How to Extract SSL Certificates from a PFX File on macOS
If you’ve ever been handed a .pfx file and told to “just upload the certificate,” you know the pain that’s coming.
PFX (PKCS#12) files bundle your private key, SSL certificate, and any intermediate certificates into one encrypted file. That’s great until you actually need to extract those pieces for something like an NGINX server, AWS load balancer, or third-party CDN that wants them all separately.
MacOS has OpenSSL built in, which is all you need. Here’s a simple shell script I use to generate the cert, private key, and chain in one shot and make them clipboard-ready for easy pasting.
How to enable MacFuse/PCloud Drive on Mac Sonoma 14.2.1
I recently upgraded to Mac Sonoma 14.2.1 and MacFuse stopped loading which affected my ability to load PCloud and NTFS drives. I spent a few days trying to troubleshoot everything and in the end it turned out I had to disable Mac System Integrity Protection to get everything to load. I'm sharing in case it helps anyone else.
To disable SIP on your Mac Sonoma for extensions like MacFuse and pCloud Drive:
How to Delete a Row in Excel Using the Elgato Stream Deck
Recently I was working on a massive Excel Spreadsheet and needed to manually review each entry and clean up rows that were no longer needed. The Elgato Stream Deck came in handy for a quick shortcut so I thought I'd share it in case anyone else can use it.
I took this opportunity to practice creating the first of what I hope are many training videos. This took me around 30 minutes to do from start to finish as I had to learn the video editing software including how to record, how to split and edit, and how to add text overlays. Hopefully the next videos will be faster but it was a fun exercise and I hope someone else finds it useful.
Installing font awesome pro with bun
After recently switching to bun.sh, I was trying to install Font Awesome Pro. It uses a private registry but their docs have not been updated to support non-npm package managers and bun does not yet support .npmrc files.
You can configure a private registry using an organization scope. First, you must get your auth token from your paid Font Awesome account by going to your account page, scrolling down to the Tokens section, and copying the token.
How to Get Laravel Debugging to work with PHPStorm and MAMP Pro 5
This has been one of the more aggravating things I've had to deal with in setting up software for development. I've followed the official documentation from JetBrains, over 30 other blog tutorials, and literally failed in getting any of them to work.
I figured out an easy way to make the setup work so I'm sharing it in case someone else finds it useful and for self-reference since I'll probably forget how to do this again in 6 months when I start a new project.
Self-signed SSL certificates not working with MAMP and Chrome
I use MAMP Pro for most of my PHP development and Chrome has annoyingly been blocking the self-signed SSL certificates MAMP generates, saying the certificate is not valid and "Your connection is not private":
How to get website average latency in BASH
I was working on a project today and wanted to be able to get the average latency for an API that I was working on. Performance is a concern because we're running the API over a VPN, and then SSH tunneling over to another server. I wanted a quick way to do it and wrote a little bash function that will calculate the average for me. I couldn't find an example on how to do this online so I'm sharing in case anyone else runs into the same issue.
This is tested on Mac only. Add these two functions to your .bashrc and do a shellupdate in terminal to load the latest, or just grab my dotfiles from my github: https://github.com/gregvarghese/dotfiles
How to fix npm WARN checkPermissions Missing write access to /usr/local/lib/node_modules
A friend was running into an error when using node to install a package. When installing the package he was getting the error "npm WARN checkPermissions Missing write access to /usr/local/lib/node_modules". The fix turned out to be pretty simple and he just needed to take ownership of the node_modules folder.
Open terminal and run this simple snippet to fix the problem:
How to remove wrapping tags in PHP Storm
How often do you code something and need to delete a wrapping link or div? I was using PHPStorm and had grabbed some code from another file that had links in the tags which weren't needed in the new file. I didn't want to manually remove each link and after a quick look around PHPStorm's menus, discovered that PHPStorm has a really useful command to remove the wrapping element for you.
Select the element, then from the menu, choose Code > Unwrap/Remove... or use the keyboard shortcut, Command + Shift + Backspace and then choose the appropriate wrapping element to remove.
How to fix VMWare Fusion Pro 10 “Cannot find a valid peer process to connect to”
I recently got a new mac and was migrating a VMWare Windows Virtual Machine from my other computer. When starting the virtual machine, I received a random message from VMWare Fusion saying "Cannot find a valid peer process to connect to." The fix was rather simple as it was just Apple blocking VMWare from running. To fix it, follow these steps: