This month we’re straying slightly from our usual PHP tooling to cover Make and how we can leverage it to simplify our lives as developers. by Joe Ferguson

This month we’re exploring a programming concept known as Scaffolding. Scaffolding is the process of using an application to generate code based on some input or configuration file. Just as construction workers raise temporary structures to help perform their work, we can expect similarly. Automatically generating code is a wonderful idea but questions always arise […]

Containers are here to stay, and if you’ve been putting off learning how to migrate a PHP application from a VM to containers, we have you covered this month as we migrate a long-standing Laravel application from running on Linux via Apache and MariaDB. Our application also utilizes Redis for caching, so we need to […]

Symfony is one of the stalwarts of modern PHP, dating back to 2005. Symfony has continued to evolve into a framework of components focused on building web applications using decoupled and reusable components. Their philosophy of embracing professionalism, best practices, standards, and interoperability of applications is an exciting statement. Backing up that statement is years […]

Acceptance testing is my favorite tool to reach for when working with legacy applications that may have low test quality or no tests at all. Because acceptance testing approaches the application from outside of the source code, we’re able to greatly increase test coverage without having to touch the application’s code itself. Larger teams can […]

In the January 2022 edition, my friend Chris Tankersley wrote Education Station: [Background Queues](https://phpa.me/background-queues), a fantastic primer for using background queues, or workers with your PHP application. This month we will implement [Laravel Horizon](https://laravel.com/docs/8.x/horizon), a dashboard monitor for your Redis queues.

Last month we covered PHP and Apache and demonstrated how to get started with our custom virtual host in Apache and execute PHP via the libapache2-mod-php (mod-php) library. This month we will replace our use of mod-php with the Fast CGI Process Manager (FPM). Instead of bundling a PHP worker process in Apache, we’ll use FPM as another […]

This month we’re diving into Apache and PHP configuration to better understand the relationship between the web (HTTP) server and our application. When getting started with PHP, it’s quite common for tutorials and guides to skip over the webserver and focus more on the language aspects. PHP developers need to have a strong understanding of […]

Laravel Octane is a package that leverages another application server that loads the entire application once and keeps the application in memory throughout multiple requests, which can dramatically increase response times in applications by removing the load time for bootstrapping Laravel and all of the dependencies. by Joe Ferguson

Last month we covered Nitro, a local development environment that came out of the Craft CMS community. This month we’re going to dive into Craft CMS and demonstrate getting started with a basic project. by Joe Ferguson