_saturation,hup,hz,i1,i2,i3,ic,Ic,IC,ich,ich1,if,il,il1,im,in,ind,indn,init_1string,init_2string,init_3string,initc,init_file,initialize_color,initial ize_pair,initp,init_prog,init_tabs,insert_character,insert_line,insert_null_glitch,insert_padding,invis,ip,iP,Ip,iprog,is,is1,is2,is3,it,k;,k0,k1,K1,k2,K2,k3,K3,k4,K4,k5,K5,k6,k7,k8,k9,ka,kA,ka1,ka3,kact,kb,kB,kb2,kbeg,kBEG,kbs,kbtab,kC,kc1,kc3,kcan,kCAN,kcbt,kclo,kclr,kcmd,kCMD,kcpn,kcpy,kCPY,kcrt,kCRT,kctab,kcub1,kcud1,kcuf1,kcuu1,kd,kD,kDC,kdch1,kDL,kdl1,kdo,ke,kE,ked,kel,kend,kEND,kent,kEOL,kext,kEXT,key_a1,key_a3,key_b2,key_backspace,key_beg,key_btab,key_c1,key_c3,key_cancel,key_catab,key_clear,key_close,key_command,key_copy,key_create,key_ctab,key_dc,key_dl,key_down,key_eic,key_end,key_enter,key_eol,key_eos,key_exit,key_f0,key_f1,key_f10,key_f11,key_f12,key_f13,key_f14,key_f15,key_f16,key_f17,key_f18,key_f19,key_f2,key_f20,key_f21,key_f22,key_f23,key_f24,key_f25,key_f26,key_f27,key_f28,key_f29,key_f3,key_f30,key_f31,key_f32,key_f33,key_f34,key_f35,key_f36,key_f37,key_f38,key_f39,key_f4,key_f40,key_f41,key_f42,key_f43,key_f44,key_f45,key_f46,key_f47,key_f48,key_f49,key_f5,key_f50,key_f51,key_f52,key_f53,key_f54,key_f55,key_f56,key_f57,key_f58,key_f59,key_f6,key_f60,key_f61,key_f62,key_f63,key_f7,key_f8,key_f9,key_find,key_help,key_home,key_ic,key_il,key_left,key_ll,key_mark,key_message,key_mouse,key_move,key_next,key_npage,key_open,key_options,keypad_local,keypad_xmit,key_ppage,key_previous,key_print,key_redo,key_reference,key_refresh,key_replace,key_restart,key_resume,key_right,key_save,key_sbeg,key_scancel,key_scommand,key_scopy,key_screate,key_sdc,key_sdl,key_select,key_send,key_seol,key_sexit,key_sf,key_sfind,key_shelp,key_shome,key_sic,key_sleft,key_smessage,key_smove,key_snext,key_soptions,key_sprevious,key_sprint,key_sr,key_sredo,key_sreplace,key_sright,key_srsume,key_ssave,key_ssuspend,key_stab,key_sundo,key_suspend,key_undo,key_up,kF,kf0,kf1,kf10,kf11,kf12,kf13,kf14,kf15,kf16,kf17,kf18,kf19,kf2,kf20,kf21,kf22,kf23,kf24,kf25,kf26,kf27,kf28,kf29,kf3,kf30,kf31,kf32,kf33,kf34,kf35,kf36,kf37,kf38,kf39,kf4,kf40,kf41,kf42,kf43,kf44,kf45,kf46,kf47,kf48,kf49,kf5,kf50,kf51,kf52,kf53,kf54,kf55,kf56,kf57,kf58,kf59,kf6,kf60,kf61,kf62,kf63,kf7,kf8,kf9,kfnd,kFND,kh,kH,khlp,kHLP,kHOM,khome,khts,kI,kIC,kich1,kil1,kind,kl,kL,kLFT,kll,km,kM,Km,kmous,kmov,kMOV,kmpf1,kmpf2,kmpf3,kmpf4,kmpf5,kmpf6,kmpf7,kmpf8,kmpf9,kmpt1,kmpt2,kmpt3,kmpt4,kmpt5,kmpt6,kmpt7,kmpt8,kmpt9,kmrk,kmsg,kMSG,kn,kN,knl,knp,knpn,knxt,kNXT,ko,kopn,kopt,kOPT,kP,kpp,kppn,kprt,kPRT,kprv,kPRV,kquit,kr,kR,krdo,kRDO,kref,kres,kRES,krfr,kri,kRIT,krmir,krpl,kRPL,krst,ks,kS,ksav,kSAV,kscl,kscr,ksel,ksf1,ksf10,ksf2,ksf3,ksf4,ksf5,ksf6,ksf7,ksf8,ksf9,kslt,kspd,kSPD,kt,kT,ktab,ktbc,ku,kund,kUND,l0,l1,l2,l3,l4,l5,l6,l7,l8,l9,la,label_format,label_height,label_off,label_on,label_width,lab_f0,lab_f1,lab_f10,lab_f2,lab_f3,lab_f4,lab_f5,lab_f6,lab_f7,lab_f8,lab_f9,le,LE,Lf,LF,lf0,lf1,lf10,lf2,lf3,lf4,lf5,lf6,lf7,lf8,lf9,lh,li,linefeed_if_not_lf,linefeed_is_newline,lines,lines_of_memory,ll,lm,LO,lpi,lpi_changes_res,lpix,lvert,lw,ma,maddr,magic_cookie_glitch,magic_cookie_glitch_ul,max_attributes,max_colors,maximum_windows,max_micro_address,max_micro_jump,max_pairs,mb,MC,mc0,mc4,mc5,mc5i,mc5p,mcs,mcub,mcub1,mcud,mcud1,mcuf,mcuf1,mcuu,mcuu1,md,me,meml,memory_above,memory_below,memory_lock,memory_unlock,memu,meta_off,meta_on,mgc,mh,mhpa,mi,Mi,micro_col_size,micro_column_address,micro_down,micro_left,micro_line_size,micro_right,micro_row_address,micro_up,minfo,mir,mjump,mk,ml,ML,mls,mm,mo,mouse_info,move_insert_mode,move_standout_mode,mp,mr,MR,mrcup,ms,msgr,MT,mu,mvpa,MW,nc,NC,ncv,nd,ND,ndscr,needs_xon_xoff,nel,newline,new_line_delay,nl,Nl,NL,nlab,no_color_video,no_correctly_working_cr,no_esc_ctlc,non_dest_scroll_region,non_rev_rmcup,no_pad_char,NP,npc,npins,NR,nrrmc,ns,number_of_function_keys,number_of_pins,num_labels,nw,nx,nxon,oc,op,orc,order_of_pins,orhi,orig_colors,orig_pair,orl,orvi,os,OTbc,OTbs,OTdB,OTdC,OTdN,OTdT,OTG1,OTG2,OTG3,OTG4,OTGC,OTGD,OTGH,OTGL,OTGR,OTGU,OTGV,other_non_function_keys,OTi2,OTkn,OTko,OTma,OTMT,OTnc,OTnl,OTNL,OTns,OTpt,OTrs,OTug,OTxr,output_res_char,output_res_horz_inch,output_res_line,output_res_vert_inch,over_strike,pa,PA,pad,pad_char,padding_baud_rate,pairs,parm_dch,parm_delete_line,parm_down_cursor,parm_down_micro,parm_ich,parm_index,parm_insert_line,parm_left_cursor,parm_left_micro,parm_right_cursor,parm_right_micro,parm_rindex,parm_up_cursor,parm_up_micro,pause,pb,pc,pc_term_options,pctrm,pf,pfkey,pfloc,pfx,pfxl,pk,pkey_key,pkey_local,pkey_plab,pkey_xmit,pl,plab_norm,pln,pn,po,pO,porder,print_rate,print_screen,prot,prtr_non,prtr_off,prtr_on,prtr_silent,ps,pt,PU,pulse,px,QD,qdial,quick_dial,r1,r2,r3,RA,rbim,rc,RC,rcsd,remove_clock,rep,repeat_char,req_for_input,req_mouse_pos,reqmp,reset_1string,reset_2string,reset_3string,reset_file,restore_cursor,return_does_clr_eol,rev,rf,RF,rfi,ri,RI,rin,ritm,rlm,rmacs,rmam,rmclk,rmcup,rmdc,rmicm,rmir,rmkx,rmln,rmm,rmp,rmpch,rmsc,rmso,rmul,rmxon,row_address,row_addr_glitch,rp,rP,RQ,rs,rs1,rs2,rs3,rshm,rsubm,rsupm,rum,rvert,rwidm,RX,s0,s0ds,s1,S1,s1ds,s2,S2,s2ds,s3,S3,s3ds,S4,S5,S6,S7,S8,sa,sA,SA,sam,save_cursor,Sb,sbim,sc,SC,scancode_escape,scesa,scesc,sclk,scp,scroll_forward,scroll_reverse,scs,scsd,sdrfq,se,select_char_set,semi_auto_right_margin,set0_des_seq,set1_des_seq,set2_des_seq,set3_des_seq,set_a_attributes,setab,set_a_background,setaf,set_a_foreground,set_attributes,setb,set_background,set_bottom_margin,set_bottom_margin_parm,set_clock,setcolor,set_color_band,set_color_pair,setf,set_foreground,set_left_margin,set_left_margin_parm,set_lr_margin,set_page_length,set_pglen_inch,set_right_margin,set_right_margin_parm,set_tab,set_tb_margin,set_top_margin,set_top_margin_parm,set_window,sf,Sf,SF,sg,sgr,sgr0,sgr1,sitm,sL,slength,slines,slm,smacs,smam,smcup,smdc,smgb,smgbp,smgl,smglp,smglr,smgr,smgrp,smgt,smgtb,smgtp,smicm,smir,smkx,smln,smm,smpch,smsc,smso,smul,smxon,snlq,snrmq,so,sp,spinh,spinv,sr,SR,sshm,ssubm,ssupm,st,start_bit_image,start_char_set_def,status_line_esc_ok,stop_bit_image,stop_char_set_def,subcs,subscript_characters,sum,supcs,superscript_characters,swidm,SX,ta,tab,tbc,te,termcap_init2,termcap_reset,these_cause_cr,ti,tilde_glitch,TO,tone,topl,to_status_line,transparent_underline,ts,tsl,u0,u1,u2,u3,u4,u5,u6,u7,u8,u9,uc,ue,ug,ul,underline_char,up,UP,up_half_line,us,user0,user1,user2,user3,user4,user5,user6,user7,user8,user9,ut,vb,ve,vi,virtual_terminal,vpa,vs,vt,WA,wait,wait_tone,WG,wi,widcs,wide_char_size,width_status_line,wind,wingo,wnum,ws,wsl,xb,xenl,XF,Xh,xhp,xhpa,xl,Xl,xmc,xn,XN,xo,Xo,xoffc,xoff_character,xon,xonc,xon_character,xon_xoff,xr,Xr,xs,xsb,xt,Xt,Xv,xvpa,Xy,Ya,YA,Yb,YB,Yc,YC,Yd,YD,Ye,YE,Yf,YF,Yg,YG,Yh,Yi,Yj,Yk,Yl,Ym,Yn,Yo,Yp,Yv,Yw,Yx,Yy,Yz,YZ,Za,ZA,Zb,ZB,Zc,ZC,Zd,ZD,Ze,ZE,zerom,zero_motion,Zf,ZF,Zg,ZG,Zh,ZH,Zi,ZI,Zj,ZJ,Zk,ZK,Zl,ZL,Zm,ZM,Zn,ZN,Zo,ZO,Zp,ZP,Zq,ZQ,Zr,ZR,Zs,ZS,Zt,ZT,Zu,ZU,Zv,ZV,Zw,ZW,Zx,ZX,Zy,ZY,Zz,ZZ

