This article is the very short and straightforward version of PHP development in a devcontainer with preinstalled code quality tools. If you just want to follow a very few steps and get your PHP environment, this article is for you.

By following steps describe in this article, you'll obtain:

• A Docker PHP environment so you can code using vscode,
• The PHP composer package manager installed,
• A few static analysis tool like php-cs-fixer, phpcs, phpcbf, sonarlint and Rector installed
• A devcontainer ready-to-use environment.

Just follow the guide...

Imagine you had to make a call to a SOAP web service in Excel? For example, to validate the VAT number you have been given before carrying out some processing.

You will call the URL that corresponds to the web service you want, but you will also need to pass a number of parameters in XML format so that the service knows what you want to do.

We'll learn, in this blog post, how to validate a European VAT number using the VIES VAT number validation SOAP web service.

The VBA code we will see in this article can be used as a skeleton for your future development.

When you're running a Docker container on a different network than the standard one (called bridge) and you wish to run a second container that needs to access the first container, you need to run the second container on the same network.

Let's say, you're running a MySQL database on a network called my_network and you wish to be able start a second container like phpMyAdmin and get access to the database, then you need to use the --network CLI option when running the second container using docker run.

Now, imagine the first container is a web application and the second container should be able to access his web page and, too, reusing the same alias?

You'd like to get in touch with a GitHub user but, e.g., you don't want to post your question as an issue because, e.g., it's not about a specific repository but more generic.

As a result, the problem can be translated in How to find the email address linked to a GitHub account.

Recently, I had this need in order to contact someone with a Docusaurus blog offering a feature that I couldn't find documented on the web. His blog was not on GitHub but other repos well.

When developing APIs from scratch, you can do it in the mode I get behind the PC and start programming or I learn about the standards first and then program in compliance with these standards.

And if we lose sight of these norms, we quickly come back to writing endpoints like /articles/insert that are semantically incorrect (and even stupid). In fact, we'll never GET here.

The purpose of the article below is to list best practices by way of examples.

If there was only one, it would be Rector. Rector is extremely powerful and brilliant and, you know what, it's free!

Rector is a tremendous application to scan and automatically upgrade your codebase to a given version of PHP and this means, too, to inspect how you're coding.

Rector will look at every line of code, every loop, every conditional test, every function, every class in a PHP source code and suggest improvements.

In this role, it will not only detect improvements to my code (like a static analysis tool) but, and this is the biggest advantage for me, it will show me how I can become a better developer.

I REALLY LOVE RECTOR 💕

• Updated 2024-02-23, install Rector automatically
• Updated 2024-02-29, install Error Lens and Code Spell Checker

Let's imagine one of the following situations:

1. You are working with several people on the same PHP project and you notice that one or other person does not comply with your quality criteria when it comes to the layout of the code. You like to use four spaces for indentation, you want the brace that marks the start of a function to be on the line, you don't want to see any more useless spaces at the end of the line, ... and damned! you notice that some people don't care about this.

2. You are working alone on a project and don't want to lose time to configure your VSCode experience. You wish to start very quickly with a lot of tools already installed in VSCode so you can put your focus to the code, not the editor.

The ultimate solution: using a devcontainer in VSCode.

By using a devcontainer, you (and your team colleague) will use a preinstalled environment and everyone will have exactly the same. You'll save yourself a lot of time by not having to configure your system, and you'll be able to start coding straight away, supported by a range of quality analysis tools.

So you've created your own blog using Docker and Docusaurus. By following steps explained in the Running Docusaurus with Docker article, now, you've a blog with the list of articles stored on your machine; in a blog folder.

Let's go further.

If you're writing for Docusaurus, there are a few tips to know.

This article is by no means exhaustive, but for me it's a reminder of the features that are really essential and must not be forgotten.

As you know, this blog is powered by Docusaurus.

I'm writing blog posts in Markdown files (one post = one .md file) and Docusaurus will convert them into HTML pages.

In this first article, we're going to learn how to install Docusaurus... ouch, sorry, not install Docusaurus as we're going to use Docker to simplify our lives.