While preferring virtualised development environments using Docker and DDEV, sometimes I work with projects that utilise the Symfony CLI, Valet or PHPs built-in web server. What all of these have in common: they use the locally installed PHP on your macOS. Here's how I added xdebug to it on a Apple Silicon.
By Erik. Erik Pöhler's Weblog.Let's say you have a PHP Project that is based on Composer. You have found a bug in a vendor package and you need to fix it. What do you do? In this article I want to list a couple of options you have and outline differences, as well as look at each options Pros and Cons.
By Erik. Erik Pöhler's Weblog.Recently, I've been playing around with NativePHP a Laravel package that is currently in alpha pre-release state. It bridges Laravel and Electron (Tauri support is currently in the making), thus allows building Native Desktop Apps for Windows and MacOS. In short: NativePHP allows you, to turn PHP Applications into Desktop Apps. During build, NativePHP bundles a PHP binary together with PHP Code. The binary executes PHP just like a server would. It needs to be specific for Operating System and Processor Architecture.
By Erik. Erik Pöhler's Weblog.Derick Rethans article gives an in-depth look at the inner workings of references in PHP. There are quite some things in this article, that will help you write less memory-hungry code. It’s an absolute must-read article if you have ever wondered why there’s an & in front of variables or in function parameters.
By Erik. Erik Pöhler's Weblog.Laravel's Valet is amazing. It makes setting up a new PHP Projects on macOS as easy as creating a folder. Valet has many advantages over for example Docker, as it has less overhead. No need to download images, no need to build them, no additional disk space is blocked by all the VM images, containers so on and so forth. Valet also takes advantage of your full CPU power as it doesn't have to share resources with a parent slash host OS. Of course, Docker has many advantages, too. In this article, however, we won't look at the things that make each of them stand out – instead I want to list all of those smaller and bigger problems one can run into when using Valet in your day to day web development. And of course how to fix them.
By Erik. Erik Pöhler's Weblog.I use NodeJS, its package manager NPM, and even NVM to install different versions of NPM in many projects to build frontend assets. My recurring use case is: compile some SASS files into CSS, join some files, minify the output, copy fonts and icon fonts, pre-compress static assets, and so on. I am familiar with helper tools like Grunt and Gulp to set up these tasks. In a recent PHP project, I tried to avoid the use of NodeJS/NPM. I was surprised how easy it is to achieve the same results with nothing but plain old PHP.
By Erik. Erik Pöhler's Weblog.