TERMINAL TYPE DESCRIPTIONS SOURCE FILE

ANSI, UNIX CONSOLE, AND SPECIAL TYPES
Specials
ANSI.SYS/ISO 6429/ECMA-48 Capabilities
ANSI/ECMA-48 terminals and terminal emulators
DOS ANSI.SYS variants
ANSI console types
BeOS
Linux consoles
Mach
OSF Unix
QNX
NetBSD consoles
FreeBSD console entries
386BSD and BSD/OS Consoles
DEC VT52
DEC VT100 and compatibles
VT100 emulations
X terminal emulators
MGR
UNIX VIRTUAL TERMINALS, VIRTUAL CONSOLES, AND TELNET CLIENTS
Pilot Pro Palm-Top
COMMERCIAL WORKSTATION CONSOLES
Alpha consoles
Sun consoles
Iris consoles
NeWS consoles
NeXT consoles
Sony NEWS workstations
Common Desktop Environment
Non-Unix Consoles
COMMON TERMINAL TYPES
Altos
Hewlett-Packard (hp)
Honeywell-Bull
Lear-Siegler (adm)
Prime
Qume (qvt)
Televideo (tvi)
Visual (vi)
Wyse (wy)
Kermit terminal emulations
NON-ANSI TERMINAL EMULATIONS
Avatar
RBcomm
LCD DISPLAYS
Matrix Orbital
OLDER TERMINAL TYPES
AT&T (att, tty)
Ampex (Dialogue)
Ann Arbor (aa)
Applied Digital Data Systems (adds)
C. Itoh Electronics
Control Data (cdc)
Getronics
Human Designed Systems (Concept)
Contel Business Systems.
Data General (dg)
Datamedia (dm)
Falco

Just something sorta cool for you to check out

{
 local t=`tputm 'clear' 'setaf 75'` l a b f=/tmp/ps IFS=' ';
exec 6<>$f;ps L|tr -s ' ' &>$f;
while read -u6 l;do a=${l/% */} b=${l/* /};
figlet -rtw $((${COLUMNS} /2 )) -f big "$l";
tput sgr0;
command ps wwo pid:6,user:8,vsize:8,comm:20,$a:50 k -$a -A;cont;
done;
};

Terminal Escape Code Zen originally appeared on AskApache.com

This is part of the GRUB article on the Arch Linux wiki that I contributed. As of now, just a copy.

The grub menu.lst provides for a convenient way to add a number of entries with extended kernel parameters to configure all sorts of advanced settings to enable you to quickly and conveniently boot into your existing system with varying levels of debugging output. It's very easy and useful to create several levels of debugging just by adding additional entries to your grub configuration. And if you ever have issues or problems down the road due to a power-failure or hardware failure, it can save you hours of trouble, and of course nothing can beat debugging output when it comes to learning about your system.

Useful Menu.lst Entries

If you are interested in debugging, then you deserve some grub entries for powerusers, here are a few that I like (just add to your menu.lst).

title Shutdown the Computer
halt
 
title Reboot the Computer
reboot
 
title Command Line
commandline
 
title Install GRUB to hd0 MBR
root (hd0,0)
setup (hd0)
 
title Matrix
color green/black light-green/green
 
title Scan for /boot/grub/menu.lst
find --set-root --ignore-floppies /boot/grub/menu.lst
configfile /boot/grub/menu.lst
 
title Scan for /boot/menu.lst
find --set-root --ignore-floppies /menu.lst
configfile /boot/menu.lst
 
# http://www.vortex.prodigynet.co.uk/x86test/
title    Run x86test (CPU Info)
kernel /boot/x86test_zImage.bin
#wget http://www.vortex.prodigynet.co.uk/x86test/x86test_zImage.bin
 
# http://www.memtest.org/
title    Run memtest86+ (Memory Testing)
kernel /boot/memtest86+-1.70.bin

Light Debug

A quick way to see more verbose messages on your console is to bootup your normal grub entry after appending verbose to the kernel line. This simple word added to your kernel line turns on more logging thanks to the /etc/rc.sysinit file, which at the top of the file runs:

if /bin/grep -q " verbose" /proc/cmdline; then /bin/dmesg -n 8; fi

Very simple way to get a bit more messages and debug output in your logs.

title  Arch Linux DEBUG Light
kernel /vmlinuz26 root=/dev/disk/by-label/ROOT ro rootwait verbose
initrd /kernel26.img

Medium Debug

This example menu.lst entry turns on real logging that is set by the kernel and not in an init script. Adding the debug kernel parameter to your kernel line is recognized by a lot of linux internals and enables quite a bit of debugging compared to the default.

title Arch Linux DEBUG Medium
kernel /vmlinuz26 root=/dev/disk/by-label/ROOT ro rootdelay=5 panic=10 debug
initrd /kernel26.img

Heavy Debug

An even more impressive kernel parameter is the ignore_loglevel, which causes the system to ignore any loglevel and keeps the internal loglevel at the maximum debugging level, basically rendering dmesg unable to lower the debug level.

title Arch Linux DEBUG Heavy
kernel /vmlinuz26 root=/dev/disk/by-label/ROOT ro rootdelay=5 panic=10 debug ignore_loglevel
initrd /kernel26.img

Extreme Debug

If the "Heavy Debug" seemed like a lot of output, thats about 1/2 of the logging that occurs with this example. This does a couple things, it uses the earlyprintk parameter to setup your kernel for "early" "printing" of messages to your "vga" screen. The ,keep just lets it stay on the screen longer. This will let you see logs that normally are hidden due to the boot-up process. This also changes the log buffer length to 10MB, and also instructs that any fatal signals be printed with print_fatal_signals. The last one, sched_debug, you can look up in the very excellent kernel documentation on kernel parameters.

title Arch Linux DEBUG Extreme
kernel /vmlinuz26 root=/dev/disk/by-label/ROOT ro debug ignore_loglevel log_buf_len=10M print_fatal_signals=1 LOGLEVEL=8 earlyprintk=vga,keep sched_debug
initrd /kernel26.img

Insane Debug

The first few debugging examples showed some really nice kernel parameters to turn on really verbose debugging. This kind of debugging is absolutely critical if you want to max out your system or just learn more about what is going on behind the scenes. But there is a final trick that is my favorite, it's the ability to set both environment variables, and more importantly, module parameters at boot.

