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13 posts tagged with "code quality"

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Git - pre-commit-hooks

9 min read
Christophe
Markdown, WSL and Docker lover ~ PHP developer ~ Insatiable curious.

Git - pre-commit-hooks

You like clean code, don't you? And you hate getting an email from your versioning tool (e.g. Github or GitLab) telling you that your last commit didn't go through, that the formatting of your code is bad; this is because you've left one space too many at the end of a line or you've used single quote instead of double (or the opposite), for example.

You've pushed your changes, already start to work on another activity, perhaps another project and boum, two hours after your last commit (because the CI server was working on a lot of pipelines before yours), boum, you get a Your last commit has failed, #gnagnagna. I hate it as much as I love clean code.

So, what should we do to avoid this?

The answer is simple! Before each push, we should run the same code analysis tools that are executed in the CI, i.e. phplint, php-cs-fixer, phpcbf, phan, phpstan, ... (for PHP) or pylint, mypy, prospector, black, ruff, ... (for Python) or shellcheck and shellformat (for Linux Bash) or ...

We should, but do we think about it every time? Unfortunately not.

Let's see how to correct this.

Python - Code Quality tools

9 min read
Christophe
Markdown, WSL and Docker lover ~ PHP developer ~ Insatiable curious.

Python - Code Quality tools

If you're a self-respecting programmer, you can't develop without code analysis tools. For PHP programmers, you already know a lot of them (rector, phpstan, phan, phpcs, ...). See my previous articles Rector 1.0.0, my friend, my coach and Docker image that provides static analysis tools for PHP f.i.

What about Python?

Format poorly formatted PHP code

2 min read
Christophe
Markdown, WSL and Docker lover ~ PHP developer ~ Insatiable curious.

Format poorly formatted PHP code

You're recovering some old PHP code; you want to answer a question asked on a forum and the person who posted the PHP question didn't take care to ensure that it was properly formatted; ... there are too many occasions when the syntactic quality of a code can be rotten.

You'd like to have an online tool that you can use to quickly retrieve code with a much more polished layout, just by copying and pasting. Without having to install anything and without any headaches.

For example, how do you make the code below look cleaner in five seconds?

<?php
abstract class mycollection implements Iterator
{
protected function populate($array, $dataobject){
foreach($array as $item){
$object = new $dataobject();
foreach($item as $key => $val){$object->$key = $val;}
$this->storage[] = $object;
}}
}

JSON - Online linter

One min read
Christophe
Markdown, WSL and Docker lover ~ PHP developer ~ Insatiable curious.

JSON - Online linter

Exactly like my SQL - Formatting tool, it's always useful to have a tool in your favourites that lets you copy/paste a JSON character string and display it as a tree-view with or without code folding feature.

I use it quite regularly when I'm writing a JSON string and I want to check that there are no syntax errors (lint) or, on the other hand, and for example, when I call an API that returns JSON and I want to analyse the code received. In these cases, the collapse functionality comes in very handy.

SQL - Formatting tool

One min read
Christophe
Markdown, WSL and Docker lover ~ PHP developer ~ Insatiable curious.

SQL - Formatting tool

When faced with legacy code, it is often useful to reformat it to make it readable. And from there, the study of the code can begin.

There are plenty of reformatting tools for json, php, javascript and other languages, but far fewer for a query written in SQL.

Just copy/paste SELECT LAT_N, CITY, TEMP_F FROM STATS, STATION WHERE MONTH = 7 AND STATS.ID = STATION.ID ORDER BY TEMP_F in the tool and get

SELECT
LAT_N,
CITY,
TEMP_F
FROM
STATS,
STATION
WHERE
MONTH = 7
AND STATS.ID = STATION.ID
ORDER BY
TEMP_F

Clean code - Linux Bash - Keep the number of function parameters as small as possible

3 min read
Christophe
Markdown, WSL and Docker lover ~ PHP developer ~ Insatiable curious.

Clean code - Linux Bash - Keep the number of function parameters as small as possible

A concept of the clean code approach is to avoid too many function parameter (I would say that four parameters is already too many).

When you're programming in a language more advanced than Linux Bash, it's easy to get round the problem. For example, in PHP, if I need to call a function and pass it several parameters, I'll create an object that will be my only parameter and that object will then have several properties.

So, for instance, if I need to pass data such as a surname, first name, date of birth, gender, etc., I'll create a person object, define my properties and voil脿, I've only got one parameter to pass to my function. In most cases, it'll be a very nice solution.

But how do you do it in Linux Bash? It's impossible to pass an object... so I'm going to pass it an associative array.

Using Postman to play with API

9 min read
Christophe
Markdown, WSL and Docker lover ~ PHP developer ~ Insatiable curious.

Using Postman to play with API

If you are developing your own API (whatever the language) or if you need to consume some, Postman can be really handy.

Calling an API and getting the response is one thing, quite simple in fact, but a nice feature of Postman is the ability to validate the response like making sure the returned type is, f.i. application/json, the HTTP status code is 200, the response body is a JSON object (or an XML string), that the body contains some required information and so on.

You can also validate the response against a given schema to make sure the structure is well the one expected.

In this article, we'll use Postman like a unit test tool i.e. run checks on our own API and make a lot of assertions. This is improving the quality of your code by highlighting potential errors and, for any refactoring you'll do in the future, by running the tests again, you'll make sure you've not broken something; that you don't have any regression. Make sure you've not broken an API when you upgrade some code is gold.

Obfuscate your PHP code

6 min read
Christophe
Markdown, WSL and Docker lover ~ PHP developer ~ Insatiable curious.

Obfuscate your PHP code

A few years ago, I sold a software called aeSecure, which was a Web Application Firewall. In order to prevent my proprietary code from being picked up by someone who could then sell it, for example, I had developed an obfuscation script.

Since then, I've released a reusable version of that script: https://github.com/cavo789/php_obfuscator.

And what if, today, with artificial intelligence, this type of code was no longer of any interest? The aim of this article is to see if it's always a good idea to make your code unreadable.

Docker image that provides static analysis tools for PHP

6 min read
Christophe
Markdown, WSL and Docker lover ~ PHP developer ~ Insatiable curious.

Docker image that provides static analysis tools for PHP

For years now, I'm using https://github.com/jakzal/phpqa to run a lot of static analysis tools on my PHP codebase.

The list of available tools is huge; see by yourself: Available tools.

In this blog post, we will see how we can take advantage of all these tools and increase the quality of our scripts.

Install a PHP Docker environment in a matter of seconds

4 min read
Christophe
Markdown, WSL and Docker lover ~ PHP developer ~ Insatiable curious.

Install a PHP Docker environment in a matter of seconds

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...

The aim of this article is to create a development environment (aka devcontainer)

Please refers to my other articles about Docker to see how to Dockerize the application and be able to run the application using Apache and a database service like PostgreSQL.