Category: Tips & Tricks

Netdata is a powerful tool that can help you monitor your servers with ease and efficiency. It’s a distributed, real-time, performance, and health monitoring platform that can collect and display thousands of metrics from your servers, hardware, containers, and applications, including RAM and CPU usage.

Netdata has many features and benefits that make it a great choice for server monitoring, such as:

• Real-time data collection and visualization: Netdata collects metrics every second, and displays them on interactive charts that update every second as well. This means you can see exactly what’s happening on your servers without any delays.
• Infinite scalability: Netdata can scale to any number of servers and metrics without compromising performance or accuracy. It stores the data locally on each server, which means it doesn’t need a central database or a query engine. You can also use Netdata Cloud to view metrics from multiple servers in one dashboard, with secure streaming and encryption.
• Flexible and modular architecture: Netdata can monitor any system, service, or application that exposes metrics with the help of its modular architecture and hundreds of integrations. You can also extend Netdata with custom collectors, plugins, dashboards, alarms, notifications, and more. Netdata is open-source and community-driven, so you can always find new features and improvements.
• Zero configuration: Netdata is designed to work out of the box, without any need for configuration. It can auto-detect metrics from your servers and applications, and display them on preconfigured dashboards with meaningful visualizations and health alarms.

Netdata is compatible with RunCloud, so you can use it alongside our platform to manage your web applications.

How to Install Netdata on RunCloud Servers

If you want to install Netdata on your RunCloud server, you can follow these simple steps:

1. Sign up for Netdata: To use Netdata Cloud, you’ll need to sign up for a free account on their website. Netdata Cloud will allow you to view metrics from multiple servers in one dashboard, and access other features such as Metric Correlations and War Rooms.
2. SSH into your RunCloud server: To install Netdata on your server, you’ll need to access it via SSH. If you don’t know how to do this, you can read our post on how to connect to your RunCloud server using SSH. You will need your server’s IP address, username, and password or SSH key.
3. Open Installation Script: Once you have logged into your server via SSH, go to the Netdata dashboard and go to the “All Nodes” tab. Once there, click on “+ Add Node” button to view the installation script.

4. Execute the given command: You can install Netdata on your server with a single kickstart command. Change the update channel to “Stable“, and then copy the given installation command.

Upon execution, the above command will download and run a script that will install Netdata and its dependencies on your server. Go back to your SSH terminal, paste the given command, and then press ‘Enter’.

During installation, it will ask you some questions about automatic updates, release channels, anonymous statistics, and Netdata Cloud connection. Press ‘Y’ to confirm the installation and then press ‘Enter’.

After this, the installation daemon will ask you which services should be restarted. You can use the arrow keys to navigate up/down and press the spacebar to select/deselect options if you want to do so.

In most cases, default selection is right choice for most people. Press the ‘Tab’ key on your keyboard – this will move cursor to the next position. Make sure that the ‘Ok’ is highlighted, and then press ‘Enter‘ to continue the installation.

You will be asked to confirm the installation once again, press ‘Y’ to confirm, and then press ‘Enter‘.

After this, the installation script will once again ask you which services should be restarted – leave these settings to default. Press ‘Tab‘ to highlight the ‘Ok’ button, and press ‘Enter‘ to finish the installation.

That’s it! You have successfully installed Netdata on your RunCloud server. You can now access the Netdata web interface by visiting your Netdata dashboard.

How to View Server Metrics

To see the RAM and CPU usage of different servers, you can use either Netdata’s web interface or Netdata Cloud. Both options will show you interactive charts that update every second with real-time metrics.

Using Netdata’s Web Interface

Netdata hosts a dashboard on your server, which you can view by visiting port 19999 of your server. You can change this port by editing the Netdata configuration file. By default, RunCloud blocks all non-standard ports. Therefore, you’ll need to either connect to your server via a VPN, or open up the ports to visit the dashboard.

To open up ports, go to your RunCloud dashboard and open the “Security” tab of the server. Click on “Add New Rule” and create a new rule to open up the specified ports on TCP and UDP. Once you have created all of the rules, you’ll need to click “Deploy” to save the changes.

Once you have opened up the firewall, anyone on the internet can view your Netdata Dashboard by visiting http://<ip address>:19999.

Note: this will allow you to view the dashboard only for this particular server – if you have more than one server, you must repeat this step for all of them.

This option presents a simplified user interface that displays all metrics of the selected server. This is useful if you don’t want to log into your Netdata Cloud account to view the metrics. However, you won’t be able to make any changes in this dashboard; for that, you will still need to log into your account.

Using Netdata Cloud Dashboard

Once you have connected a node to your cloud account, you can see it in your dashboard. One cloud account can connect to many servers, so you’ll need to navigate the dashboard and search for the server that you want to view.