As an example, here is the boot line that I am using at the moment on an older Dell Desktop, just to illustrate module parameters and environment vars.

title  Arch Linux X-256
kernel /vmlinuz26 root=/dev/disk/by-label/ROOT ro rootwait pause_on_oops=5 panic=60 i915.modeset=1 no_console_suspend ipv6.disable=1 TERM=xterm-256color quiet 5
initrd /kernel26.img

Since it's low on both memory and CPU, I disable ipv6. I also turn on kernel modesetting for the i915 video card, set my terminal to be xterm-256color, and boot straight into X. This lets me use a very optimized arch-linux configuration, amazing how fast thanks to using slim as the login manager, ratpoison as my window manager, and terminal with tmux as my login shell, all from boot, as the pstree shows (plus Synergy!).

init,1
  |-slim,3096
  |   |-X,3098 -nolisten tcp vt07 -auth /var/run/slim.auth
  |   `-ratpoison,3107,askapache
  |       |-terminal,5341 -x sh -c exec /usr/bin/tmux -2 -l -u -q attach -d -t tmux-askapache
  |       |   |-bash,11165
  |       |   |-tmux,5345 -2 -l -u -q attach -d -t tmux-askapache
  |       |   `-{terminal},5346
  |       `-xscreensaver,3113 -no-splash
  |-synergyc,6121,galileo -f --name galileo-fire --restart 10.66.66.2:26666
  |
  `-tmux,5348,askapache -2 -l -u -q attach -d -t tmux-askapache
      |-bash,5351
      |   `-ssh,9969 lug@askapache.com
      `-bash,5868
         `-vim,11149 -p sda1/grub/menu.lst /boot/grub/menu.lst

That kind of optimized system is only possible if you first can figure out your system, by debugging both the kernel as previously illustrated, debugging the init process, and most importantly, by debugging the modules enabled for your system's hardware/firmware/software. Debugging modules is challenging but worth the effort, and then you are able to do some truly insane debugging from grub like the following example, note that the actual grub entry is all on one line, but I split it into 4 lines so you could see it all. This basically turns on every module on this little Dell desktop to be at the absolute max debug level. There is so much logging when I boot this that the system grinds to a halt and is slower than a TI-89 calculator (See Improve Boot Performance).

title  Arch Linux DEBUG INSANE
kernel /vmlinuz26 root=/dev/disk/by-label/ROOT ro rootwait ignore_loglevel debug debug_locks_verbose=1 sched_debug initcall_debug mminit_loglevel=4 udev.log_priority=8
       loglevel=8 earlyprintk=vga,keep log_buf_len=10M print_fatal_signals=1 apm.debug=Y i8042.debug=Y drm.debug=1 scsi_logging_level=1 usbserial.debug=Y
       option.debug=Y pl2303.debug=Y firewire_ohci.debug=1 hid.debug=1 pci_hotplug.debug=Y pci_hotplug.debug_acpi=Y shpchp.shpchp_debug=Y apic=debug
       show_lapic=all hpet=verbose lmb=debug pause_on_oops=5 panic=10 sysrq_always_enabled
initrd /kernel26.img

A couple key items from that grub entry are sysrq_always_enabled which forces on the sysrq magic, which really is a lifesaver when debugging at this level as your machine will freeze/stop-responding sometimes and it's nice to use sysrq to kill all tasks, change the loglevel, unmount all filesystems, or do a hard reboot. Another key parameter is the initcall_debug, which debugs the init process in excruciating detail. Very useful at times. The last parametery I find very useful is the udev.log_priority=8 to turn on udev logging.

Break Into Init

For instance, If you add break=y to your kernel cmdline, init will pause early in the boot process (after loading modules) and launch an interactive sh shell which can be used for troubleshooting purposes. (Normal boot continues after logout.) This is very similar to the shell that shows up if your computer gets turned off before it is able to shutdown properly. But using this parameter lets you enter into this mode differently at will.

title  Arch Linux Init Break
kernel /vmlinuz26 root=/dev/disk/by-label/ROOT ro rootwait break=y
initrd /kernel26.img

Debugging init

This awesome parameter udev.log_priority=8 does the same thing as editing the file /etc/udev/udev.conf except it executes earlier, turning on debugging output for udev. If you want to know your hardware, that is the key parameter right there. Another trick is if you change the /etc/udev/udev.conf to be verbose, then you can make your initrd image include that file to turn on verbose udeb debugging by adding it to your {{Filename|/etc/mkinitcpio.conf} like:

FILES="/etc/modprobe.d/modprobe.conf /etc/udev/udev.conf"

, which on arch is as easy as

# mkinitcpio -p kernel26

Debugging udev is key because the initrd performs a root change at the end of its run to usually launch a program like /sbin/init as part of a chroot, and unless the new file system has a valid /dev directory, udev must be initialized before invoking chroot in order to provide /dev/console.

exec chroot . /sbin/init <dev/console >dev/console 2>&1

So basically, you aren't able to view the logs that are generated before /dev/console is initialized by udev or by a special initrd you compiled yourself. One method the kernel developers use to be able to still get the log messages generated before /dev/console is available is to provide an alternative console that you can enable or disable from grub.

Net Console

If you read through the kernel documentation regarding debugging, you will hear about Netconsole, which can be loaded from the kernel line in GRUB, compiled into your kernel, or loaded at runtime as a module. Having a netconsole entry in your menu.lst is most excellent for debugging slower computers like old laptops or thin-clients. It's easy to use. Just setup a 2nd computer (running arch) to accept syslog requests on a remote port, very fast and quick to do on arch-linux, 1 line to syslog.conf. Then you could use a log-color-parser like ccze to view all syslog logs, or just tail your everything.log. Then on your laptop, boot up and select the netconsole entry from the grub menu, and you will start seeing as much logging as you want on your syslog system. This logging lets you view even earlier log output than is available with the earlyprintk=vga kernel parameter, as netconsole is used by kernel hackers and developers, so it's very powerful.

title  Arch Linux DEBUG Netconsole
kernel /vmlinuz26 root=/dev/disk/by-label/ROOT ro netconsole=514@10.0.0.2/12:34:56:78:9a:bc debug ignore_loglevel
initrd /kernel26.img

Hijacking cmdline

If you do not have access to GRUB or the kernel boottime cmdline, like on a server or virtual machine, as long as you have root permissions you can still enable this kind of simplistic verbose logging using a neat hack. While you cannot modify the /proc/cmdline even as root, you can place your own cmdline file on top of /proc/cmdline, so that accessing /proc/cmdline actually accesses your file.

For example if I cat /proc/cmdline, I have the following:

root=/dev/disk/by-label/ROOT ro console=tty1 logo.nologo quiet

So I use a simple sed command to replace quiet with verbose like:

sed 's/ quiet/ verbose/' /proc/cmdline > /root/cmdline

Then I bind mount /root/cmdline so that it becomes /proc/cmdline, using the -n option to mount so that this mount won't be recorded in the systems mtab.

mount -n --bind -o ro /root/cmdline /proc/cmdline

Now if I cat /proc/cmdline, I have the following:

root=/dev/disk/by-label/ROOT ro console=tty1 logo.nologo verbose

Advanced Linux Debugging using a Bootloader (GRUB) originally appeared on AskApache.com

The bottom line for this article is that I want to make WordPress as fast, secure, and easy to install, run, and manage because I am using it more and more for client production sites, I will work for days in order to solve an issue so that I never have to spend time on that issue again. Time is money in this industry and that is ultimately (time) what there is to gain by tweaking WordPress.

Note: I spent no time on readability, this is primarily a read the code and figure it out article.. This is for advanced users looking for a reference or discussion and for those of you looking to advance. Feedback would be great if you make it that far..

For a better handle on the way I like to structure web site directories, see Optimize a Website for Speed, Security, and Easy Management but note it is a bit outdated compared to what I'm doing now. I don't have the luxury of using only one type of server, or hosting provider anymore, so I have been working towards making things even more portable in order to move from host to host from server to server without issues i.e. my portable .bash_profile.

So I've been basically experimenting various ways to accomplish that and thought I would share what I am currently doing for my benefit and hopefully get some input. All of my WP installs run the development version, and one main idea with my setups is that upgrading is automated. So I really keep the WordPress install clean and use plugins and wp-config.php to do all the customization.

• Portability - Hands-free upgrades and easy to move
• Security - Additional security and protection
• Speed - Less CPU and Disk I/O
• Customization - All my favorite customizations

wp-config.php

These are the main settings I use.. Seriously this is more like an interactive article, because to understand it you will need to do some code grepping. You may want to grab a jolt.

ASKAPACHE_ROOT

The ASKAPACHE_ROOT variable is just a better way for me to be able to include and access all the different files in my site tree. For instance, in my non-wp php files, I can do this:

!defined('ASKAPACHE_ROOT') && require $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'] . '/wp-config.php';
include(ASKAPACHE_ROOT . '/includes/custom-download.inc.php');

ASKAPACHE_LOCK

This is one of my all-time favorite hacks, that I think is one of the most useful methods I employ as a web developer. This allows me to use far-future-expire headers for optimum caching, while still forcing browsers to re-validate every day or so automatically, or forcing them to re-validate whenever I change the suffix. This takes advantage of the mod_rewrite trick that I use on EVERY site I run, definately worth learning. Because I practice best-practice web-standards, for every web site I create a single css file and javascript file, which I then add to the template like:

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="all" href="http://static.askapache.com/c/apache-0<?php echo ASKAPACHE_LOCK?>.css" />
<script src="http://static.askapache.com/j/apache-0<?php echo ASKAPACHE_LOCK;?>.js" type="text/javascript"></script>

<?php
/**
 * The base configurations of the WordPress.
 *
 * This file has the following configurations: MySQL settings, Table Prefix,
 * Secret Keys, WordPress Language, and ABSPATH. You can find more information by
 * visiting {@link http://codex.wordpress.org/Editing_wp-config.php Editing
 * wp-config.php} Codex page. You can get the MySQL settings from your web host.
 *
 * This file is used by the wp-config.php creation script during the
 * installation. You don't have to use the web site, you can just copy this file
 * to "wp-config.php" and fill in the values.
 *
 * @package WordPress
 */
/* http://codex.wordpress.org/Editing_wp-config.php */
 
