Freek.dev

Adam Wathan has another excellent article on using collections. This time he tackles the less used transpose-function.

Transpose is an often overlooked list operation that I first noticed in Ruby.

The goal of transpose is to rotate a multidimensional array, turning the rows into columns and the columns into rows.

http://adamwathan.me/2016/04/06/cleaning-up-form-input-with-transpose/

Personally, I can't wait until the release of his book: Refactoring To Collections.

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Jens Segers wrote an interesting little article about fail2ban. This piece of software prevents unauthorized pundits from accessing your server. You'll be happy to know that is installed by default on Forge.

The first thing I do on every server is set up the firewall so that all ports except for the SSH port are blocked from incoming requests. But with the SSH port unprotected, you still want it to be protected from illegitimate access, right? This is where fail2ban comes in. Fail2ban will automatically ban IPs that show the malicious signs such as too many password failures, seeking for exploits, etc.

https://jenssegers.com/82/protect-your-server-with-fail2ban

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This week an article on WIRED informed us that the average webpage is now the size of the computer game 'DOOM'.

Maciej Ceglowski gave an excellent talk on this subject at this years Web Directions conference. His keynote title "The website obesity crisis" is available on Vimeo.

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Jordi Boggiano researched which files are common in PHP packages.

I queried GitHub's API for the file listing (only the root directory) of all PHP packages listed on packagist.org.

What this let me do is look at what files are commonly present (and not), which is quite interesting to get a picture of the whole ecosystem.

In total, this includes file listings from 78'992 packages (no GitHub API was harmed in the making of this blog post though). And here are a few interesting things that surfaced:

https://seld.be/notes/common-files-in-php-packages

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It's quite surprising that Laravel didn't have a changelog until today. Community member Till Krüss added one and will probably maintain it in the foreseeable future. The changelog can be viewed on GitHub.

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Hannes Van De Vreken shows what awesome async things you can do with Guzzle promises.

Now what happens if you need to perform a large number of concurrent requests? If you don’t control the number of requests you might end up with a dangerously large amount of open TCP sockets to a server. You’ll need to use some sort of dispatching to have a limited number of concurrent requests at any given time.

Let’s show you how to do that.

https://blog.madewithlove.be/post/concurrent-http-requests/

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Let’s take a look at a PHP script used to send spam. These types of scripts run on servers all over the world and might give you some insight into a spammer’s dedication to annoy the hell out of you. ... One of the WordPress sites on a shared hosting web server I manage was infected by a spam script. Fortunately, the script was unable to do any real damage and was detected within half an hour of infection. I thought it would be fun to show you the script and dissect it, to find out exactly how these things work and make thousands of email administrators’ lives a living hell.

https://jelleraaijmakers.nl/2016/04/dissecting-spammers-spam-script

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Added on 2016-04-28: newly provisioned Forge servers will now use http2 by default whenever you install an ssl certifcate.

Like mentioned in the post on how to upgrade PHP, I'm a big fan of Forge. By default sites provisioned by Forge use regular http. Let's learn how to enable http2.

The http2 protocol provides a lot of benefits over http. In short it'll make your website load much faster. If want to know how this protocol works under the hood watch this excellent video by Mattias Geniar or read this blogpost at Cloudflare. Here an interesting test by (again) Mattias that shows the potential speed improvements.

A prerequisite for using http2 is that you serve your website via an encrypted connection (note: this is not 100% true but virtually all major browsers won't support http2 via unencrypted connections). Thanks to LetsEncrypt you can get free ssl certificates. Watch this free video on Laracasts to learn how to install a LetsEncrypt certificate.

Support for http2 was introduced in Nginx 1.9.5. You can check the version number of your Nginx installation by running nginx -v. If you're on 1.9.5 or higher you're good. You just have to add http2 to a server block in the Nginx configuration:

server {
  listen 443 ssl http2;
  ...
}

The Chrome developer tools can be used to check if you're site is indeed using http2. The column "protocol" should display "h2".

Don't be overwhelmed with sadness if you're running something below Nginx 1.9.5. Upgrading is easy! Only three instructions are needed to upgrade to, at the time of this writing, Nginx 1.9.14:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:nginx/development
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install nginx

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If you've read some posts before on this blog, then you'll probably know that I'm a big fan of Forge. The service makes it very easy to set up and administer servers. At my company we've been using it since it launched.

We currently have 80 provisioned servers. Most of them are small droplets. We have a policy of running every site on it's own droplet. This approach has many benefits, but that's maybe something for a future post.

The bulk of our servers are on PHP 5.6. That's not too bad, but once you have some sites on PHP 7, the sites running on those servers feel a bit slow. It's amazing how fast you get used to the speed that PHP 7 offers. That's why I experimented a bit with upgrading the PHP version on a Forge provisioned server. My gut feeling was that upgrading the PHP version is less work that setting up a new server and moving a site to it.

To not mess up a live site I created a snapshot and used that to set up a server to toy around with. With a little bit of research I came up with these instructions to upgrade the PHP version.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ondrej/php

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install php7.0

sudo apt-get install php7.0-fpm

Depending on your project you will need less or more php extensions, but these were the ones relevant for my site:

sudo apt-get install php7.0-gd

sudo apt-get install php7.0-mysql

sudo apt-get install php-memcached

sudo apt-get install php7.0-mcrypt

sudo apt-get install php-curl

sudo apt-get install php-imagick

Next, in the nginx configuration of the site I replaced unix:/var/run/php5-fpm.sock with unix:/var/run/php/php7.0-fpm.sock

The final adjustment I made was to make sure nginx would spawn the php processes under the forge. This will make sure that a php process can write to sites previously created by Forge:

// in the file /etc/php/7.0/fpm/pool.d/www.conf
...
user = forge
group = forge
...

