Demat ! I'm Yannick, a senior backend developer based in Brighton, UK.
This post is part of the "Building a PHP CLI tool using DDD and Event Sourcing" series but can also be read as an independent guide to getting started with Laravel Zero, a micro-framework for console applications.
A common aspect of a PHP developer's job is to deal with Composer dependencies. We don't usually need to think about supporting various versions of these dependencies, just as we don't need to think about accommodating a range of PHP versions. Things are different for open-source software maintainers – they need to ensure their libraries will work with as many environments as possible. This post explores one way of automating compatibility testing, using a combination of test coverage and a GitHub workflow.
When you think of command-line applications, PHP doesn't immediately come to mind. Yet the language powers many popular tools, either as independent programs or to be used within projects. This tutorial will walk you through the process of creating a simple game running in the terminal, using Symfony's Console component as a bedrock, GitHub Actions for testing, and Composer for distribution.
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.
When using packages maintained by other developers, you may eventually find yourself waiting for a fix, an update, or the merge of a PR that will be available with the next release. I you can't wait, a workaround is to fork the corresponding repository, make the changes you need and then use your fork instead of the original package.