A modern approach to PHP development

A modern approach to
PHP development
Joel Clermont
@jclermont
Tuesday, August 13, 13
No bio slide. If you want to know more about me personally, we can discuss over a beer at Happy Hour tonight.

View Slide

Platinum Sponsors
Gold Sponsors

View Slide

Goals
I only have one hour. In order to be effective, we need to establish some clear goals up front.

View Slide

Goals
• Expose you to some new ideas and tools
Not a dry “how to do X” technical discussion. There will be some “how”, but focus on the “why”

View Slide

Goals
• Show you how they solved problems for me
Odds are, you have faced (or are facing) some of the same problems.
No solution is “one size ﬁts all” - so take the knowledge and apply it in your speciﬁc project, team and organization

View Slide

Goals
• Show you how they solved problems for me
• Get you interested enough to try it out later
I believe that the topics we cover today can make you more efficient, produce higher quality code and make your development more FUN.
To me, less frustration == more fun.

View Slide

What do I mean by modern?
Simplest deﬁnition: something newer than what you are currently doing. (tool, library, technique, language feature, etc)

View Slide

¬ (Newer 㱺 Better)
Translation: Newer isn’t always better. (I love Unicode characters)
The Art of Computer Programming is a classic example. These books are decades old but still extremely valuable.
Developers tend to like shiny things. We often jump on new tools and technologies
But newer isn’t always better. Remember previous disclaimer: I found these newer techniques better in my experience. YMMV

View Slide

Three talks for the price of one!!
Structure will be 3 topics under one central theme
I will pause for questions at the end of each section, but don’t wait. Interrupt me at any time (clariﬁcation, disagreement, etc)
Interaction makes the presentation more enjoyable for me and more valuable for you.

View Slide

PROBLEM
Wasting time setting up or maintaining a
local dev environment
Option 1: NO local env. Edit and upload. Test on server (ouch)
Option 2: OS X, use system apache/php/mysql (issues upgrading, conﬁguring)
Option 3: packaged env like MAMP. Pretty good, but leads to a second problem . . .

View Slide

PROBLEM
“Works on my machine!”
Dev environment doesn’t match others on the team. Doesn’t match production
Scenario: You’re running MAMP on OS X, everything works. Upload to production (Linux), getting 404 errors on some pages. Files exist.
What happened?

View Slide

Solution
January 2010
Solves the issue of time/effort to setup and maintain your local environment
Eliminates inconsistencies between team environments AND production environment
Best of all, it doesn’t require you to force people to give up their favorite OS or text editor/IDE

View Slide

Uses virtual machines
portable, isolated, project-speciﬁc
runs on any major OS
doesn’t mess with stock libraries
one project can be Nginx with 5.5, other can be Apache with 5.3

View Slide

FREE
nominal cost if you want to use the VMWare infrastructure instead of VirtualBox
all the tools I mention are free. Can’t beat the price.

View Slide

DEMO
maybe this all sounds a little too good to be true
demo with Drupal (many OSS projects are distributing Vagrant conﬁgs for easy setup/testing)
~/vagrant/drupal

View Slide

Pick a “box”
Minimum conﬁguration is picking a base box: usually a ﬂavor of Linux
Vagrant provides several common choices, Community provides many, many others
You can even create your own

View Slide

Side note: disk space
You might be wondering about how much space all these VMs are going to take?
Vagrant stores one copy of each base box
Project has its own copy
Most Linux VMs are 200 - 400 MB, not a huge impact

View Slide

vagrant init
this creates your Vagrantﬁle
really a Ruby ﬁle - don’t despair if you don’t know Ruby
check it into source control

View Slide

vagrant up
boots the machine
no GUI, saves on resources

View Slide

vagrant ssh
kick the tires, get full access to the VM, just like any server

View Slide

Oh no, do I have to use vim or emacs?
Remember, I said you didn’t have to give up your text editor or IDE of choice
ssh is available, but there is a better way to edit ﬁles
your project folder is sync’d into the VM at /vagrant
anything you do in the host is sync’d to the VM
if performance is an issue, NFS is an option (except on Windows)

View Slide

vagrant suspend
vagrant halt

View Slide

vagrant destroy
Nothing is really lost when you do destroy. It will simply rebuild the box from your Vagrantﬁle
Project code and data lives in your host OS

View Slide

How do I configure my VM?
Remember, how I mentioned that your Vagrantfile is really a Ruby file?
Vagrant has concept of provisioners: Chef / Puppet - learning curve
Shell scripts: works, but can be a bit clunky and repetitive
Ansible: declarative approach, but still has some learning curve

View Slide

PuPHPet == awesome
awkwardly named, but incredibly useful
under the hood, it uses Puppet, but you conﬁgure it with a web UI
if you want to learn Puppet, studying the manifests from PuPHPet is a great way to start

View Slide

References
• Vagrant http://www.vagrantup.com
• Drupal Vagrant box https://drupal.org/project/vagrant
• Vagrant commands for the lazy and forgetful: http://codepoets.co.uk/
2013/vagrant-commands-for-the-lazy-and-forgetful/
• PuPHPet https://puphpet.com

View Slide

Questions?