After that I rebooted the server (maybe just restarting nginx is enough) and enjoyed browsing a site that was four times as fast. ?

If you decide to try this out for your server, be aware that what works for me doesn't necessarily work for you. Every site is a bit different. But I'm sure the instructions from this post will get you pretty far. Happy upgrading!

EDIT: Meanwhile DigitalOcean also published a guide on how to upgrade to PHP 7.

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Yesterday, after a winter sleep, PHPGent awoke and held a meetup at the offices of In The Pocket. It was nice to see some familiar and some new faces.

I had the honor of being the first speaker. My talk was titled "Backing up with Laravel". I started off with some best practices regarding backups and demonstrated the laravel-backup package which was released a few weeks ago.

Here are my slides:

https://speakerdeck.com/freekmurze/backing-up-with-laravel

Next up was Wouter Sioen of SumoCoders. He talked about building maintainable software. He showed how using the solid principles help to clean up the code of his home brew json to html converter. Then he continued with explaining object calisthenics: a few simple rules to greatly improve the readability of your code. Wouter's slides can found on github.io.

These two very beautiful graphic summaries of the talks were made by Peter Decuyper:

https://twitter.com/sgrame/status/720674134041235456

https://twitter.com/sgrame/status/720690758265778176

If you attended the meetup be sure to leave Wouter and me some feedback on joind.in so we can improve our speaking skills.

Visiting your local PHP user group is one of the best ways to learn new stuff and to getting to know the community. If you've never visited a user group, use this site to lookup the closest one to your home. If there isn't one close by, start one yourself.

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This is a technique that I recently found useful. Eloquent models allow you to specify a custom collection object to be returned – which sometimes can be a great place to put some business logic.

https://michaelstivala.com/pushing-logic-custom-collections/

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Over at Envato Tuts Alireza Rahmani Khalili wrote a good article on Laravel Facades.

Sweet syntax, which Laravel uses, makes writing code cleaner and easier to understand. Laravel facades are actually the syntactic sugar for service location.

Let’s take a look at Laravel Facade and the way it functions.

http://code.tutsplus.com/tutorials/what-are-laravel-50-facades--cms-25347

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I run a small hosting provider with more or less 1535 customers and I use Ansible to automate some operations to be run on all servers. Last night I accidentally ran, on all servers, a Bash script with a `rm -rf {foo}/{bar}` with those variables undefined due to a bug in the code above this line.

All servers got deleted and the offsite backups too because the remote storage was mounted just before by the same script (that is a backup maintenance script).

http://serverfault.com/questions/769357/recovering-from-a-rm-rf

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At this year's FOSDEM Mattias Geniar explained what HTTP/2 has in store for developers:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QMm_qvCYwDk

Here are the slides used in his excellent talk:

https://speakerdeck.com/mattiasgeniar/2-for-php-developers

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Dries Vints does not blog often, but when he does it's very much worth your time to read.

We all have specific ways of setting up our computer. It's all different somehow. The apps we use, our IDE settings, what shell we prefer, what programming languages we work with, the tools we prefer. How on earth are we going to get that specific setup back the way we had it before our computer broke down?

Enter dotfiles.

https://driesvints.com/blog/getting-started-with-dotfiles

You can find Dries' dotfiles on GitHub. Mine can be found here.

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For a site I was working on the admin should be able to switch on or off a form that's displayed on the homepage. Question: where's the best place to store the value of that switch? Creating a table and column for it in the database seems overkill. Putting it in a never expiring cache does not feel right. I think the best place to store such value is just write it to a simple file.

In the example above only one value needed to be stored, but for other projects there sometimes were two or three of them. Over the years I found myself writing the same code over and over again to store and work with such values.

Our intern Jolita and I whipped up a valuestore package. It only provides one class: Valuestore. The values will get written as JSON in a given file. The API mostly reflects Laravel's caching API. Here's how you can work with it:

$valuestore = Valuestore::make($pathToFile);

$valuestore->put('key', 'value');

$valuestore->get('key'); // Returns 'value'

$valuestore->has('key'); // Returns true

// Specify a default value for when the specified key does not exist
$valuestore->get('non existing key', 'default') // Returns 'default'

$valuestore->put('anotherKey', 'anotherValue');

// Put multiple items in one go
$valuestore->put(['ringo' => 'drums', 'paul' => 'bass']);

$valuestore->all(); // Returns an array with all items

$valuestore->forget('key'); // Removes the item

$valuestore->flush(); // Empty the entire valuestore

$valuestore->flushStartingWith('somekey'); // remove all items who's keys start with "somekey"

$valuestore->increment('number'); // $valuestore->get('key') will return 1 
$valuestore->increment('number'); // $valuestore->get('key') will return 2
$valuestore->increment('number', 3); // $valuestore->get('key') will return 5

// Valuestore implements ArrayAccess
$valuestore['key'] = 'value';
$valuestore['key']; // Returns 'value'
isset($valuestore['key']); // Return true
unset($valuestore['key']); // Equivalent to removing the value

// Valuestore impements Countable
count($valuestore); // Returns 0
$valuestore->put('key', 'value');
count($valuestore); // Returns 1

As you see it's quite a simple class, but I'm sure it'll come in handy in the future. The package can be found on GitHub.

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