/** /home/liet/askapache.com */
!defined('ASKAPACHE_ROOT') && define('ASKAPACHE_ROOT', str_replace('/public_html','', $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT']));
 
/** The 008 at the end is for manual tweaking.  time() returns seconds since '00:00:00 1970-01-01 UTC'. */
// http://www.askapache.com/htaccess/mod_rewrite-fix-for-caching-updated-files.html
!defined('ASKAPACHE_LOCK') && define(ASKAPACHE_LOCK', substr(time(),0,5).'008'); // 12533001
 
/** absolute path to the WordPress directory */
!defined('ABSPATH') && define('ABSPATH', ASKAPACHE_ROOT .'/public_html/');
 
/**
 * WP_SITEURL, defined since WordPress Version 2.2, allows the WordPress address (URL) to be defined. The valued defined is the address where your WordPress core files reside.
 * It should include the http:// part too. Do not put a slash "/" at the end.
 * Setting this value in wp-config.php overrides the wp_options table value for siteurl and disables the WordPress address (URL) field in the Administration > Settings > General panel.
 */
!defined('WP_SITEURL') && define('WP_SITEURL', 'http://'.$_SERVER['SERVER_NAME']);
 
/**
 * WP_HOME is another wp-config.php option added in WordPress Version 2.2. Similar to WP_SITEURL,
 * WP_HOME overrides the wp_options table value for home but does not change it permanently.
 * home is the address you want people to type in their browser to reach your WordPress blog. It should include the http:// part. Also, do not put a slash "/" at the end.
 */
!defined('WP_HOME') && define('WP_HOME', WP_SITEURL);
 
/** no trailing slash, full paths only */
!defined('WP_CONTENT_DIR') && define( 'WP_CONTENT_DIR', ABSPATH . 'wp-content' );
 
// full url - WP_CONTENT_DIR is defined further up
!defined('WP_CONTENT_URL') && define( 'WP_CONTENT_URL', WP_SITEURL . '/wp-content');
 
/** Allows for the plugins directory to be moved from the default location. @since 2.6.0 */
// full path, no trailing slash
!defined('WP_PLUGIN_DIR') && define( 'WP_PLUGIN_DIR', WP_CONTENT_DIR . '/plugins' );
 
/** Allows for the plugins directory to be moved from the default location. @since 2.6.0 */
// full url, no trailing slash
!defined('WP_PLUGIN_URL') && define( 'WP_PLUGIN_URL', WP_CONTENT_URL . '/plugins' );
 
/** Allows for the plugins directory to be moved from the default location. @since 2.1.0 */
// Relative to ABSPATH.  For back compat.
//!defined('PLUGINDIR') && define( 'PLUGINDIR', 'wp-content/plugins' );
 
/** Number of autosaves to save. TRUE is default and enables post revisions, FALSE disables revisions completely. */
!defined('WP_POST_REVISIONS') && define('WP_POST_REVISIONS', 150);
 
/* ini_set('memory_limit', WP_MEMORY_LIMIT); */
!defined('WP_MEMORY_LIMIT') && define('WP_MEMORY_LIMIT', '64M');
 
/** Only check at this interval for new messages. Default is 5min */
/** @since 2.9  */
!defined('WP_MAIL_INTERVAL') && define('WP_MAIL_INTERVAL', 3600); // 1 hour
 
/** Saves updated post values to post from edit window every x seconds. (default 60)
 * When editing a post, WordPress uses Ajax to auto-save revisions to the post as you edit. You may want to increase this setting for longer delays in between auto-saves, or decrease the setting to make sure you never lose changes.
 * @since 2.5.0 */
!defined( 'AUTOSAVE_INTERVAL' ) && define( 'AUTOSAVE_INTERVAL', 60 );
 
/** @since 2.9.0  */
/** Permanently deletes posts, pages, attachments, and comments which have been in the trash for EMPTY_TRASH_DAYS. */
!defined( 'EMPTY_TRASH_DAYS' ) && define( 'EMPTY_TRASH_DAYS', 300 );

Debugging WordPress

One of my secrets for getting really good at this stuff is to master debugging. There is really not ever a time when I am working on a site that I don't have color-highlighted logs scrolling automatically in an ssh window. It's really almost impossible to fix problems with wordpress or do any kind of advanced anything without being able to view debugging info. At first I relied heavily on a custom php.ini being available on the server, but after having to deal with many hosts who don't allow php.ini files I now rely completely on setting values using ini_set for ultimate portability. Detailed towards the end of this article and is also included in this wp-config.php

/**#@+
 * DEBUGGING STUFF
 */
/** display of notices during development. if false, error_reporting is E_ERROR | E_WARNING | E_PARSE | E_USER_ERROR | E_USER_WARNING | E_RECOVERABLE_ERROR otherwise E_ALL */
!defined('WP_DEBUG') && define('WP_DEBUG', false);
 
/** The SAVEQUERIES definition saves the database queries to a array and that array can be displayed to help analyze those queries.
 *  The information saves each query, what function called it, and how long that query took to execute.  */
!defined('SAVE_QUERIES') && define('SAVE_QUERIES', WP_DEBUG);
 
!defined('ACTION_DEBUG') && define('ACTION_DEBUG', WP_DEBUG);
 
/** This will allow you to edit the scriptname.dev.js files in the wp-includes/js and wp-admin/js directories.  */
!defined('SCRIPT_DEBUG') && define('SCRIPT_DEBUG', WP_DEBUG);
 
/** Add define('WP_DEBUG_LOG', true); to enable php debug logging to WP_CONTENT_DIR/debug.log */
//!defined('WP_DEBUG_LOG') && define('WP_DEBUG_LOG', true);
 
/** This determines whether errors should be printed to the screen as part of the output or if they should be hidden from the user.
 *  Add define('WP_DEBUG_DISPLAY', false); to wp-config.php to use the globally configured setting for display_errors and not force it to On */
!defined('WP_DEBUG_DISPLAY') && define('WP_DEBUG_DISPLAY', false);

Ultimate Security Tweaks

Well, ultimate for WP's built-in keys and password functions, this is all for wp-config.php keep in mind. This is a very neccessary and recommended step, and is one of the only things I modify for each new installation.

Security KEYS

If like me you are familiar with password-cracking software like John the ripper, rainbow hash tables, l0pht-crack, etc.. then you will like to know that you can specify your own keys and salts for the encryption used by WP. They are AUTH_KEY, AUTH_SALT, SECURE_AUTH_KEY, SECURE_AUTH_SALT, LOGGED_IN_KEY, LOGGED_IN_SALT, NONCE_KEY, NONCE_SALT, SECRET_KEY and SECRET_SALT.

A random and long key gives you better encryption, and exponentially increasing that is using a random and long salt for the encryption. Encryptions with known salts are incredibly easy to decrypt compared to encryptions with secure salts, because the salt + key individually need to be guessed in order to find a matching hash, vs. just the key if the salt is known. See: Locating weak passwords.

A secret key is a hashing salt which makes your site harder to hack and access harder to crack by adding random elements to the password.

In simple terms, a secret key is a password with elements that make it harder to generate enough options to break through your security barriers. A password like "password" or "test" is simple and easily broken. A random, unpredictable password such as "88a7da62429ba6ad3cb3c76a09641fc" takes years to come up with the right combination.

For more information on the technical background and breakdown of secret keys and secure passwords, see:

• WordPress Support Forum - HOWTO: Set up secret keys in WordPress 2.6+
• Wikipedia's explanation of Password Cracking

I like to use the WordPress.org secret-key service 4 times. That's because for each key and salt I like to do: (1 key from api +random keyboard input+1 key from api).

