Tag: PHP

How to handle configuration in PHP

Kevin Schroeder has a blog post about the tool that he is building for configuration management in PHP.  The library is still in the early pre-release stage, but it looks like it solves quite a few problems related to configuration, like nesting, inheritance, and environment/context variation.

Here’s the YouTube video that provides a bit of introduction into how to use the tool, and what to expect of it.

The only thing that dials down my excitement in this implementation is the use of XML, even though I understand why he opted for this choice.

I will need a PHP configuration management solution soon, but the priority hasn’t been raised high enough yet for me to jump into the research.  If you know of any other similar tools, please let me know – it all will come handy pretty soon.

Composer require inline alias

Here’s a feature of composer that I didn’t know about until a few days ago – require inline alias.  Here’s the example from the documentation:

{
    "repositories": [
        {
            "type": "vcs",
            "url": "https://github.com/you/monolog"
        }
    ],
    "require": {
        "symfony/monolog-bundle": "2.0",
        "monolog/monolog": "dev-bugfix as 1.0.x-dev"
    }
}

This is super useful when you have dependencies in your project that require a particular version of a third-party library or plugin, and you want to try a branch of that library or plugin. Switching to the branch alias doesn’t solve the problem, as everything that has version constraints on that requirement, will complain. With inline alias, you can alias a particular branch of the dependency as a particular version.

With inline alias, composer will fetch the branch that you want, but will assume that that branch works as a particular version that you specify, and thus satisfy all the other dependencies that require that particular version.

In my particular case, I was working on the CakePHP-based application, which was using a few CakePHP plugins (installed via composer).  Those plugins require CakePHP v3+.  I wanted to test a branch of CakePHP which had a particular fix I was interested in, but without disabling all the plugins.  Switching my application’s composer to require a branch dissatisfied all the plugins, as now composer didn’t know if the branch that I am requiring is of the CakePHP v3 or not.  Aliasing the branch to v3.4.1 (current stable version at the time) worked like a charm.

Morphos – morphological solution in PHP for English and Russian

If you ever had to deal with morphology in English, you probably found one or two libraries to help you out.  But if you had to do that for Russian, than I’m sure you are missing a few hairs, and the ones that you still have are grayer than they used to be.  I’ve got some good news for you though, now there is Morphos (GitHub repository).

Morphos is a morphological solution written completely in the PHP language. Supports Russian and English. Provides classes to decline First/Middle/Last names/nouns and generate cardinal numerals.

Just look at this beauty!

var_dump($dec->getForms($user_name, $dec->detectGender($user_name)));
/* Will produce something like
  array(6) {
    ["nominativus"]=>
    string(8) "Иван"
    ["genetivus"]=>
    string(10) "Ивана"
    ["dativus"]=>
    string(10) "Ивану"
    ["accusative"]=>
    string(10) "Ивана"
    ["ablativus"]=>
    string(12) "Иваном"
    ["praepositionalis"]=>
    string(15) "об Иване"
  }
*/

Just this alone can make user interfaces and emails so much better.  But there is more to it than that.

Vim setup for PHP development

Robert Basic shares his “current Vim setup for PHP development“.  He shows how setup the Gutentags plugin, jump to definitions with CtrlP plugin, display of the current file and method in the status line, add support for PHP namespaces, improve linting with Asynchronous Lint Engine, and add support for PHPStan.

Via PHPDeveloper.

PHP overwrite of built-in constants (true is false)

Here is a scary thing I picked up on Reddit PHP:

<?php
use const true as false;
if (false) {
    echo "uh-oh";
}

Until PHP 5.6 this was throwing a parse error, but from then on – it’s just fine.  Scary, right?

The comments on the Reddit thread are quite helpful.  Technically, this is not overwriting (shadowing?) since the original constant is still available:

<?php
use const true as false;
if (\false) {
    echo "uh-oh";
}

If you are a fan of nightmares, there is also this link, which will shake your religious beliefs …