Demat ! I'm Yannick, a senior backend developer based in Brighton, UK.
A few weeks ago, GitHub quietly released a feature that was quickly noticed by the community – profile READMEs. A profile README is a global README file for your GitHub profile; in this article, I describe how I've used GitHub Actions and PHP to automatically update my profile README to list my blog's latest publications.
Git hooks are scripts that are run every time a specific Git-related event happens, like a commit or a checkout. This article shows you how to use a simple hook to enforce a coding standard at every commit in a PHP project.
I hope you enjoyed going through these tutorials as much as I enjoyed writing them, and that you now clearly see how to use Docker to your advantage, and feel comfortable doing so. That being said, you might still feel like some stones are left unturned, so I will try and flip some of them in this conclusion, the same way I used the introduction to try and address some of the concerns you might have had before taking the plunge.
Once we start to get comfortable around Docker and make it a full component of our development environment, inevitably there will come a time when we have to deal with some form of task scheduling.
There are many ways to increase an API's responsivity, and one of them which is also the focus of today's article is the use of queues. Queues are basically lists of tasks to be performed at a later time which, unlike flossing, will be completed eventually. What's important about those tasks – called jobs – is that they don't need to be performed during the lifecycle of the initial request.
While using Docker for local development allows us to replicate a production environment as closely as possible in a self-contained way, in some instances exposure to the outside world is unavoidable. Typical use cases include testing a third-party service's webhook (like a transaction confirmation from a payment gateway), or showing a project's advancement to a client.
While it is getting ever cheaper and easier to encrypt the web, somehow this evolution doesn't extend to local environments, where bringing in HTTPS is still far from a sinecure. This article intends to ease the pain by showing you how to generate a self-signed SSL/TLS certificate and how to use it with our Docker-based setup, thus getting us one step closer to perfectly mimicking a production environment.
As our development environment is taking shape, the number of commands we need to remember starts to build up. With little effort, Bash will allow us to add a layer on top of Docker to abstract away most of the complexity, and introduce a standardised, user-friendly interface instead.
There are many ways to manage a multitiered project with Docker, and while the approach I am about to describe certainly isn't the only one, I also think this is a subject that doesn't get much coverage at all.
By using standard Linux distributions, we embark a lot of tools and services we don't always need, unnecessarily increasing the size of the images in the process. In turn, this has an impact on performance, security and, sometimes, the cost of deployment.