Category: PHP

One thing I learnt recently which I probably should have known already is that getimagesize() returns more than just the width and height of the image. I've always used it like this: list($width, $height) = getimagesize($filename); However, getimagesize() also returns up to 5 more pieces of information. Interestingly, the data array is a mix of indexed elements and named elements For example, for a file I uploaded while testing a PR, the output of print_r(getimagesize($filename))… continue reading.

Posted on 4 March 2016 in PHP

I discovered recently that if you walk through an array using array_walk or array_walk_recursive, then the array's internal pointer is left at the end of the array. Clearly this isn't something that I've needed to know before! This code example shows the fundamentals: $var = [ 'a' => 'a', 'b' => 'b', ]; array_walk($var, function ($value) { }); var_dump(key($var)); The output is NULL and you use reset() to put the internal pointed back to the… continue reading.

Posted on 12 January 2016 in PHP

I can't use Composer because I'm using shared hosting and don't have SSH I've seen this sentiment a few times now, so this seems like a good time to point out that you do not need SSH access to your server in order to use Composer. In fact, I don't run Composer on a live server (regardless of whether it's using shared hosting) and it's not on my list of things to do in the… continue reading.

Posted on 28 December 2015 in PHP

I use Homebrew for my local PHP installation on OS X and am currently running PHP 7.0.0 RC8. Phan is a static analyser for PHP 7 which was written by Rasmus and then rewritten by Andrew Morrison. As it benefits from PHP 7's abstract syntax tree it can find all kinds of subtle errors, so I wanted to install it locally to have a play with it. I started by trying to install Phan into… continue reading.

Posted on 3 December 2015 in PHP

Within Slim 3's Request object, there's a method called getIp() which is determines the client's IP address. However it's rather simplistic and potentially risky as it checks the X-Forwarded-For header with no ability to ignore this header or whitelist whether we trust the final proxy in the chain. Determining the client's IP address is an ideal use-case for middleware as we can inspect the headers in the request and then set an attribute so that… continue reading.

Posted on 5 November 2015 in PHP

I'm currently working on an API using Slim 3 and needed a generic way to render arrays to XML, JSON or HTML based on the Request's Accept header. This is just good practice. The Accept header is used by a client to specify the media types that it accepts. Therefore if our client would like XML, I'd like to give it XML. Similarly for JSON. I also like to support an HTML rendering on my… continue reading.

Posted on 22 October 2015 in PHP

You've successfully created a PR and it's in the queue to be merged. A maintainer looks at the code and asks you to rebase your PR so that they can merge it. Say what? The maintainer means that there have been other code changes on the project since you branched which means that your branch cannot be merged without conflicts and they would like to you to sort this out. These are the steps you… continue reading.

Posted on 8 October 2015 in PHP

This is a guide to contributing to an open source project that uses GitHub. It's mostly based on how I've seen Zend Framework, Slim Framework and joind.in operate. However, this is a general guide so check your project's README for specifics. TL;DR Skip to the summary. Step 1: Set up a working copy on your computer Firstly you need a local fork of the the project, so go ahead and press the "fork" button in… continue reading.

Posted on 22 September 2015 in PHP

Recently, Zend made available a Z-Ray Technology Preview which takes the Z-Ray feature of Zend Server and makes it stand-alone. This is very interesting as it means that I can run it with the PHP 5.6 on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS Vagrant set up that I prefer. I decided to create an Ansible playbook to install Z-Ray into my VM. The Z-Ray instructions are clear enough, so it was simply a case of converting them to… continue reading.

Posted on 15 September 2015 in PHP