To view all available nodes connected to your account, navigate to the “All Nodes” page, and switch to the “Nodes” tab to view all connected nodes.

In the above screenshot, we can see two nodes are connected to our Netdata account. The first node is inactive, and the second node is posting metrics to the cloud. You can click on this node to view detailed metrics.

The above screenshot shows the overview of the system metrics. To view detailed metrics such as disk, memory, CPU usage, etc. for a particular application, click on the “Applications” button in the tab on the right of the screen.

Besides monitoring, you can also use this dashboard to invite new users and collaborate with them. 

Final Thoughts

Netdata is a powerful and easy-to-use tool that provides real-time insights into your server’s performance and health. You can use Netdata to visualize and analyze various metrics such as memory usage, CPU load, disk I/O, network traffic, and more. You can also set up alerts and notifications to get notified when something goes wrong with your web app.

By using Netdata on RunCloud, you can benefit from the seamless integration and compatibility between the two platforms. If you have any questions or feedback, please feel free to leave a comment below.

If you’re tired of managing your own servers – you might want to check out RunCloud (yep, that’s us!). RunCloud is built for developers that want to focus on shipping great work, not on managing their infrastructure. We provide painless server configuration so you don’t need to spend hours figuring it out – get started with RunCloud today & get up and running in minutes.

In most cases, we normally recommend using transactional email services such as Mailgun, Amazon SES, or Mandrill rather than sending emails from your own service. But if you are feeling enthusiastic you can even set up your own server too.

That’s what we’re going to cover in this article.

Take your tech skills to the next level with our easy-to-follow guide on how to send emails from PHP! No need to worry about complicated code – our step-by-step walkthrough makes it a breeze. This guide will guide you through setting up your own mailing service on your Ubuntu server or other similar Debian distros.

Ways to Send Email From PHP

There are multiple ways of sending emails from PHP, but the two most basic ones are:

• Using the mail() function: This is the built-in PHP function for sending email. It is a simple and easy-to-use option for sending basic emails.
• Using a library or framework: Several libraries and frameworks are available for PHP that make it easier to send emails. Some popular options include PHPMailer and SwiftMailer.

Using external mail packages such as SwiftMailer or PHPMailer is generally recommended over PHP’s built-in mail function because they offer more advanced features and functionality. While the mail function can be useful for sending basic emails, it has very limited capabilities.

One major limitation of the mail function is that it doesn’t allow you to add attachments to your emails. This can be a significant issue if you need to send files or documents as part of your communication.

In addition, using the mail function can make it difficult to meet industry standards, and build trust with Google and other email providers. Establishing trust and following best practices are both crucial for ensuring that your emails are recognized as safe and secure. This can be challenging with the mail function, as it doesn’t provide the necessary tools and capabilities to meet these standards.

These are two of the most compelling reasons to use external mail packages such as SwiftMailer or PHPMailer instead of PHP’s built-in mail function. However, if you are still interested in learning how to send emails from a PHP web server, you are in the right place! While it may not be the most efficient or effective option, there is still significant value in understanding how to use the mail function and other methods for sending emails from PHP.

How to Send Email With PHP From Web Server in 5 Steps

The process of sending an email with PHP from your web server is fairly simple, so we’re going to break it down into five steps.

1. Install Dependencies

Installing dependencies is the first step in setting up your PHP application to send email. Dependencies are external libraries or packages that your application requires to function properly.

First, we will install Sendmail and GNU Mailutils on the server. To install these tools, enter this command:

sudo apt update && sudo apt install mailutils sendmail-base

2. Update The sendmail_path Inside php.ini

You will need to update the php.ini file to let PHP know where sendmail is located. This file can be located at either “/etc/php74rc/php.ini” or “/etc/php/7.4/apache2/php.ini”. If you are using a later version of PHP then run php -v to find out what version you are using, and update the path accordingly.

The php.ini file is pretty big, and it’s hard to parse all the information in a terminal editor. We will use the following command to find out the exact line number of the setting so we can jump directly there:

cat -n /etc/php74rc/php.ini | grep "sendmail"

Note down the line numbers displayed on the left of the text. Next, we will edit the /etc/php74rc/php.ini file. You can use your favorite terminal editor, or simply paste the following command to open the nano editor.

sudo nano /etc/php74rc/php.ini

Scroll down to the line number we noted, and search for “sendmail_path =”. It should look something like this:

; For Unix only.  You may supply arguments as well (default: "sendmail -t -i").
; http://php.net/sendmail-path
;sendmail_path =

Uncomment the sendmail_path by removing the ; and add the sendmail path. The default value is “/usr/sbin/sendmail -t -i”. You should have something like this:

; For Unix only.  You may supply arguments as well (default: "sendmail -t -i").
; http://php.net/sendmail-path
sendmail_path = /usr/sbin/sendmail -t -i

Now press Ctrl + O to save the file. Press Enter to confirm the filename and location, and press Ctrl + X to exit the editor. Now when you run the ‘cat -n /etc/php74rc/php.ini | grep “sendmail”’ command, you should see the updated path.

