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4th January 2019 - 3 minutes read time
Whilst it is possible to view the contents of an SSL cert from within most modern browsers I occasionally find the need to use the command line to find out the same information. I find this useful when renewing certificates as browsers can occasionally cache certificates for longer than expected, causing false results.
The following command connects to the server, downloads the SSL certificate from port 443 and then uses the openssl tool to extract the information from the certificate into a readable format.
Timing web requests is possible in curl using the -w or --write-out flag. This flag takes a number of different options, including several time based options.
If you are working on the Linux command line then sometimes you'll do a search to find out how to run a command that performs a task. I don't usually copy and paste commands in unless I can see what is going on, which used to mean spending time going through man pages and documentation trying to find out what this or that flag does.
Creating a symlink is a common way of ensuring that the directory structure of a deployment will always be the same. For example you might create a symlink so that the release directory of release123/docroot will instead be just current.
I'm a proponent of automation, so when I find myself running the same commands over and over I always look for a way of wrapping that in an alias or script.
Grep is a really powerful tool for finding things in files. I often use it to scan for plugins in the Drupal codebase or to scan through a CSV or log file for data.
For example, to scan for user centric ViewsFilter plugins in the Drupal core directory use this command (assuming you are relative to the core directory).
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