Nitro is a command-line tool for managing Docker-based PHP development environments. Like most development environments, Nitro provides several defaults to improve the developer experience of using Docker. A primary focus of Nitro is “Simplicity matters,” meaning the developer should be focused on building their project, not getting bogged down in the DevOps swamps. If you […]

Laravel Livewire describes itself as a “..full-stack framework for Laravel that makes building dynamic interfaces simple, without leaving the comfort of Laravel.” As a developer who has always struggled to feel comfortable with the latest and greatest front-end tooling, “without leaving Laravel” is incredibly appealing.

Pest is a PHP testing framework focused on simplicity and brings a powerful expectations API to PHP. Pest is influenced by Jest, a JavaScript testing framework. Pest was created by Nuno Maduro originally via Sponsorware license and ultimately was published under the MIT open source license. You can think of Pest ha an alternative to other testing frameworks, such as […]

If you use CentOS as the L in your LAMP stack, you may be wondering what to do after Red Hat’s announcement. Let’s look at a new community distro that aims to provide a replacement for CentOS.

Docker Swarm is a mode in which Docker deploys container services across a cluster. Spreading a service across multiple swarm nodes (systems running Docker joined to the same swarm cluster) allows us to perform load balancing and rolling updates to our application. We also can easily horizontally scale by adding more nodes and scaling services […]

We continue our containerization journey from last month where we covered how to refactor an application that created PDF files to use S3 to store the documents instead of relying on the local server’s storage. Another challenge often found is when an application uses outdated PHP and runs on an unsupported/outdated operating system version. What […]

Welcome to the third installment of our containerization journey. Last month we covered running our application locally in Docker containers replacing our pre-existing development virtual machine. We used Laravel Sail to scaffold our development environment with Docker Compose. This month we’re going to look at a real-world application running on a traditional Linux Virtual Private […]

Welcome to the second installment of our containerization journey ast month. We covered container basics, Docker installation, and running command line PHP images. This month we’re focused on building our local development environment with Docker coming from an existing Vagrant virtual machine configuration. We’re not jumping directly into overly complicated build targets and multistage builds […]

If you’ve been putting off learning how to use Docker in your PHP projects, here is your chance: we’re going to start from scratch, and we’re going to cover a lot of ground to take a PHP application from running locally to running in containers, then a cluster, and ultimately in Kubernetes. Let’s get settled […]

This month, we’re diving into running our own S3 compatible open-source server via the open-source project MinIO. We’ll configure MinIO alongside our local development environment to quickly replicate our application’s integration with S3 object storage without operating on “production” storage buckets or having to set up “dev” buckets.