PHP

Laragon ships with Mail Catcher, which intercepts mail sent using the PHP mail() function. Mailpit goes one step further and acts as a local mailbox. No mail will ever leave the local PC!

Laragon 6 added the ability to run cron jobs. Here is an example on how to run them on Windows using Cronical.

I recently upgrade eight PHP Katas from a minimum PHP 7.3 to a minimum of PHP 8.0. I used Rector, Easy Coding Standard (ECS) and PhpStan to help me. This is how I approached the upgrade and used these tools.

Updating the version of PHP is probably the most common change I make in Laragon. The ability to switch from PHP 7.4 to PHP 8.2 in a few clicks is Laragon’s magic

Laragon’s terminal is cmder, which will automatically give command line access to all the tools in Laragon’s development environment. If other terminals are required then Laragon can add the development tools to the Windows user environment path.

Laragon ships with Mail Catcher, which intercepts mail sent using the PHP mail() function. MailHog goes one step further and acts as a local mailbox. No mail will ever leave the local PC!

When developing projects the development environment should be as close as possible to the production one. We can and should enable security

Keeping the Laragon icon visible in the system tray, when minimised is helpful. In particular, it will avoid opening a new instance when one is already running.

This is my curated and opinionated list on how I try to keep up to date with what’s going on in software development and in particular PHP.

This is a basic tutorial on how to send emails from Windows using PHPMailer.

VS Code with PHP and Xdebug 3 Xdebug 3 is an extremely powerful debugging tool for PHP. Although print_r(), var_dump() and dd() have their uses, Xdebug gives more powerful debugging options: step debugging allows the ability to view execution of each line of code, including the ability to view all variables and their values. Code coverage is useful to identify untested code, or code which is never executed (dead code).

The focus of this blog is to help set up PHP Projects in PhpStorm. I have also included snippets from my side-projects. I hope the information will be useful for other PHP projects. This is a follow-up to my blog Standard Setup for PHP projects from 2020.

I have recently configured my windows 10 laptop with an additional SSD, so I could experiment with Linux. I have already installed Pop!_OS Git, PhpStorm and Docker. I haven’t installed PHP or Composer locally. Next I want to learn how to use this new environment. This is what I have found out so far.

One of the things that have helped me to learn software development using PHP is coding Katas. I especially enjoyed the Katas by Emily Bache on Github. They offer a safe sandbox environment to play with code and tools. They have good, or should that be not so good, starting code to self-teach techniques for refactoring, testing and object orientated code. In fact, I enjoyed them so much, I have contributed to them!

I have recently started a new job as a software developer, the tech stack includes a content management system (CMS) called Silverstripe. I therefore wanted to learn the Silverstripe CMS. The initial process of creating a project should be straight forward, there are supposed to be beginner lessons. The first three lessons on how to set up a silverstripe project are confusing, as there is intermixed talk about upgrading from Silverstripe v3.