/**#@+
 * Authentication Unique Keys.
 *
 * Change these to different unique phrases!
 * You can generate these using the {@link https://api.wordpress.org/secret-key/1.1/ WordPress.org secret-key service}
 * You can change these at any point in time to invalidate all existing cookies.
 * This will force all users to have to log in again.
 *
 * @since 2.6.0
 *
 * Get salt to add to hashes to help prevent attacks.
 *
 * The secret key is located in two places: the database in case the secret key
 * isn't defined in the second place, which is in the wp-config.php file. If you
 * are going to set the secret key, then you must do so in the wp-config.php
 * file.
 *
 * The secret key in the database is randomly generated and will be appended to
 * the secret key that is in wp-config.php file in some instances. It is
 * important to have the secret key defined or changed in wp-config.php.
 *
 * If you have installed WordPress 2.5 or later, then you will have the
 * SECRET_KEY defined in the wp-config.php already. You will want to change the
 * value in it because hackers will know what it is. If you have upgraded to
 * WordPress 2.5 or later version from a version before WordPress 2.5, then you
 * should add the constant to your wp-config.php file.
 *
 * Below is an example of how the SECRET_KEY constant is defined with a value.
 * You must not copy the below example and paste into your wp-config.php. If you
 * need an example, then you can have a
 * {@link https://api.wordpress.org/secret-key/1.1/ secret key created} for you.
 *
 * Salting passwords helps against tools which has stored hashed values of
 * common dictionary strings. The added values makes it harder to crack if given
 * salt string is not weak.
 *
 * @since 2.5
 * @link https://api.wordpress.org/secret-key/1.1/ Create a Secret Key for wp-config.php
 *
 * @return string Salt value from either 'SECRET_KEY' or 'secret' option
 */
define('AUTH_KEY',        'jflkhaskljdfhkljasdhflkjashd;flkjhas;djfh;kajshdflkjashdlfkjhasdlkfhal?p[B+GR{@>{Yq`c|LnG;dvq#| %OA_cbBSU6,rICC1o/c)-|');
define('SECURE_AUTH_KEY', 'jflkhaskljdfhkljasdhflkjashd;flkjhas;djfh;kajshdflkjashdlfkjhasdlkfhal?Vp[Bb15baar8&R-r<[T|?(xhJJABGq+Ux+U$)-Hltp/');
define('LOGGED_IN_KEY',   'jflkhaskljdfhkljasdhflkjashd;flkjhas;djfh;kajshdflkjashdlfkjhasdlkfhal?Vp[B<5n6DG|YWnJ9tY2!M1L)`{-$LW~~Ia%.uCbn!P. 41o2$Z$4');
define('NONCE_KEY',       'jflkhaskljdfhkljasdhflkjashd;flkjhas;djfh;kajshdflkjashdlfkjhasdlkfhal?Vp[Bgu<wM*zewR0.{+m:bmrB?wj!B,4]Wo+4 Avk ApR-D?E');
define('SECRET_KEY',     'jflkhaskljdfhkljasdhflkjashd;flkjhas;djfh;kajshdflkjashdlfkjhasdlkfhal?Vp[B52ugH6muE9r4._iZwoYKUybrqLPpv|d Xr+|yrqhUE');
 
define('AUTH_SALT',        '123423190847olqkfhladhfsldshafasdfasdf09a7f-90a87df98adfyapoiyaf9asd8f70a9s8d7f908a7sdf97W4qCdm~Ky%+%~PPa5b YEmDI%U[W!-B');
define('SECURE_AUTH_SALT', '123423190847olqkfhladhfsldshafasdfasdf09a7f-90a87df98adfyapoiyaf9asd8f70a9s8d7f908a7sdf97W4qCdmad/7o6.AU3%9o-|Kqm]+eUqr-n~:ag');
define('LOGGED_IN_SALT',   '123423190847olqkfhladhfsldshafasdfasdf09a7f-90a87df98adfyapoiyaf9asd8f70a9s8d7f908a7sdf97W4qCdmsLiCv@KJ{#wd(?qe(KcH3!');
define('NONCE_SALT',       '123423190847olqkfhladhfsldshafasdfasdf09a7f-90a87df98adfyapoiyaf9asd8f70a9s8d7f908a7sdf97W4qCdmG9>+wm 2)bS0Pd_+1rx0brX]ND8|');
define('SECRET_SALT',      '123423190847olqkfhladhfsldshafasdfasdf09a7f-90a87df98adfyapoiyaf9asd8f70a9s8d7f908a7sdf97W4qCdm2<>))U|sty)+4vpWooKls/^[vN');
/**#@-*/

Using SSL for Admin and Login

SSL is kinda required from my point of view, it is just way to easy to sniff data off the wire otherwise. At least with SSL you force them to use tools like burpsuite, paros proxy, webscarab, etc..

/** @since 2.6.0  */
!defined('FORCE_SSL_ADMIN') && define('FORCE_SSL_ADMIN', true);
 
/** @since 2.6.0  */
!defined('FORCE_SSL_LOGIN') && define('FORCE_SSL_LOGIN', true);

Mod_Rewrite to Force SSL

This is pretty cool, it forces non-https for all urls except for /wp-admin and wp-login.php, which both require https. It also checks for the logged_in_cookie, and if that is present in the request then it doesn't force non-https. Kinda confusing if you don't have a mod_rewrite cheatsheet.

RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/(wp-admin|wp-login\.php).*$ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_COOKIE} ^.*wp_li_sadfsdfasdf11b361cdsdfasdfasd=.*$ [NC]
RewriteRule .* - [S=1]
 
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} =on [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.askapache\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule .* http://%{SERVER_NAME}%{REQUEST_URI} [R=301,L]
 
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /(wp-admin/.*|wp-login\.php.*)\ HTTP/ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} !=on
RewriteRule .* https://%{SERVER_NAME}%{REQUEST_URI} [R=301,L]

File System Permissions

You can get a basic and solid intro on file permissions by reading: Changing File Permissions, or you can check out some of my file permission research.

/** The permissions as octal number, usually 0644 for files, 0755 for dirs.
 *  http://codex.wordpress.org/Changing_File_Permissions
 *  if ( !$wp_filesystem->mkdir($remote_destination, FS_CHMOD_DIR) )
 */
!defined('FS_CHMOD_DIR') && define('FS_CHMOD_DIR', (0755 & ~ umask()));
!defined('FS_CHMOD_FILE') && define('FS_CHMOD_FILE', (0644 & ~ umask()));
/**#@-*/
 
/** Define the timeouts for the connections. Only available after the construct is called to allow for per-transport overriding of the default. */
//stream_set_timeout( $stream, FS_TIMEOUT );
//!defined('FS_TIMEOUT') && define('FS_TIMEOUT', 30);
 
//$this->link = @ftp_connect($this->options['hostname'], $this->options['port'], FS_CONNECT_TIMEOUT);
//!defined('FS_CONNECT_TIMEOUT') && define('FS_CONNECT_TIMEOUT', 30);
 
// function get_filesystem_method($args = array(), $context = false) {
//  $method = defined('FS_METHOD') ? FS_METHOD : false; //Please ensure that this is either 'direct', 'ssh', 'ftpext' or 'ftpsockets'
//!defined('FS_METHOD') && define('FS_METHOD', 'direct');
 
/** These methods for the WordPress core, plugin, and theme upgrades try to determine the WordPress path, as reported by PHP, but symlink trickery can sometimes
 * 'muck this up' so if you know the paths to the various folders on the server, as seen via your FTP user, you can manually define them in the wp-config.php file.
 * FS_METHOD forces the filesystem method. It should only be "direct", "ssh", "ftpext", or "ftpsockets".
 * FTP_BASE is the full path to the "base" folder of the WordPress installation.
 * FTP_CONTENT_DIR is the full path to the wp-content folder of the WordPress installation.
 * FTP_PLUGIN_DIR is the full path to the plugins folder of the WordPress installation.
 * FTP_PUBKEY is the full path to your SSH public key.
 * FTP_PRIKEY is the full path to your SSH private key.
 * FTP_USER is either user FTP or SSH username. Most likely these are the same, but use the appropriate one for the type of update you wish to do.
 * FTP_PASS is the password for the username entered for FTP_USER. If you are using SSH public key authentication this can be omitted.
 * FTP_HOST is the hostname:port combination for your SSH/FTP server. The standard FTP port is 21 and the standard SSH port is 22.
 */
//define('FS_METHOD', 'ftpext');
//define('FTP_BASE', '/path/to/wordpress/');
//define('FTP_CONTENT_DIR', '/path/to/wordpress/wp-content/');
//define('FTP_PLUGIN_DIR ', '/path/to/wordpress/wp-content/plugins/');
//define('FTP_PUBKEY', '/home/username/.ssh/id_rsa.pub');
//define('FTP_PRIKEY', '/home/username/.ssh/id_rsa');
//define('FTP_USER', 'username');
//define('FTP_PASS', 'password');
//define('FTP_HOST', 'ftp.example.org:21');
 
/**
 * Block requests through the proxy.
 *
 * Those who are behind a proxy and want to prevent access to certain hosts may do so. This will
 * prevent plugins from working and core functionality, if you don't include api.wordpress.org.
 *
 * You block external URL requests by defining WP_HTTP_BLOCK_EXTERNAL in your wp-config.php file
 * and this will only allow localhost and your blog to make requests.
 * The constant WP_ACCESSIBLE_HOSTS will allow additional hosts to go through for requests. The format of the
 * WP_ACCESSIBLE_HOSTS constant is a comma separated list of hostnames to allow.
 *
 * @since 2.8.0
 * @link http://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/8927 Allow preventing external requests.
/** @since 2.9  */
//!defined('WP_HTTP_BLOCK_EXTERNAL') && define( 'WP_HTTP_BLOCK_EXTERNAL', false );
 
/*
 * The constant WP_ACCESSIBLE_HOSTS will allow additional hosts to go through for requests. The format of the
 * WP_ACCESSIBLE_HOSTS constant is a comma separated list of hostnames to allow.
 *
 * @since 2.8.0
 * @link http://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/8927 Allow preventing external requests.
 * $accessible_hosts = preg_split('|,\s*|', WP_ACCESSIBLE_HOSTS);
 * return !in_array( $check['host'], $accessible_hosts ); //Inverse logic, If its in the array, then we can't access it.
 */
//!defined('WP_ACCESSIBLE_HOSTS') && define( 'WP_ACCESSIBLE_HOSTS', 'askapache.com,askapache.org' );

Cookies!

There's always a little comfort in having non-default cookies for security (against auto-bots), and using shorter names also means smaller HTTP Packets.

The $cookie_hash is my hack to get around the fact that COOKIEHASH isn't definable in wp-config.

