web development

Highlights from Git 2.19 and PHP syntax

GitHub blog covers the highlights from Git 2.19, which was recently released.

One particular change that I want to highlight (which GitHub skipped in their highlights, but which exists in the Git release notes for this version) is the syntax pattern update for the PHP files.

Let’s have a look at the full diff of this release. The particular change I am referring to is in the userdiff.c file. Git now understands final, abstract, interface, and trait keywords.

If you are not sure where and how it is used, here are a couple of useful links for you:

.gitattributes documentation section on settings the syntax of the file for diffs. Basically, you just need to add “*.php diff=php” to the .gitattributes file. Unfortunately, this is done on a per-project level, rather than globally on a user level. (See this blog post for more details).
More info on the same subject: How Does Git Know What Functions Look Like?

Now that you have it all configured, there are a couple of ways to benefit from this functionality. First, you’ll see a more useful context comment in the diffs. Here’s the screenshot (using an older git version still). On the left, the diff without the PHP syntax configured, and on the right is the diff with the PHP syntax configured:

As you can see, on the left, the context shows that the change was done somewhere in the ChangeLogTrait trait. On the right, the context is much more specific – it shows that the change was done in the public function changelog.

This makes reviewing code changes a lot easier. But there is also one other place where this is useful – in reviewing the history of a particular function. For example, running “git log -L :changelog:ChangelogTrait.php” will produce the git log output containing only the commits and diffs on the function changelog in the file ChangelogTrait.php. Very handy!

open-policy-agent/opa – Open Source, general purpose policy agent

open-policy-agent/opa is an Open Source general purpose policy agent.

OPA gives you a high-level declarative language to author and enforce policies across your stack.

With OPA, you define rules that govern how your system should behave. These rules exist to answer questions like:

Can user X call operation Y on resource Z?

What clusters should workload W be deployed to?

What tags must be set on resource R before it’s created?

You integrate services with OPA so that these kinds of policy decisions do not have to be hardcoded in your service. Services integrate with OPA by executing queries when policy decisions are needed.

When you query OPA for a policy decision, OPA evaluates the rules and data (which you give it) to produce an answer. The policy decision is sent back as the result of the query.

The div that looks different in every browser

Martijn Cuppens tweets the link to this code snippet and a screenshot of how the code renders in different browsers. Yup. Each browser produces a different result. The Twitter thread has more examples.

This is yet another example of how CSS and cross-browser compatibility can drive a web developer insane.

laravolt/avatar – plug-n-play PHP library for quick dynamic avatars

laravolt/avatar is a PHP library that helps to avoid those old and boring anonymous face pictures for users who haven’t uploaded or configured their avatar in your application. With library you can use any string – name, email, initials, or anything else you fancy – to generate a dynamic avatar with random color and letters.

php-jsonq – a simple, elegant PHP package to query over any type of JSON data

php-jsonq provides an easy, yet powerful way to build queries for any JSON data (or PHP data structures for that matter, which are a step away). This has a variety of useful applications – data migration, API response filtering, complex configurations manipulation, and so on, and so forth.