When your website or web application has outgrown your shared hosting account, it is time to move it to the cloud, or into a virtual private server (VPS). Nowadays, VPS providers offer better value in terms of CPU and RAM resources than the shared hosting counterparts. However, I can recall when I wanted to move my web...
It’s undeniable how useful console commands can be when developing software. Not too long ago we re-introduced the Symfony Console component. This component allows us to create structured and testable CLI commands. We created some simple commands and tested them; but when our commands become bigger and more compl...
I used to use an extension called XHP. It enables HTML-in-PHP syntax for generating front-end markup. I reached for it recently, and was surprised to find that it was no longer officially supported for modern PHP versions. So, I decided to implement a user-land version of it, using a basic state-machine compiler. It se...
Building good APIs is hard, and anyone who had the chance to do so can relate to this. A project can easily grow to become a mess. One can keep trying to adopt an approach to make it more enjoyable, like trying a documentation-first workflow, but something always feels clumsy. I was trying out Postman lately, a tool w...
There are a lot of PHPUnit posts on our site already (just check the tag), but it’s been a while since we’ve actually introduced people to it, and the tool has evolved significantly since then. This article aims to re-introduce the tool in a modern way, to a modern audience, in a modern PHP environment R...
Laravel Scout is a driver-based library for adding full-text search to Eloquent models. If you’re not familiar with Laravel or Eloquent models in general, we have a good premium course available here. In this tutorial, we will create a minimal lyrics web site using Laravel Scout and Algolia. To do so, we need a C...
For shipping quality code, we must have testing in mind while coding (if not doing TDD). However, with the wide range of PHP testing tools out there, it’s hard to make a choice! Exploring PHP is a fun adventure (premium course on that here!) but it’s hard to assemble a toolbelt that’s not too heavy to...
When working in a medium to large team on the same codebase, it can sometimes become hard to understand each other’s code and how to use it. Various solutions exist to help with this. For example, you can agree to follow a set of coding standards to make the code more readable for each other, or use a framework t...
Ah-ha moments are beautiful and rare in programming. Every so often, we’re fortunate enough to discover some trick or facet of a system that forever changes how we think of it. For me, that’s what snapshot testing is. You probably write a lot of PHP code, but today I want to talk about something I learned ...
This tutorial will walk you through the full process of building a bitcoin bot with PHP – from setup, on to your first execution of an automated trade, and beyond. Cryptocurrencies I should not need to tell you but, a couple of months ago you could buy the cryptocurrency Ether for $11, it rapidly went up to $43 ...
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