View Slide

PROBLEM
Managing project dependencies
is time-consuming and error prone
download a zip ﬁle?
clone a git repo?
PEAR
PHAR ﬁles

View Slide

PROBLEM
Vendor code is mixed in with your code
.gitignore ﬁles work, maybe git submodules. requires discipline

View Slide

Solution
Composer makes it easy to declare your dependencies per project
AND to keep them up to date (this part can be the trickiest over time)

View Slide

Dependencies, not packages
Easy mistake to make, I even made it in my talk abstract
packages are system-level, composer is project-level by default (can be used to install global packages)
conceptually very similar to Ruby’s bundler or Node’s npm

View Slide

Easily specify a dependency level
what version of a library do you want?
only master/production? dev ok? dev tools?
it knows about your dependency’s dependencies (down the rabbit hole)

View Slide

How paranoid are you?
$ curl -s https://getcomposer.org/installer | php
The installation instructions take curl output and pipe it into your php executable
YOLO
i recommend installing it globally in your path
no need to manage the composer code per project

View Slide

composer.json
{
"minimum-‐stability": "dev",
"require": {
"silex/silex": "1.0.*",
"doctrine/dbal": ">=2.2",
"knplabs/console-‐service-‐provider": ">=1.0.0",
"igorw/config-‐service-‐provider": "*.*.*"
}
}

View Slide

composer install
looks at composer.json and installs dependencies
puts everything in a /vendor folder (easy to exclude from your git repo)
creates a composer.lock ﬁle (snapshot of what was just installed)
commit composer.json and composer.lock to repo
if composer.lock is present, .json ﬁle is ignored and snapshot in .lock is installed

View Slide

Use your dependencies painlessly
require 'vendor/autoload.php'
install also builds an autoload ﬁle for you
one single point of entry to all your composer managed code

View Slide

composer update
follows rules in composer.json, but updates as far as possible while following rules
sidebar on semantic versioning

View Slide

the real power of composer
no need to tell composer where to fetch each package
14,454 packages registered

View Slide

Is Packagist the only way?
you can specify a git (or other VCS) repo in composer.json
if the package isn’t composer aware, you can autoload it if it supports PSR-0
if package isn’t PSR-0, use a classmap
there is always a way

View Slide

composer create-‐project
Will do a demo later on Silex
Basic way to install a framework, CMS, etc with one command

View Slide

Bonus points:
create your own packages
you can publish to Packagist
host your own internal Packagist
or lighter weight tool called Satis

View Slide

References
• Composer http://getcomposer.org
• Packagist https://packagist.org
• Satis https://github.com/composer/satis
• Semantic versioning http://semver.org

View Slide

Questions?

View Slide

PROBLEM
Ad-hoc project organization
lacks structure
300 PHP ﬁles in your public web root
I’m sure you’ve never done that

View Slide

PROBLEM
Lots of repeated or boilerplate code
content negotiation: should I send HTML or JSON back?
setting cache directives
introspecting the HTTP request

View Slide

PROBLEM
Automated testing is hard
500+ line functions
lots of side effects
extremely high cyclomatic complexity (fancy way of saying there are too many paths through your code)

View Slide

Solution
MicroPHP Manifesto: January 2012
This could be an hour-long talk on its own, or even a full day workshop
You aren’t going to learn how to use Silex, but why a micro framework is worth considering
Silex is only one option: Slim is another great one. I’m sure there are others

View Slide

Why a framework?
It can enforce some structure on your project and make it a lot easier to avoid the big ball of mud
You can still write complex, untestable, disorganized code with a framework.

View Slide

Why a micro framework?
Micro PHP manifesto
Zend and Symfony (full stack) can be useful, but have steeper learning curve. Require higher team buy-in
Micro-frameworks can ﬁt almost any type of project
I’m a fan of SOA, many single-focused services coordinating together
YMMV

View Slide

DEMO
Common complaint: too hard to get started
composer create-project fabpot/silex-skeleton silex-demo
leverage both composer and vagrant

View Slide

Simple routing

View Slide

Logic before each request

View Slide

Automated testing

View Slide

References
• Silex http://silex.sensiolabs.org
• Pimple http://pimple.sensiolabs.org
• Micro manifesto http://microphp.org

View Slide

Questions?

View Slide

Please TRY this on your own
There will be some learning curve but remember the goals: more efficient, higher quality code, have more fun while developing

View Slide

August 11th – 13th 2014
Same Place, Same Time
Go tell all your fellow PHP devs about next year. I would like to see even more PHP topics and attendees next year.
If you think of more questions, find me later or tweet me @jclermont. I’m here all three days

View Slide

A modern approach to PHP development

A modern approach to PHP development

Joel Clermont

More Decks by Joel Clermont

Other Decks in Programming

Featured

Transcript