Blog do Pedro Padron

On the past few days I’ve been working on a PHP spamd client, and I think it is somewhat usable for now since it already implements all of the protocol commands. This is release 0.1.0, so you might expect some API changes for the next versions. Feedback is always welcome.

I tried to make this the most straight-forward as possible, abstracting some nasty things that happens under the hood, so you can do things like:

require_once 'SpamAssassin/Client.php';
 
$params = array(
    "hostname" => "localhost",
    "port" => "783",
    "user" => "ppadron",
);
 
$sa = new SpamAssassin_Client($params);
 
$message = file_get_contents('/path/to/message/file');
 
var_dump($sa->isSpam($message));

bool(true)

Methods available

ping()

Pings the server to test the connection

getSpamReport($message)

Returns a detailed report if the message is spam or null if it’s ham

headers($message)

Processes the message and returns it’s headers (like X-Spam-Flag and X-Spam-Status)

check($message)

Checks if a message is spam with the CHECK protocol command

isSpam($message)

Shortcut to check() method that returns a boolean

process($message)

Processes the message, checks it for spam and returning it’s modified version

symbols($message)

Returns all rules matched by the message

learn($message, $learnType)

Uses SpamAssassin learning feature with TELL. Must be enabled on the server.

report($message)

Report message as spam, both local and remote

revoke($message)

Revokes a message previously reported as spam

I’m still working on providing some good usage examples, but I’ve put (temporarily) API docs available here. In the meantime, you can browse the tests directory and learn some basic stuff.

If you want to use this library to implement a spam filter for your mail server, maybe you should consider using the spamc command line utility or the Perl library that already comes with SpamAssassin (which was my main source of inspiration).

This library is most useful when you already have stuff written in PHP and you need to do something with SpamAssassin. If you have a webmail written in PHP and would like to interact with a remote SpamAssassin server to report spam, for example.

The project is hosted @ Github, so you can:

• browse the repository
• download the package as zip/tgz
• clone the repository:

  $ git clone git://github.com/w3p/php-spamassassin

I owe you a PEAR repo to serve this package.

If you happen to use some CPAN module that is not already available in any repo (always check EPEL), you might consider packaging it yourself. It can really be a pain if you try to do it from scratch, that’s why you should consider using cpanspec. It’s a simple tool that will generate a specfile given a CPAN package name or package file.

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Sorry, this entry is only available in Português.

Compared to the old address (ppadron.w3p.com.br), the new one (ppadron.blog.br) is easier to remember and more intuitive. If you happen to follow this blog, please update your RSS reader. The old address will still work though, thanks to Apache’s RedirectMatch directive. This is the .htaccess file at ppadron.w3p.com.br:

RedirectMatch permanent (.*)$ http://ppadron.blog.br$1

This will redirect (301 Moved Permanently) anything from the old domain to the new one, preserving Wordpress permalinks.

A few weeks ago I did the first release of augeas, my first PECL extension. Augeas is a configuration editing tool that provides an unified API to different configuration file formats. Quoting the official website:

Augeas is a configuration editing tool. It parses configuration files in their native formats and transforms them into a tree. Configuration changes are made by manipulating this tree and saving it back into native config files.

After the second release, I notified David Lutterkort, who was kind enough to add the PHP extension to the list of language bindings in the Augeas website.

Well, today I just released version 0.4.0 (thanks to Pierre Joye for fixing the upload page), which includes a new method (Augeas::mv()) and finally a PHPUnit test suite (AllTests.php).

The next items in my TODO list regarding this project are (in no particular order):

• Augeas::defVar() wrapping aug_defvar()
• Augeas::__toString() wrapping aug_print() to make debugging easier
• complete docbook documentation instead of this wiki

Here’s a sample of what you can do with Augeas:

$aug = new Augeas();
 
// let's disable register_globals!
$aug->set("/files/etc/php.ini/PHP/register_globals", "Off");
 
if (!$aug->save()) {
    die("You do not have enough privileges to edit php.ini file.");
}

How easy was that? No regex, no fopen, no hassle.