PHP – Rob Allen's DevNotes

Free ticket to The Online PHP Conference!

I'm very happy to be speaking at The Online PHP Conference this year. As you can guess from the title, this is an online event so is easily accessible right from your desk. thePHP.cc have very kindly made available a couple of tickets to me, so you could attend for free.

Posted on 6 January 2021 in Conferences, PHP

Installing PHP extensions without pecl in PHP 8 Docker images

UPDATE: Since this was published, PR 1087 has been raised and merged with restores pecl to the Docker PHP 8 images. I discovered recently that pecl is no longer shipped in the PHP Docker images for PHP 8. This appears to be related to the deprecation of –with-pear in PHP core as noted in issue 1029. Consider this Dockerfile: FROM php:8.0.0RC5-cli-buster RUN pecl install mongodb && docker-php-ext-enable mongodb If you build, you'll discover the pecl… continue reading.

Posted on 24 November 2020 in PHP View all 3 comments

Step-debugging linked composer dependencies with PhpStorm

One project I'm working on has multiple separate parts in different git repositories that are brought into the main project using linked composer directories. I needed to get step debugging working in PhpStorm and this is the approach I took.

Posted on 7 October 2020 in PHP Leave a comment

Recursive PHP lint

There are many scripts that recursively execute php -l on a set of files or directories. This is mine:

#!/usr/bin/env bash
set -o nounset

# Recursively call `php -l` over the specified directories/files

if [ -z "$1" ] ; then
    printf 'Usage: %s <directory-or-file> ...\n' "$(basename "$0")"
    exit 1
fi

ERROR=false
SAVEIFS=$IFS
IFS=$'\n'
while test $# -gt 0; do
    CURRENT=${1%/}
    shift

    if [ ! -f $CURRENT ] && [ ! -d $CURRENT ] ; then
        echo "$CURRENT cannot be found"
        ERROR=true
        continue
    fi

    for FILE in $(find $CURRENT -type f -name "*.php") ; do
        OUTPUT=$(php -l "$FILE" 2> /dev/null)

        # Remove blank lines from the `php -l` output
        OUTPUT=$(echo -e "$OUTPUT" | awk 'NF')

        if [ "$OUTPUT" != "No syntax errors detected in $FILE" ] ; then
            echo -e "$FILE:"
            echo -e "  ${OUTPUT//$'\n'/\\n  }\n"
            ERROR=true
        fi
    done
done

IFS=$SAVEIFS

if [ "$ERROR" = true ] ; then
    exit 1
fi

echo "No syntax errors found."
exit 0

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#!/usr/bin/env bash

set -o nounset

# Recursively call `php -l` over the specified directories/files

if [ -z "$1" ] ; then

printf 'Usage: %s <directory-or-file> ...\n' "$(basename "$0")"

exit 1

fi

ERROR=false

SAVEIFS=$IFS

IFS=$'\n'

while test $# -gt 0; do

CURRENT=${1%/}

shift

if [ ! -f $CURRENT ] && [ ! -d $CURRENT ] ; then

echo "$CURRENT cannot be found"

ERROR=true

continue

fi

for FILE in $(find $CURRENT -type f -name "*.php") ; do

OUTPUT=$(php -l "$FILE" 2> /dev/null)

# Remove blank lines from the `php -l` output

OUTPUT=$(echo -e "$OUTPUT" | awk 'NF')

if [ "$OUTPUT" != "No syntax errors detected in $FILE" ] ; then

echo -e "$FILE:"

echo -e " ${OUTPUT//$'\n'/\\n }\n"

ERROR=true

fi

done

IFS=$SAVEIFS

if [ "$ERROR" = true ] ; then

exit 1

fi

echo "No syntax errors found."

exit 0

I store it in ~/bin and usually run it like this:

$ cd project
$ phplint .
No syntax errors found.

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$ cd project

$ phplint .

No syntax errors found.

