Strategies for dealing with environment variables

marijn.huizendveld.com

Here's an interesting approach to work with env variables proposed by Marijn Huizendveld

Frameworks offer tools to parameterize environments in a variety of ways. But because of this configuration files of projects tend to get messy once projects are taken into production. Specifying purpose of the parameter within the name can help identify unneeded configurations. Making configuration explicit within the application layer can be even more helpful. Doing so eases refactoring and provides potential to improve the overall developer experience.

Read more [marijn.huizendveld.com]

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Hand-written service containers

matthiasnoback.nl

Matthias Noback makes the case for writting your own service containers.

Dependency injection is very important. Dependency injection containers are too. The trouble is with the tools, that let us define services in a meta-language, and rely on conventions to work well. This extra layer requires the "ambient information" Paul speaks about in his tweet, and easily lets us make mistakes that we wouldn't make if we'd just write out the code for instantiating our services.

Read more [matthiasnoback.nl]

PHPStorm Inspections for your Continuous Integration Process

www.christianscheb.de

I was quite surprised to learn that it could make sense to run PhpStorm on the server too.

Did you know that PHPStorm (or any other Jetbrains IDE) can run inspections from command line and generate XML files for the results? This is a great “hidden” feature of those IDEs and machine-readable output means it can be somehow integrated with a continuous integration (CI) process. So let’s do this!

Read more [www.christianscheb.de]

Notes on PHP RFCs, and topics that occur repeatedly on PHP internals

github.com

Dan Ackroyd maintains this interesting repo on GitHub with thoughts on why some PHP RFC's are not implemented yet. High on on my wishlist: Briefer closure syntax and Generics

There are some notes on PHP RFCs, why some were declined, and what others might need for them to be implemented. The purpose of these documents is to avoid information from being lost and to try to avoid conversations needing to be repeated multiple times on PHP internals.

Read more [github.com]

A package to handle enums

stitcher.io

Recently we released a new package called enum. In a new post on his blog Brent tells you what the benefit of working with enums is and how our package differs from the alternatives.

Today I want to explore some of the difficulties we encounter when solving problems like enums in userland. I'll talk about my personal take on enums, and we'll ponder on core support.

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Understanding how Laravel configures database connections

divinglaravel.com

Mohammed Said shows a great way on how to handle db connections in a multi tenancy Laravel app.

The majority of applications just communicate with a single database. However, a considerable portion of laravel applications communicates with multiple databases. There are some neat packages that help with managing multiple connections, but it'd be useful if we understand how database connections work in Laravel, so let's dive in.

Read more [divinglaravel.com]

How migrations might be slowing down your Laravel tests

alexvanderbist.com

Having a lot of migrations might slow down your tests. My colleague Alex shares how you can fix this.

One of the larger test suites I run daily has about 1500 tests in it. It takes just over 4 minutes to complete at an average of 160ms per test. That's pretty good. However, lately I've noticed a delay between starting PHPUnit and running the first test. This delay grew to the point where running a single test would take almost 12 seconds with the setUp method using most of that time on... migrations.

Read more [alexvanderbist.com]

Tools to automatically format PHP, JavaScript and CSS files original

by Freek Van der Herten – 2 minute read

When working on a project with other people, it's important to pick a coding standard. A coding standard like PSR-2 in the PHP world specifies rules on where certain characters, like braces of an if statement, or comma's should be put. Agreeing on a coding standard makes the code more readable for…

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