For a while now I've started my day by unlocking my phone and scrolling through different news and social media sites to see what's going on. It's not exactly great for my mental health and I've been trying to cut down on screen time for a while. I still want to stay up-to-date though, especially after I get up in the morning. What about a custom "front page" printed out and ready for me, instead.
If you've been working with PHP regularly, chances are you've run across an Interface, Trait, or Abstract Class. At first glance, they might appear to have a few similarities between them, and it can be hard to make out their differences and use cases.
I have a lot of side projects on GitHub. Some of them are kind of popular, and I tend to get issues posted from time to time. The problem though is that usually they kind of get lost in the mix. I've been occasionally writing new issues down on sticky notes whenever I see a notification for one pop-up, but I always wanted an excuse to streamline it a bit more.
If you've worked in a PHP project, chances are you've dealt with the Composer package manager. As a full-stack developer, I think it's one of the better ones that I use on a regular basis, consistently improving while remaining relatively simple. One of the more difficult things to do with it though, is adding a local package for use in a larger PHP project.
I've been maintaining and iterating on a basic Docker Compose setup for Laravel over the last year or so. It's worked well enough for local development, which was what I originally intended it for. Ever since I released it though, I've had multiple people sending me concerns and GitHub issues surrounding permissions problems.
Before we get started, I'd like to let you know that this article isn’t a deep-dive tutorial into Docker or an explanation on the intricacies of the toolset. It’s more of a casual walk-through that explores the basics in getting a local development environment set up fast using Docker and Docker Compose.
Right now there's a lot of options when it comes to working with Laravel on a local development environment. Where there used to be only a handful of options, there's now over a half dozen officially supported ones. In this article, I'm going to try and give a brief synapses of each of them. Provide some pros and cons, along with a basic overview of what you need to get started with each.
You can think of Docker as a watered-down VM. Why is this helpful or useful? Well if you have multiple production servers running different versions of Linux, PHP, or any other web software, those variables can be replicated in your container and you can be guaranteed that the application will run precisely how it’s intended to on the production machine.