Now restart the php service with:

systemctl restart php74rc-fpm

3. Change hostname

Now we will edit the server hostname. You can find the hosts file at /etc/hosts. Update the localhost address as shown below.

# Old Value

127.0.0.1      localhost.localdomain localhost 

# New Value

127.0.0.1      test.runcloud.me test

And then we change the hostname on the fly with:

hostname test.runcloud.me

4. Configure sendmail

Now we need to configure the sendmail CLI. We can do this by running the following command, and entering the necessary details:

sendmailconfig

5. The Basics of PHP Mail Function

You can use the following PHP code to use the inbuilt PHP mail function:

mail($to, $subject, $message, $headers)

That is the basic way to start sending email from your server. Here’s an example of real-world usage:

<?php

$to = 'youremail@gmail.com';
$subject = 'This is a test email';
$message = 'Hello john!';
$from = 'jane@runcloud.me';

$headers = sprintf("From: %s\r\nReply-To: %s", $from, $from);

mail($to, $subject, $message, $headers);

Now add the mail.php inside your web application. Make sure you have replaced the $from variable to your own email address.

It is important to keep in mind that simply sending an email from your PHP web application doesn’t guarantee that it will be delivered to the recipient’s inbox. There are many factors that can influence whether an email is delivered, and it’s not uncommon for emails to be caught by spam or security filters.

For example, Google has many filters in place to identify and block potentially malicious or spammy emails. For your emails to pass these filters and reach the recipient’s inbox, they need to meet certain security and quality standards.

By following the steps to send email from PHP, you will have the basic ability to send emails from your web application. However, to ensure that your emails are delivered effectively and avoid being caught by filters, you will need to focus on security attributes and other factors that can help your emails pass spam and security checks. This may require additional effort and attention to detail, but is essential for ensuring that your emails are delivered safely and successfully.

How To Make Sure Your Email Sent From PHP Will Be Delivered

Although you’re now set up to send emails from PHP, the next task is to ensure that your emails include certain standards and attributes to pass spam checks, and actually end up in the inbox of your recipients.

In this section, we will go through the process of testing your email for deliverability using services such as mail-tester and mailook which help identify the probability of your email getting flagged as possible spam.

Testing Your Email Deliverability.

Open up either of the mail testing websites, and you should get an email address to send it to. Add this email to your $to variable, and you should get something like this:

<?php

$to = 'web-ovl78@mail-tester.com';
$subject = 'This is a test email';
$message = 'Hello john!';
$from = 'jane@runcloud.me';

$headers = sprintf("From: %s\r\nReply-To: %s", $from, $from);

mail($to, $subject, $message, $headers);

Now visit the mail.php again inside your browser; this should execute the code again and send another email. Check the score of this mail from the Mail Tester. This is our result:

With this score, your email will never reach any inbox! This is expected and we will configure a few settings, which will increase the score dramatically.

Setting SPF Records

Sender Policy Framework (SPF) is the TXT-based DNS record that you can add to your DNS as a policy for sending emails. Your server hostname needs to be verified as an email sender.

You can use SPF Wizard to generate your SPF record. We are using the following records for our test domain (runcloud.me).

runcloud.me. IN TXT "v=spf1 a:test.runcloud.me -all"

test.runcloud.me. IN TXT "v=spf1 ip4:45.118.132.8 -all"

Don’t forget to change your a:<your own domain> and ip4:<your server IP>

This is how it looks like when you query the DNS records from Cloudflare.

Let’s break this down line-by-line to get a better understanding. In the given configuration, the first line tells the internet that test.runcloud.me can send email on behalf of runcloud.me. So your outgoing emails will look like jane@runcloud.me even though our actual domain is test.runcloud.me.

The second record tells the internet that the mail server for test.runcloud.me is located at the given IP address(es). The ~all bit at the end of each record tells everyone that they should ignore all the emails which do not originate from the given server.

Having done that, we sent the email to the Mail Tester as before and then checked the score.

This is a significant improvement. However, some inboxes might still refuse the email.

Setting MX Records

Mail servers also check for MX records, and the domain (runcloud.me) doesn’t have any MX records. Because of this, it gets a penalty. We will add an MX record to improve it further, and check the score again after adding this.

