Git Hooks are executable server-side or client-side scripts that run when specific Git events happen, such as creating commits or checking out branches. Server-side hooks are useful for Git administrators to enforce specific policies and can run before or after pushes to the server. We’re going to focus on client-side Git Hooks, and how we […]

We’ve spent the past few months discussing and demonstrating how to use WSL in your PHP development workflow as a better alternative to Virtual Machines by running native Linux on Windows 10. This month we’re going to dive into an unsupported (by Microsoft) territory and cover how to and why we may run GUI applications […]

We’ve spent the past two months talking about Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) in Windows 10 and how to customize it to serve as a PHP development environment. While functional, our environment lacked a fair bit of polish. In the nearly four years that I’ve been working on and maintaining Laravel Homestead, I’ve spent much […]

Last month we covered Windows Subsystem for Linux and this month we’re continuing the journey by demonstrating how to further work with our WSL distribution using tools such as Mailhog, Xdebug with PhpStorm and Visual Studio Code, and ngrok.

Does a recent announcement by Microsoft have you wondering how you’ll continue to use Windows for PHP development? Anyone with a compiler and the PHP source code should be able to build a PHP executable for Windows. If the thought of compiling your PHP binary on Windows seems daunting, have no fear! We’re going to […]

By Joe Ferguson Continuous Integration (CI), or the ongoing process of integrating changes in a shared version control repository, should be a goal of every project you work on. This month, we’re going to dive into configuring GitHub Actions to build and test our PHP application. Then we’ll look at a larger scale API, which […]

Last month, we covered getting started with a brand new CodeIgniter 4 project and explored the framework. We explained installation, routing, controllers, and built some models and migration to exercise the basics of working with a database. This month we’re focusing on the frontend of our CodeIgniter 4 example project by implementing a PHP template […]

Fourteen years after its first public release and six years after transitioning ownership from EllisLab to British Columbia Institute of Technology CodeIgniter (CI) has released major version 4. It continues to deliver a framework with a small footprint without having to learn a lot of framework vendor-specific functionality. CodeIgniter has always prided itself on clear, […]

phpspec is a package which allows us to use Behavior-Driven Development, BDD, which comes from Test-Driven Development, TDD. When applying BDD, we write our tests first and then only enough code to pass our tests and then refactor and verify the tests still pass exactly as we would with TDD. This cycle continues and is […]

Writing console commands with PHP is something I have always taken for granted. I started my career having learned Linux and command line server configuration and was very comfortable writing small applications with BASH scripts, Python, and even dabbling in C and Microsoft Qbasic. These commands copied files to a backup location, process batched data […]