There are a few interesting bash tricks that I picked up when I wrote this. Firstly, you need to set IFS to break on new line rather than space otherwise the find command doesn't work with spaces in file names. I also discovered… continue reading.

Posted on 13 August 2020 in Development, PHP View all 2 comments

Validating default PHP session ID values

I recently needed to validate the value created by PHP for its session ID. After a bit of research, I realised that there are two interesting php.ini config settings that relate to this value: session.sid_length is the number of characters in the ID session.sid_bits_per_character controls the set of characters used. From the manual: The possible values are '4' (0-9, a-f), '5' (0-9, a-v), and '6' (0-9, a-z, A-Z, "-", ","). Therefore, to validate the session… continue reading.

Posted on 13 February 2020 in PHP View all 7 comments

Routing in Slim 4

Routing in Slim 4 works pretty much exactly the same as in Slim 3. They are used to map a URL that the browser requests to a specific handler that executes the code for that particular page or API endpoint. You can also attach middleware that will only be run when that route is matched. The route in the slim4-starter looks like this:

$app->get('/[{name}]', HomePageHandler::class);

1	$app->get('/[{name}]', HomePageHandler::class);

It is made up of the method, the pattern and the… continue reading.

Posted on 18 December 2019 in PHP, Slim Framework 4 View all 3 comments

Changing an SQL Server primary key in Doctrine Migrations

I recently came across a rather weird quirk when trying to change a primary key in Sql Server using Doctrine Migrations: you need to use two migrations to get it to work. This is incredibly minor and I'm only writing it up as it confused me for a while so I thought that I'd document so that I'll find this article if I run across it again in the future! This is the migration:

final class Version20191023125629 extends AbstractMigration
{
    public function up(Schema $schema) : void
    {
        $table = $schema->getTable('page_category');
        $table->dropPrimaryKey();
        $table->setPrimaryKey(['page_uuid', 'category_id']);
    }

    public function down(Schema $schema) : void
    {
        $table = $schema->getTable('page_category');
        $table->dropPrimaryKey();
        $table->setPrimaryKey(['page_id', 'category_id']);
    }
}

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final class Version20191023125629 extends AbstractMigration

{

public function up(Schema $schema) : void

{

$table = $schema->getTable('page_category');

$table->dropPrimaryKey();

$table->setPrimaryKey(['page_uuid', 'category_id']);

}

public function down(Schema $schema) : void

{

$table = $schema->getTable('page_category');

$table->dropPrimaryKey();

$table->setPrimaryKey(['page_id', 'category_id']);

}

Posted on 20 November 2019 in PHP Leave a comment

Testing migrating to Laminas

Zend Framework is renaming to Laminas and all the source code is moving to a new GitHub organisation. Implicitly this means a new PHP top level namespace. As you can imagine, this implies that a lot of our code will need to change, so Matthew, Michał and the team have been writing migration tooling to make this easier. It's now time to test it and they need all the help they can get on real-world… continue reading.

Posted on 6 November 2019 in Laminas, PHP, Zend Framework One comment so far

Embedding Notist slides

This site uses WordPress under the hood as I find the flexibility that a good CMS provides quite useful. For the talks section, I use a custom post type so that I can set additional properties on the post and customise the display. With my usual lack of imagination, my custom post type is called talk. When Notist was released, I've been uploading the PDFs for my presentations there so that I have a nicely… continue reading.

Posted on 30 October 2019 in PHP, WordPress Leave a comment

Custom error rendering in Slim 4

One of the nice things about Slim 4 is that it's easier to customise the HTML generated on error without having to worry about the rest of the error handling mechanism. This is because we have separated error rendering from error handling. Slim's default ErrorHandler maintains a list of renderers, one for each content-type and will delegate the creation of the error payload (HTML, JSON, XML, etc) to the renderer. Out of the Box, the… continue reading.

Posted on 16 October 2019 in PHP, Slim Framework, Slim Framework 4 View all 13 comments