/**#@+
 * COOKIES
 * Used to guarantee unique hash cookies @since 1.5 */
$cookie_hash=md5(WP_SITEURL);
 
/** Set a cookie now to see if they are supported by the browser.
 * setcookie(TEST_COOKIE, 'WP Cookie check', 0, COOKIEPATH, COOKIE_DOMAIN);
 * @since 2.3.0 */
!defined('TEST_COOKIE') && define('TEST_COOKIE', 'wp_tc');
 
/* @since 2.6.0 */
!defined('LOGGED_IN_COOKIE') && define('LOGGED_IN_COOKIE', 'wp_li_' . $cookie_hash);
 
/* @since 2.6.0 */
!defined('SECURE_AUTH_COOKIE') && define('SECURE_AUTH_COOKIE', 'wp_sa_' . $cookie_hash);
 
/* @since 2.5.0 */
!defined('AUTH_COOKIE') && define('AUTH_COOKIE', 'wp_a_' . $cookie_hash);
 
/* @since 2.0.0 */
!defined('PASS_COOKIE') && define('PASS_COOKIE', 'wp_p_' . $cookie_hash);
 
/* @since 2.0.0 */
!defined('USER_COOKIE') && define('USER_COOKIE', 'wp_u_' . $cookie_hash);
 
/* ok unset this var, its not needed as COOKIEHASH will have this value, but is not definable in wp-config.php */
unset($cookie_hash);
 
/** @since 1.2.0 */
!defined('COOKIEPATH') && define('COOKIEPATH', preg_replace('|https?://[^/]+|i', '', WP_HOME . '/' ) );
 
/** @since 1.5.0 */
!defined('SITECOOKIEPATH') && define('SITECOOKIEPATH', preg_replace('|https?://[^/]+|i', '', WP_SITEURL . '/' ) );
 
/** @since 2.6.0 */
!defined('ADMIN_COOKIE_PATH') && define( 'ADMIN_COOKIE_PATH', SITECOOKIEPATH . 'wp-admin' );
 
/** @since 2.6.0 */
!defined('PLUGINS_COOKIE_PATH') && define( 'PLUGINS_COOKIE_PATH', preg_replace('|https?://[^/]+|i', '', WP_PLUGIN_URL)  );
 
/** @since 2.0.0 */
!defined('COOKIE_DOMAIN') && define('COOKIE_DOMAIN', $_SERVER['SERVER_NAME']);

/**
  * The WP_CACHE setting, if true, includes the wp-content/advanced-cache.php script, when executing wp-settings.php.
  * For an advanced caching plugin to use, static because you would only want one
  * if ( defined('WP_CACHE') )@include WP_CONTENT_DIR . '/advanced-cache.php';
  */
!defined('WP_CACHE') && define('WP_CACHE', true);
 
/** WordPress Localized Language, defaults to en_US.
 *
 * Change this to localize WordPress.  A corresponding MO file for the chosen
 * language must be installed to wp-content/languages. For example, install
 * de.mo to wp-content/languages and set WPLANG to 'de' to enable German
 * language support. */
!defined('WPLANG') && define ('WPLANG', 'en_US');
 
/** Stores the location of the language directory. First looks for language folder in WP_CONTENT_DIR
 *   and uses that folder if it exists. Or it uses the "languages" folder in WPINC. @since 2.1.0 */
//!defined('WP_LANG_DIR') && define('WP_LANG_DIR', ABSPATH . WPINC . '/languages');
 
/** LANGDIR defines what directory the WPLANG .mo file resides. If LANGDIR is not defined WordPress looks first to wp-content/languages and then wp-includes/languages for the .mo defined by WPLANG file.  Old static relative path maintained for limited backwards compatibility - won't work in some cases*/
//!defined('LANGDIR') && define('LANGDIR', 'wp-content/languages');
 
/** Stores the location of the WordPress directory of functions, classes, and core content. @since 1.0.0 */
//!defined('WPINC') && define('WPINC', 'wp-includes');

WPMU Stuff

I personally don't use.

/** Allows for the mu-plugins directory to be moved from the default location. @since 2.8.0 */
//!defined('WPMU_PLUGIN_DIR') && define( 'WPMU_PLUGIN_DIR', WP_CONTENT_DIR . '/mu-plugins' ); // full path, no trailing slash
 
/** Allows for the mu-plugins directory to be moved from the default location. @since 2.8.0 */
//!defined('WPMU_PLUGIN_URL') && define( 'WPMU_PLUGIN_URL', WP_CONTENT_URL . '/mu-plugins' ); // full url, no trailing slash
 
/** Allows for the mu-plugins directory to be moved from the default location. @since 2.8.0 */
//!defined( 'MUPLUGINDIR' ) && define( 'MUPLUGINDIR', 'wp-content/mu-plugins' ); // Relative to ABSPATH.  For back compat.

WordPress Database

This is usually the only thing I have to manually edit when creating a new site, unless I just use the same DB and modify the $table_prefix, (farther down). I run everything I possibly can in UTF-8, but if you don't already know alot about character sets, wow it is one of the most confusing things so you may want to save learning about that topic for another day. Otherwise the following are helpful (and show how confusing character sets are!)

• Character Sets and Collations MySQL Support
• Converting Database Character Sets
• UTF-8 character sets (UTF-8)

If you ever setup WP to use the builtin membership features, make sure you learn about the CUSTOM_USER_TABLE and CUSTOM_USER_META_TABLE constants, I've found them very helpful.

/**#@+
 * MySQL settings
 */
/** The name of the database for WordPress */
define('DB_NAME', 'askapachewpblog75');
 
/** The username to access the database */
define('DB_USER', 'askapache245d');
 
/** The password for the username to access the database */
define('DB_PASSWORD', 'asdfklj2340');
 
/** The hostname to connect to the database at */
define('DB_HOST', 'mysql.askapache.com');
 
/** The charset of the database */
define('DB_CHARSET', 'utf8');
 
/** The collation of the database */
define('DB_COLLATE', 'utf8_general_ci');

$table_prefix

The $table_prefix is the value placed in the front of your database tables. Change the value if you want to use something other than wp_ for your database prefix. Typically this is changed if you are installing multiple WordPress blogs in the same database, and also for enhanced security.

Its a safe and good idea to change this value pre-installation to add more security to your WordPress blog. Exploits attempted against your WordPress blog by malicious crackers often are built with the premise that your blog uses the prefix wp_, by changing the value you mitigate some attack vectors.

/**
 * WordPress Database Table prefix.
 *
 * You can have multiple installations in one database if you give each a unique
 * prefix. Only numbers, letters, and underscores please!
 */
$table_prefix  = 'ar15_';
 
/** CUSTOM_USER_TABLE and CUSTOM_USER_META_TABLE are used to designated that the user and usermeta tables normally utilized by WordPress are not used, instead these values/tables are used to store your user information. */
//!defined('CUSTOM_USER_TABLE') && define('CUSTOM_USER_TABLE', $table_prefix . 'my_users');
//!defined('CUSTOM_USER_META_TABLE') && define('CUSTOM_USER_META_TABLE', $table_prefix . 'my_usermeta');

Setup PHP Ini Settings

/** Turns the output of errors on or off, you really never want this on, you should only view errors by reading the log file. */
ini_set('display_errors', WP_DEBUG_DISPLAY);
 
/** Tells whether script error messages should be logged to the server's error log or error_log. */
ini_set('log_errors', 'On');
 
/** http://us.php.net/manual/en/timezones.php */
ini_set('date.timezone', 'America/Indianapolis');
 
/** Where to log php errors */
ini_set('error_log', ASKAPACHE_ROOT . '/logs/php_error.log');
 
/** Set the memory limit, otherwise defaults to '32M' */
ini_set('memory_limit', WP_MEMORY_LIMIT);

Sessions are slow

So I only use sessions when I have a specific use... In this case I need sessions only when one of the tools in the /online-tools/ directory is being used. And that is for the captcha image. In the future I won't ever use sessions.

if(preg_match( '#^/online-tools/#',$_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'])) session_start();

Include Custom Files

Sure you could use the my-hacks.php that WP allows, or you can just stick your functions in your TEMPLATEPATH/functions.php file, but they are executed only after the wp-settings.php file, which may be too late for your file.

In the past I've also used the auto_prepend_file settings to run my script before anything (index.php) but I ran into some issues on different hosts, and it wasn't as portable.