This time we 9/10 which is much better. If you are not getting the same score, wait for a few hours so that modified TXT records are propagated across the servers. Learn more about How to speed up DNS propagation.

Setting PTR Record

Your server reverse IP lookup should return your server hostname (test.runcloud.me). You can do this from the Digital Ocean or Linode panel if you are using their service. Alternatively, any IaaS-based company that provides VPS/Server will always give you access to modify your PTR record.

Setting DKIM Record

DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) is a digital signature that verifies the authenticity of a given email and checks whether it was authorized by the owner of the domain. Learn more about why your mail server needs a DKIM record.

All modern email service providers support DKIM, simply create new CNAME records with the given values, and it should work automatically.

Setting DMARC Record

Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance (DMARC) is a validation system that makes it harder for malicious actors to spoof your domain and send emails on your behalf. Although it is optional, it is recommended to use it if your email provider supports it.

You can create a new DNS record with values provided by your email server to use it.

After creating all the records, our score has significantly improved. It is very close to a perfect score, but it is not there yet. In our testing, we used a shared email server that was flagged as spam in the past 28 days. This is expected, and it should not matter to most of the people.

However, if this is unacceptable, you can rent a private IP address and use it to send emails. If you don’t send spam messages, it will slowly build the reputation of your IP address, and your emails will get closer to a perfect score.

Using SSL/TLS To Connect Securely

You should be connecting SSL/TLS. Failing to do so will result in Gmail blocking your email, as you can see in Google’s help documentation.

If you encounter any errors, you can check the /var/log/maillog or var/log/mail.log file on your terminal to see the mail server logs. This is particularly handy for fetching information about postfix, smtpd, and other email-related services running on your server.

You can simply run the following command to view a continuous stream of logs in your terminal.

tail -f /var/log/mail.log

After adding all of these certificates and policies, and making your web server fully compliant with industry standards, you should be able to send emails using PHP from your webserver without deliverability issues.

Conclusion

In conclusion, sending emails from PHP is viable, but using external email packages such as SwiftMailer or PHPMailer is generally recommended. These packages offer more advanced features, and better reliability, and can save you time, money, and effort. Additionally, using an external email package can increase your chances of successful email delivery.

If you do choose to send emails from your web server using PHP, it is important to follow this guide carefully and pay attention to factors such as deliverability, security, and industry standards. This may require additional effort, but it is necessary to ensure that your emails are delivered safely and effectively.

To make the process of sending email from PHP even easier and more reliable, consider using a platform like RunCloud. With RunCloud, you can easily set up and manage your PHP web server, install dependencies, and send email without the hassle. Start using RunCloud today!

Amazon Simple Email Service, also known as AWS SES, is an email marketing platform that you can use to send and receive emails through your own addresses and domains.

AWS SES can be used to send transactional emails, including any personalized emails or for newsletter campaigns. It’s a highly modular platform that you can use to create email marketing campaigns, set up autoresponders, and even use it for live ticketing support.

However, if you’re getting the “Email address is not verified error”, this post will guide you on how to solve it.

What is the “Email Address is not verified” Error?

When you start Amazon SES, it launches in a sandbox environment before you can switch it to production. Once you sign up, Amazon will verify whether you actually own the email address and the domain.

The error usually arises when you try to send emails from an entity, such an email address or a domain, that hasn’t been verified in Amazon SES. Here’s how you can fix this error.

How to Fix the “Email Address is not verified” Error

Here’s a brief guide on how to fix this error:

Verify if Your SES Account is Still in Sandbox Mode, and Request Production Access

This is easy to do. Just open your SES console in the region by selecting “Account dashboard”. SES is region-locked, so you’ll need access for each region that you plan on sending emails from.

If you’re in Sandbox mode still, simply click on “Request production access”. You’ll have to submit a form to AWS, and it may take up to a few days (usually a few hours) to get approval.

Once you get production access to AWS SES, you’ll be able to send emails freely from any of the verified identities.

Check Your Verified Identities

Before you start sending emails, make sure you look in the left sidebar menu to ensure that the email address or domain that you’re using to send emails from is verified.

Whenever you add a new email address, you’ll receive a confirmation email with a link to verify. As soon as you click that link, its status will change.

Similarly, when adding a domain, you’ll have to add the record that you receive with the registrar in your DNS records. It may take up to 48 hours for DNS records to propagate, but once they’re done, the status of your domain will also change to verified.

After Action Report — Getting Started with AWS SES is Easy

That’s it! Fixing the “Email address is not verified error” is quite easy with AWS SES. Once you fix the issue, you’ll be able to send emails freely through the platform. Have you experienced this issue before? Let us know how you fixed it, and join the conversion in the comments (or by Tweeting @RunCloud_io)!