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    Category: php

  1. The Laravel Synchronous Queue

    20 May 2019

    Using queues for asynchronous processing is one of my favourite tricks for offloading hard work from web servers. When working with Laravel recently I was pleased to find that it supports beanstalkd out of the box. I've got opinions about frameworks with Opinions but I did find one thing I really liked in the way Laravel uses queues: the sync queue option that runs your queue synchronously on your development platform so you can develop and debug your work, then switch the queue platform you use later.

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  2. Generating PHP library code from OpenAPI

    20 November 2018

    I'm working with a bunch of OpenAPI specs now I am working for Nexmo and so far I'm loving working with API descriptions. OpenAPI is the next iteration of what used to be called "Swagger", a machine-readable way to describe your API and from that description create docs, code libraries, tests, and all sorts. Today's post is a quick writeup of how I generated some PHP code so that I can refer back to this next time I want to do it!

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  3. Managing Environment Variables in PHP

    15 October 2018

    Now I work with more programming languages, I start to miss features from other languages when I come "home" to PHP. One that I hadn't seen in PHP before I saw it in other languages such as NodeJS (I think Ruby had the original implementation) was: a way to easily control setting your environment variables, particularly in development. In NodeJS the dotenv library is great for this; handily in PHP vlucas has already created phpdotenv so we are all set to apply these tricks to PHP applications!

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  4. Make a POST Request from PHP With Guzzle

    18 September 2018

    I work extensively with APIs and a variety of serverside scripting languages, and best practice does change over time. Many of the most popular posts on this blog are 10 years old, because apparently I was interesting in 2008. Two in particular from around that time relate to making POST requests from PHP ... and I'd do it completely differently today. So, in an attempt to overcome some of the past crimes of the Internet in general and PHP in particular: here's how to make a POST request in PHP, today, in a PHP 7+ world (it probably works in PHP 5 too).

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  5. Handle Webhooks with Serverless PHP

    20 February 2018

    Did you know you can serverless with PHP? OK, so serverless is clearly not a verb, but since I love serverless tech and have also loved PHP for longer than I'm going to admit (the dates of the earliest posts on this blog might serve as a clue), using these technologies together is definitely my idea of a good time.

    I included an example of a serverless endpoint to receive incoming webhooks in my talk at PHPUK last week and I got a few questions about it so I thought I'd share that example in written form.

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  6. Script for Migrating Related Posts in Wordpress

    29 January 2018

    I couldn't find the script I needed to migrate my existing related-post data to a new plugin so I fiddled about and wrote a rather hacky one. I thought I'd share it in case someone else needed it!

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  7. Testing API calls in PHP with Guzzle Mocks

    21 November 2017

    I'm working on a CouchDB library for PHP, and so I needed to write some tests for it. CouchDB has an HTTP API so I'm basically making web requests and while I could certainly set up a test database and run full-on integration tests, there are a few limitations with that approach. Firstly: it means I'm testing the database as well, which isn't what I want and brings extra dependencies that make the tests harder to run. Also: I want to be able to test error cases, rate limiting and so on, that would be difficult to recreate reliably.

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  8. Connecting PHP to MySQL on Bluemix

    23 August 2017

    Most of the PHP I write runs on Bluemix - it's IBM self-service cloud, and since I work there, they pay for my accounts :) There are a bunch of databases you can use there, mostly open source offerings, and of course with PHP I like to use MySQL. Someone asked me for my connection code since it's a bit tricky to grab the credentials that you need, so here it is.

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  9. Removing Object Properties Before Var_Dumping Them

    11 August 2017

    I'm working on a project at the moment (a PHP library for CouchDB, if you must know) that is designed to make HTTP calls and therefore holds a Guzzle HTTPClient object as an object property. This is great except when I need to debug something and the output of my call to var_dump() is several screens high ...

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  10. Handling Incoming Webhooks in PHP

    24 July 2017

    An increasing number of applications now offer webhooks as an integration, often in addition to an API. The classic example, familiar to most developers, is the GitHub webhooks which can notify your other systems such as CI tooling that a new commit has been added to a branch. If you imagine how many repositories exist on GitHub, and how many other systems react to changes on each repository ... there's a reason they are excellent with webhooks! Whether it's your source control, updates from your IoT sensors, or an event coming from another component in your application, I have some Opinions (TM) about handling webhooks, so I thought I'd write them down and include some code as well, since I think this is an area that many applications will need to work with.

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  11. Joind.In Needs Help

    14 August 2016

    This post is about the open source project, Joind.in. Joind.in is a tool to allow attendees at conferences or other events to offer immediate public feedback to speakers and organisers at those events. Joind.in is an open source project run by volunteers. For the last 6 years I've been a maintainer of this project, following a year or two of being a contributor. Over the last few months, myself and my comaintainer Rob Allen have been mostly inactive due to other commitments, and we have agreed it's time to step aside and let others take up the baton.

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  12. Connect to RabbitMQ from PHP over AMQPS

    11 August 2016

    I work a lot with data these days and queues are a common addition to my applications to move data between applications. At the moment I'm working with RabbitMQ (and loving it!) but I wanted to deploy to a hosted RabbitMQ service and struggled to find examples of doing this over SSL so I thought I'd share what worked for me. Disclaimer: I work for IBM and they own Compose.com, which means I have a "do anything you like!" account there :)

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