18 posts tagged with "php"

If you think writing unit tests in PHP is fun, stay in the room; the rest of you please leave. And then everyone leaves, including the person who asked the question.

Writing “old-fashioned” unit tests with PHPUnit is so boring that almost nobody does it.

And for some time now, https://pestphp.com/ has come along and totally changed the way things are done.

Pest is a wrapper around PhpUnit so, for instance, every command line arguments supported by PhpUnit can be used for Pest.

In a previous article, I've explained how to run a static HTML site in seconds.

The result was a site running on your computer; using http. Let's go one step further and learn how to configure Docker to use https i.e. SSL and encryption.

In this article, you'll learn how to use Apache, nginx and PHP on your machine and be able to start https://localhost.

At work, I'm part of a team of PHP developers where we work together to create a very large proprietary application with a web interface.

This application is developed using the Laravel framework and we use PHPUnit and Pest to run our unit tests.

However, in addition to the unit tests, we are also putting in place a tool that will simulate actions on our interface, such as accessing the login page, entering a login and password, simulating the click on the 'login' button, wait our main screen is displayed then, on the new page, assert a lot of things / do a lot of tasks.

It's a bit like asking a human to play out scenarios over and over again, every day, to make sure we haven't introduced any regressions in our latest developments, like a cool new feature whose code changes have broken a previous feature.

For this, we're using Behat. This is a PHP composer dependency you can add to your project (or a new one). The idea is to be able to write assertions in pure English (or French) like "I go to the ABC website then I click on the blog menu item and I should receive a list of blog items" or "In the search box, I type Docker then I click on the search button and I should receive articles having the Docker tags".

In this article, we'll learn more about Behat and how to use it for a first test.

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.

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.

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.

Tabnine is a MUST HAVE extension. He will predict your next keystroke and sometimes it's just WOW; HOW IS IT POSSIBLE?.

Imagine you've a private string $firstName property in PHP. By starting to type private function set, Tabnine will understand you're probably creating a setter and will then suggest setFirstName(string $firstname).

<?php

class Customer
{
    private string $firstName;

    private function set // <=== Tabnine will predict and propose setFirstName(string $firstname)
}

Currently, end of February 2024, there aren't many free refactoring extensions for PHP under VSCode. We'll take a look to PHP Refactor Tool and PHP Refactoring.

We'll learn how to rename a symbol, a class and, even better, how to extract a portion of a long method into a new one.

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...

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.