Harry Bailey

Harry Bailey specialises in turning project chaos into clarity. With two decades of hands-on agency experience and agile-certified expertise, he offers practical, immediately actionable strategies, not just theory, to dramatically improve agency project delivery.

Check AWS Lightsail Bitnami WordPress PHP version

Before you spend time upgrading to a new lightsail instance in the hope of your PHP version meeting WordPress minimum requirements, it’s useful to know if the version available is high enough.

You can check which PHP version you’re going to end up with using the following steps:

  • Open your lightsail home page
  • Click the Create Instance button
  • Check the ‘Linux/Unix’ option is selected
  • Look for the ‘WordPress’ option and make a note of the number displayed underneath (Something like a.b.c-d)

Ok, next we’ll check the Bitnami WordPress changelog

  • Open the changelog file
  • Search for a matching number from your note above
  • Check for a bullet which begins Updated php to
  • If no match, keep reading down the file until you find the first match for Updated php to
  • That’s the current PHP version you’ll get if you spin up a new lightsail wordpress install

If it’s the same or higher than the message being shown inside WordPress you can go ahead. If it’s not then you need to set a reminder to check back regularly on the lightsail creation page to see when the version updates.

AWS don’t use the very latest version available from Bitnami.

The final thing to consider… strangely is if WordPress supports the PHP version you’ll be upgrading to. WordPress maintain a list of which versions of PHP they support (properly and in beta).

Work in a software agency where you struggle to delivery consistently to your unique clients and unique projects? I specialise in that challenge!

Follow me on X (formerly Twitter), Threads for insights, on Medium for thought pieces, or read about my agency focused workshops (UK only) for more information.

WHM: List Largest Emails In An Account With Subject

I recently needed to find the largest emails in various email accounts and share the size and subject. Not if it was a single email account which I had access too there are likely much simpler options using webmail or an email client to get the same outcome.

It looks like this hasn’t been written about before so I pieced together various tutorials to end up with the final solution.

This guide assumes you know what you’re doing on the command line prompt and that you have the permissions to view the files and folders below. It also assumes you have the permissions to go poking around in people’s email accounts, so be sure to ask for that before you start outputing private email subjects from their accounts

The first step is to check you have the following results for a list of files in the chosen CPanel account’s mail folder:

$ls -a /home/[account]/mail

The above should show you a folder for each domain, but hopefully also a symlink for each account. In my case:

.email@example_com

The above actually points to example.com/email but we’ll be using it in our code.

This code also expects emails to be stored in files ending with ,Sab or ,RSab or ,S or ,RS so check that too.

So here is the full example which I’ll then break down below. You’ll need to update it to suit your needs:

find /home/[account]/mail/.email\@example_com/ -type f ( -iname "*,Sab" -or -iname "*,RSab" -or -iname "*,S" -or -iname "*,RS" ) -size +1M -exec grep "Subject: " {} \; -printf '%s B - ' | sort -nr | head -10

First we use the find command to list files which match our email file name (end with 4 options) and have a file size of greater than 1M:

find /home/[account]/mail/.email\@example_com/ -type f ( -iname "*,Sab" -or -iname "*,RSab" -or -iname "*,S" -or -iname "*,RS" ) -size +1M

We then trigger an exec on that which will eventually return their subject as part of the output, and also print their file size in bytes (%s) followed by a B and a hyphen with -printf

-exec grep "Subject: " {} \; -printf '%s B - '

We then sort the list:

sort -nr

and finally only return the first 10:

head -10

Offboarding as a priority

There is nothing quite like the heart sinking feeling other team members get when a developer announces they’ll be leaving a small team.

Mild panic sets in, and everybody looks to each other for reassurance. Yet that moment is the right time to switch mindsets to focused offboarding. Ensuring the remaining members are left in the best state possible to continue their great work.

Team size is critical here. One developer leaving a team of five often has a huge impact relative to a developer leaving a team of 20. Small teams need to run offboarding in a way that acknowledges this size frailty and mitigates the short and long term risks associated with developer churn.

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Fuelling Your Team

What we eat plays an important role in our ability to focus. Our choices around what and when we eat and drink affects our productivity, energy and general mood. It directly impacts the quality and quantity of our output at work. It compounds within small teams and has an even greater effect.

It’s been shown that those who form new habits around drinking plenty of water and eating the right foods see a better version of themselves within just a few days. Measurably better.

These simple insights into diet aren’t new information though. Most people are already aware that more water, less salt and less sugar are recommended for health and mood. People don’t do their body damage intentionally, but through choosing the path of least resistance when it comes to workplace food and drink habits.

The moral dilemma is of course, do we have any right influencing these choices and the diets of those we work with?

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