This is useful because you can have a file with globally available functions that you can use in non-WP areas as well as WP areas. I am moving away from this more and more as I learn more about classes and build plugins instead for portability.

include_once ASKAPACHE_ROOT . '/includes/myfunctions.inc';
 
/** Sets up WordPress vars and included files. */
require_once(ABSPATH . 'wp-settings.php');
?>

Some Useful PHP

I am constantly trying to make my sites and code more portable, so I am using plugins alot more to accomplish things that I use to do with separate php. Here are some examples of minimal php.

add_filter("the_generator", create_function('$a','return "";'));
add_filter('the_content', create_function('$a', 'return ((is_feed())? $a."<p><a href=\"".get_permalink()."\">".get_the_title()."</a> originally appeared on ".get_bloginfo("name").".</p>" : $a);'), 99999);
add_filter('excerpt_length', create_function('$a', 'return 300;'),99);
add_filter('excerpt_more', create_function('$a', 'return "&hellip;";'),99);
add_action( 'wp_head', create_function('$a','echo "<link rel=\"pingback\" href=\"'.get_bloginfo('pingback_url').'\" />\n";'), 95 );
add_action( 'wp_head', create_function('$a','echo "<link rel=\"schema.rss\" href=\"http://purl.org/rss/1.0/\" />\n";'), 96 );
add_action( 'wp_head', create_function('$a','echo "<link rel=\"schema.rel\" href=\"http://purl.org/vocab/relationship/\" />\n";'), 97 );
add_action( 'wp_head', create_function('$a','echo "<link rel=\"meta\" type=\"application/rdf+xml\" href=\"/foaf.rdf\" />\n";'), 98 );
add_action( 'wp_head', create_function('$a','echo "<link href=\"/favicon.ico\" rel=\"shortcut icon\" type=\"image/x-icon\" />\n";'), 99 );

Debugging Note

If you read this far than you probably know how important debugging is, but I sometimes like to stick the best tips deep in my articles to make sure only YOU find it. GRTFM isn't used on this site, it's mostly a requirement because my writing can get pretty bad.. The point, debugging is more than a crucial requirement if you want to do anything cool. Don't worry I got you.. check my AskApache Debug Viewer Plugin from the official WP site. It's pretty close to providing as verbose amount of information that I could possibly figure out how to get out of php, probably more than you have ever seen at least, I focused on quantity. I use it all the time on new installs as there is no setup required and it tells me advanced information about the setup of the server, hacker code for sure.

Here's a quick function to see set global vars, I just think this is interesting code.

function askapache_global_debug(){
  global $_GET,$_POST,$_COOKIE,$_SESSION,$_ENV,$_FILES,$_SERVER,$_REQUEST,$HTTP_POST_FILES,$HTTP_POST_VARS,$HTTP_SERVER_VARS,$HTTP_RAW_POST_DATA,$HTTP_GET_VARS,$HTTP_COOKIE_VARS,$HTTP_ENV_VARS;
  $gv=create_function('$n','global $$n; ob_start(); if ( is_array($$n) && sizeof($$n)>0 && print("[{$n}]\n") ) print_r($$n);return ob_get_clean();');
  foreach (array('_GET','_POST','_COOKIE','_SESSION','_ENV','_FILES','_SERVER','_REQUEST','HTTP_POST_FILES','HTTP_POST_VARS','HTTP_SERVER_VARS','HTTP_RAW_POST_DATA','HTTP_GET_VARS','HTTP_COOKIE_VARS','HTTP_ENV_VARS') as $k)echo $gv($k);
  print_r(get_defined_constants());
}

Also check the WordPress Codex page: Editing wp-config.php and Perishable Press's: Stupid WordPress Tricks

Advanced WordPress wp-config.php Tweaks originally appeared on AskApache.com

Over the past 10 or so years I've been directly or indirectly involved in configuring/administrating/hacking thousands of websites, and I realized today that I've actually learned quite a bit about how to really make them work hard for me, instead of the other way around. It came as a mild shock to think of where I was back then vs. now because the improvements and optimizations are hundreds of smaller improvements, but taken together, the optimization hacks I've found through trial and error and much reading are as Donald would say, YOOUUGE compared to a basic website setup.

I use this awesome skeleton setup for all my high-paying clients sorry poor people! and also of course on this blog, which I use as a bleeding-edge dev server for my crazy testing. So realize that I'm already past this setup and using it to do cooler stuff. In order for you to use these more advanced ideas, you first need to get up to speed on what I'm doing so you know what I'm talking about. This article tries to help you accomplish that... remains to be seen.

An Optimized Website, The Real Deal

This first article is to give you some ideas and get you thinking and reading before the first article in this series comes out. This series details how to setup, configure, secure, optimize, and manage a website the best possible way I can come up with. It pieces together all the AskApache hacks and tricks and uses methods and ideas discussed all over this blog and all over the net and glues them all together to show you how to have the most optimized, fastest, best website setup I can think of.

Knowing the why and how behind the operation of a Web Server allows us to optimize that operation. For this example we will be creating the website www.askapache.com, which will be running WordPress and php. We will also set up static.askapache.com to serve all of our sites uploads, images, css and javascript files, flash files, etc. with advanced caching and security using Apache Server .htaccess files. So lets get started and take a look at this site structure for a moment.

/home/askapache.com
|-- /home/askapache.com/backups/
|-- /home/askapache.com/public_html/
|-- /home/askapache.com/inc/
|-- /home/askapache.com/logs/
|-- /home/askapache.com/static/
|-- /home/askapache.com/tmp/
|-- /home/askapache.com/.htpasswd-basic
`-- /home/askapache.com/.htpasswd-digest

• /backups/ - For encrypted backups of WordPress database and site files. And any other backups.
• /public_html/ - The document root for www.askapache.com
• /inc/ - Folder to keep your php include files for extra security and easy management.
• /logs/ - Save your php, apache, and other logs here or create symlinks to them.
• /static/ - The document root for static.askapache.com
• /tmp/ - Only need this if your host doesn't already have a /tmp folder

Strong Security, Top to Bottom

Simply by implementing correct access permissions, file permissions, password protection and segmenting various folders and services we are already ahead of the game. I've always taken security extremely seriously, so you can benefit from alot of the simple solutions I'm recommending for a really locked down site.

Indeed, security is a major part of every step of this setup process, as security concerns are what drives a lot of the motivations I have for coming up with this setup in the first place. We will be doing very simple but very effective site security like the following items, which is a short list compared to everything we will be doing.

• Fixing file permissions automatically
• Searching for modified files on the server
• Encrypting your backups
• Get alerted to breakin attempts
• Block tons of bad clients
• Disallowing cgi scripts or any other handlers, just serve files.
• Configuring PHP
• Password Protection for certain areas

Ready for Warfare?

My past work for an Internet Service Provider, followed by 4 years of auditing the security of organizations external/internal networks has given me a fresh perspective on website security, and I think it allows me to see what would really be effective at preventing and killing attacks. In fact just last night I was once again doing some research into some off-the-wall security topics, and I discovered a new defense method that I will be writing about very soon. I believe that this new method, could be quickly adopted and implemented by hosting providers and software developers, which would result in us finally taking the Internet back from all those zombies and robots. This method will be discussed in great detail soon, and will be a core part of this site setups security and optimization.

Built to Bleed Speed

Serve's files as fast and efficiently as possible using advanced caching, HTTP Protocols, php/server configurations.

Many of the articles and research on this blog is about improving the speed and efficiency of your website. In fact that is why I am helping develop open-source software to block spammers from WordPress blogs... not because I'm bothered by the spam, but because they make the net slow! So lets look at some of the ideas we'll be implementing.

Many techniques I've been using and tweaking for several years, and recently many of them were included in the high-performance websites list. Of course we will be taking a look at this list in practical terms, meaning almost all of it, the caching, compression, etc., will be automated in keeping with our "comfort" goal, which is to say we want to make the Web Developer and Server Admin's lives as easy and comfy as possible. After all, we do the work right?

1. Reduce HTTP requests - Reducing 304 requests with Cache-Control Headers
2. Use a customized php.ini - Creating and using a custom PHP.ini
3. Add an Expires header - Caching with mod_expires on Apache
4. Gzip components
5. Make CSS and unobtrusive Javascript as external files not inline
6. Reduce DNS lookups - Use Static IP address, use a subdomain with static IP address for static content.
7. Minimize Javascript - Refactor the code, compress with dojo
8. Avoid external redirects - Use internal redirection with mod_rewrite, The correct way to redirect with 301
9. Turn off ETags - Prevent Caching with htaccess
10. Make AJAX cacheable and small

AskApache.com, Fastest Site Ever!

Ok it might not be the #1, but surely the top 10.. ;)

I'm very proud of the performance I am able to achieve on this site. Very proud. I started looking for ways to improve the wp-cache and wp-super-cache WordPress plugins, and came up with hacks for both of them.. but they still didn't do what I wanted so I started from scratch and wrote my own caching plugin.

With much more advanced caching options and unquestionably higher performance and lower time usage on the machine. I'm hesitant to release it to the public until I get faded on it.. I just really love it.. it has been running my site for several months now and I keep finding ways to improve it.. Stay tuned.

One feature it has is the ability to allow negotiation of a resource between apache and the client. Think almost transparent mutli-lingual blogs, mutliple formats per document (look at the rdf for this page for an example*). But that plugin is the future and this is the present.. so back to it we go.

Pamper the Webmaster with Extreme Comfort

This section alone would make this setup appealing. I have developed all types of techniques and methods to make my life as easy as possible. I could literally DIE right now and this blog would continue to run and operate for years on its own. The general philosophy that I have used to get to where I can goto the beach with my laptop and do all this crazy stuff is the idea of perfection. That may sound a little put-offish, but it basically means I will focus in on one very specific area for improvement or research and just get sick with it. Most of this blogs articles are enlightening examples of this in action. I will take a relatively unknown or unused piece of code or software and experiment with it until I feel I have it down, then I move on to the next item of never-ending research. Mostly I think this is just plain habit from when I was studying security. I'm much better at this then that :)

Apache ErrorDocuments

The 57 HTTP Status Codes and Apache ErrorDocuments article is a prime example. I was simply searching for an authoritative list of HTTP status codes, an issue not many web people find worth their time, and that search led to some of the most useful stuff I've found about the Web

This "Comfort" article will include multi-language, intelligent, and optimized error documents for handling any type of HTTP error with class and allow us to stop spammers, save bandwidth, redirect correctly, etc.. You will probably be surprised at all the uses an Apache ErrorDocument can have.. It IS one of the foundations of the HTTP-based Net after all.

Emphasis on Easy Upgrades

The whole setup is geared to make hassle-free WordPress/PHP/application upgrades possible by keeping different types of files in separate places, keeping backups, other misc tricks and since all of these files are in /home/askapache.com, your FTP connection can still access every file easily. Sometimes security and optimizing your server can lead to it being more of a pain to do updates, backups, and general maintenance. This article tries to overwhelm the balance with a trifecta of goals.

Move to a new host? Ok!

Comfort to me also means being able to pack up the whole website and database and move to another web host in under an hour. I can move the whole AskApache site to one of several other hosting providers accounts I have in about 30minutes. If this was a clients site or I was getting paid more, I'd also be focused on round-robin DNS technology, balance-load setups, and just go crazy making it fast.

Staying Online, Improving Uptime

Ever since I started sharing information and software to stop all these resource hogging zombies attacking everything I've been attacked several times. Normally I get over 10K exploit attempts or requests per day, which I pretty much block 100%. But a few times they've actually tried to DDOS me off the net in a distributed attack. I have implemented several "poor mans" techniques to put up your best effort at surviving, which I did. Basically you want to configure your server to KILL connections just as fast as possible and prevent your server resources from skyrocketing and surpassing your quotas. A skilled attacker could easily shut you down even without the use of a widespread botnet if they are clever, which could be devastating to your small blog or site if it goes down at a crucial instant.

Organization with Templates and Systems

I used to work with a guy who did alot of the coldfusion programming for us, and I used to cringe every time I was called in to upgrade a site or do a re-design. Files and folders EVERYWHERE! Literally images in every folder, multiple index.html, index1.html, index-old.html, and on and on it went.. It would take me hours just to reverse-engineer the site enough so I could modify files on it without having some unkown consequence happen.

Do You Have a Cluttered Desktop?

Everyone has this problem, what I do all the time is just grab everything on my desktop and put it in a folder named with the date. Then the process repeats itself and invariably a few months later I'm looking at a cluttered screen again.

This absolutely is the worst thing that can happen to a website, worst for security, comfort for webmaster, and speed. So this setup addresses that issue completely heads on. With all the different pages, tools, and resources available on this blog, I can almost promise you that my site has less files than yours. No small feat to be sure, but worth every second I spent researching how to do it now that its on and popping.

What's a Website really?

All hosts are different, but any host worth their salt is running some kind of BSD/Linux operating system, and that is good news because those operating systems all use very similarly excellent file/folder structures with huge organization systems. If your web hosting provider is running on a Windows based operating system or other locked/proprietary software than this article is not for you and I would recommend switching hosts to a BSD/Linux open-source operating system.

Listening for Requests with Web Hosting and DNS

First you set your website up so it can start serving.

1. You buy your domain name, which just gives you the right to use it.
2. You pay your webhost for an account on their machine running a Server connected to the Net via a fast connection link.
3. You pay a DNS provider to redirect requests for your domain name to be sent to your webhosts machine running the server.

Sub-Domain for Serving Assets

This is a very cool method I've been using more and more frequently because it makes updates, upgrades, and changes so much easier to manage. And segmenting various parts of the site is smart security, and even smarter in the way of speeding up a website and keeping your servers running mean and lean.

Full Site Structure Expanded

/home/askapache.com
|-- /home/askapache.com/backups/
|-- /home/askapache.com/public_html/
|   |-- /home/askapache.com/public_html/about/
|   |-- /home/askapache.com/public_html/admin/
|   |-- /home/askapache.com/public_html/cgi-bin/
|   |-- /home/askapache.com/public_html/.htaccess
|   |-- /home/askapache.com/public_html/index.php
|   `-- /home/askapache.com/public_html/robots.txt
|-- /home/askapache.com/inc/
|   |-- /home/askapache.com/inc/config.inc.php
|   `-- /home/askapache.com/inc/settings.inc.php
|-- /home/askapache.com/logs/
|   |-- /home/askapache.com/logs/access.log
|   |-- /home/askapache.com/logs/error.log
|   |-- /home/askapache.com/logs/logins.log
|   |-- /home/askapache.com/logs/modsec_audit.log
|   |-- /home/askapache.com/logs/modsec_debug.log
|   `-- /home/askapache.com/logs/php_error.log
|-- /home/askapache.com/static/
|   |-- /home/askapache.com/static/css/
|   |-- /home/askapache.com/static/flv/
|   |-- /home/askapache.com/static/img/
|   |-- /home/askapache.com/static/js/
|   |-- /home/askapache.com/static/mp3/
|   |-- /home/askapache.com/static/pdf/
|   |-- /home/askapache.com/static/swf/
|   |-- /home/askapache.com/static/.htaccess
|   |-- /home/askapache.com/static/index.html
|   `-- /home/askapache.com/static/robots.txt
|-- /home/askapache.com/tmp/
|-- /home/askapache.com/.htpasswd-basic
`-- /home/askapache.com/.htpasswd-digest

Full Expanded Structure

/home/askapache.com
|-- /home/askapache.com/backups/
|-- /home/askapache.com/public_html/
|   |-- /home/askapache.com/public_html/about/
|   |   `-- /home/askapache.com/public_html/about/index.html
|   |-- /home/askapache.com/public_html/admin/
|   |   |-- /home/askapache.com/public_html/admin/.htaccess
|   |   `-- /home/askapache.com/public_html/admin/index.html
|   |-- /home/askapache.com/public_html/cgi-bin/
|   |   |-- /home/askapache.com/public_html/cgi-bin/bin/
|   |   |   |-- /home/askapache.com/public_html/cgi-bin/bin/.htaccess
|   |   |   |-- /home/askapache.com/public_html/cgi-bin/bin/php.cgi*
|   |   |   |-- /home/askapache.com/public_html/cgi-bin/bin/php.ini
|   |   |   |-- /home/askapache.com/public_html/cgi-bin/bin/php4.cgi*
|   |   |   `-- /home/askapache.com/public_html/cgi-bin/bin/php5.cgi*
|   |   |-- /home/askapache.com/public_html/cgi-bin/private/
|   |   |   |-- /home/askapache.com/public_html/cgi-bin/private/.htaccess
|   |   |   |-- /home/askapache.com/public_html/cgi-bin/private/debug.php
|   |   |   `-- /home/askapache.com/public_html/cgi-bin/private/stats.php
|   |   |-- /home/askapache.com/public_html/cgi-bin/.htaccess
|   |   |-- /home/askapache.com/public_html/cgi-bin/login.php
|   |   |-- /home/askapache.com/public_html/cgi-bin/printenv.cgi*
 
|   |   `-- /home/askapache.com/public_html/cgi-bin/redir.cgi*
|   |-- /home/askapache.com/public_html/.htaccess
|   |-- /home/askapache.com/public_html/index.php
|   `-- /home/askapache.com/public_html/robots.txt
|-- /home/askapache.com/inc/
|   |-- /home/askapache.com/inc/config.php
|   `-- /home/askapache.com/inc/functions.php
|-- /home/askapache.com/logs/
|   |-- /home/askapache.com/logs/access.log
|   |-- /home/askapache.com/logs/error.log
|   |-- /home/askapache.com/logs/logins.log
|   |-- /home/askapache.com/logs/modsec_audit.log
|   |-- /home/askapache.com/logs/modsec_debug.log
|   `-- /home/askapache.com/logs/php_error.log
|-- /home/askapache.com/static/
|   |-- /home/askapache.com/static/css/
|   |   `-- /home/askapache.com/static/css/apache.css
|   |-- /home/askapache.com/static/flv/
|   |   `-- /home/askapache.com/static/flv/apache.flv
|   |-- /home/askapache.com/static/img/
|   |   |-- /home/askapache.com/static/img/apache.gif
|   |   |-- /home/askapache.com/static/img/apache.jpg
|   |   `-- /home/askapache.com/static/img/apache.png
|   |-- /home/askapache.com/static/js/
|   |   `-- /home/askapache.com/static/js/apache.js
|   |-- /home/askapache.com/static/mp3/
|   |   `-- /home/askapache.com/static/mp3/apache.mp3
|   |-- /home/askapache.com/static/pdf/
|   |   `-- /home/askapache.com/static/pdf/apache.pdf
|   |-- /home/askapache.com/static/swf/
|   |   `-- /home/askapache.com/static/swf/apache.swf
|   |-- /home/askapache.com/static/.htaccess
|   |-- /home/askapache.com/static/index.html
|   `-- /home/askapache.com/static/robots.txt
|-- /home/askapache.com/tmp/
|-- /home/askapache.com/.htpasswd-basic
`-- /home/askapache.com/.htpasswd-digest

Merchant Account Services

If you want to make it easier for your customers to shop at your site, check out merchant account services from Network Solutions. Services like these can help bring credibility and security to your online business.

Apache is Open-Source

The buzz about apache and open-source is very real, apache is becoming more of a discussed topic as people realize the power and importance of Doing it and Doing it and Doing it well. - Movable Type Apache Installs made easy, Checking out Apache Web logs, Securing WordPress with .htaccess, WordPress Permalinks and .htaccess, New search and replace module for apache!, creating an .htaccess template, .htaccess allow directive

Check back in a week for the first article, or better yet subscribe to my rss feed or use the comment form below to get notified.

Optimize a Website for Speed, Security, and Easy Management originally appeared on AskApache.com