Archive for the ‘Programming’ Category

cPanel now has support for deploying via git. Here is a quick guide on deploying PHP applications.

Upgrade Composer

The Composer version is old and will need an upgrade. To do this, you need to log into the server as root and run:

composer self-update

Install your SSH key

To avoid having to enter your password every time you push, log into cPanel and add your public SSH key. You can paste the id_rsa into the box and leave the name as default. Once added, go to the manage key and activate it.

Create a git repo

In cPanel, go into the git section and create a new repo. You can place it anywhere so perhaps a good place to put it is:

/home/username/git/repo-name

Add a remote

Back on your own computer, add the new cPanel repo as a remote.

git remote add cpanel ssh://username@example.com/home/username/git/repo-name

Add a cPanel config file

If you need to run any additional tasks, add a .cpanel.yml file to the root of your repo.

deployment:
  tasks:
    - composer install
    - /bin/cp -a /home/username/git/repo-name/public /home/username/public_html

5. Add a .cpanel.yml script

Push your code

Do a standard git push to deploy.

git push cpanel master

You can find the logs in /home/username/.cpanel/logs/ to find out if everything went as planned.

Last month, I published an upgrade guide to Slim 4 covering the changes that most people will need to make.

I recently upgraded the Leeds Anxiety Clinic and this project has some further complexities, so this post will elaborate on all of the changes I made, in case my original blog post did not cover some of the issues that you are also running into.

Things to do in advance

The old service layer calls no longer work:

$db = $this->ci->db;

And need to be updated to:

$db = $this->ci->get('db');

However, Slim 3’s service container already supports this syntax, so you can go ahead and update your code in advance.

If you are passing the container into controller functions, you need to typecast it.

use Psr\Container\ContainerInterface;

class Controller {
    __construct(ContainerInterface $ci) {}
}

If you pull the request out from the service container, you cannot do that in Slim 4. For example, if you have a render helper that relies on the request being in the container, you will have to start manually passing that into your render help from the page route closure.

Dependencies

You will want all of these:

"slim/slim": "4.*",
"slim/psr7": "1.*",
"slim/http": "1.*",
"php-di/php-di": "^6.1",

I did wonder if I could remove my other PSR-7 library that I use for Mailgun, nyholm/psr7, but the answer is no.

Instanciating the app

We now create the container and then the app, and you can recursively pass in the container.

$container = new \DI\Container;

$container->set('serviceA', function() use ($container) {
    return new ServiceA($container->get('serviceB'));
});

\Slim\Factory\AppFactory::setContainer($container);
$app = \Slim\Factory\AppFactory::create();

Throwing not found exceptions

If you manually throw not found exceptions or other HTTP exceptions, Slim 3 has them located here:

Slim\Exception\NotFoundException

Slim 4 moves it to here:

Slim\Exception\HttpNotFoundException

Error handling

If you want Slim 4’s default error handling, you need:

$errorMiddleware = $app->addErrorMiddleware(true, true, true);

And if you want to handle HTTP errors (such as not found), you can use:

$errorMiddleware->setErrorHandler(
    Slim\Exception\HttpNotFoundException::class,
    function (Psr\Http\Message\ServerRequestInterface $request) use ($container) {
        $controller = new App\Controller\ExceptionController($container);
        return $controller->notFound($request);
    });

You can also set your own error handling:

$errorMiddleware->setDefaultErrorHandler(
        function (Psr\Http\Message\ServerRequestInterface $request,
        Throwable $exception) use ($container) {
            $controller = new App\Controller\ExceptionController($container);
            return $controller->error($request, $exception);
        });

This means you will need to create your own response object in any exception controller you use.

public function notFound(Request $request)
{
    $response = new \Slim\Psr7\Response;
    return $this->render($response, 'not-found.html');
}

Custom middleware

The way we pass through middleware has changed. The old way:

public function __invoke($request, $response, $next)
{
    $response = $next($request, $response);
    return $response;
}

The new way:

public function __invoke($request, $handler)
{
    return $handler->handle($request);
}

That change alone probably won’t do what you want it to do out-of-the-box, so you might need to do some reading up and adapt it to your specific middleware depending on function.

Custom middleware wants to go towards the bottom after you define your routes, but before the error middleware.

The Mindfulness for Anxiety app is now available for both iOS and Android on the Apple App Store and Good Play Store respectively. The app is completely free to use and comes with five guided audio practices, a self-timer mode that allows you to set any time length and a learning section where you can find out more about mindfulness.

Slim is one of my favourite PHP microframeworks and many websites are built on Slim 3. I have recently moved to Slim 4 and thought I would document the upgrade process for anyone else looking to make the leap.

Dependencies

Slim 3 came with its own dependency injection container. This is no longer the case. Therefore, we need to bring one in, such as php-di that Slim supports out-of-the-box. We will also need a PSR-7 library and the Slim HTTP helpers.

"slim/slim": "4.*",
"slim/psr7": "1.*",
"slim/http": "1.*",
"php-di/php-di": "^6.1",

Creating the app

In Slim 3, we created the app and then accessed the container.

$app = new \Slim\App([
    'settings' => []
]);

$container = $app->getContainer();

In Slim 4, we create the container then attached it to the app.

$container = new \DI\Container();
\Slim\Factory\AppFactory::setContainer($container);
$app = \Slim\Factory\AppFactory::create();

You can still access the container in the old way and inject dependencies into it, but you need to manually pass it into the app as above.

Accessing dependencies

Now we are using our PSR-11 DI of choice, we need to change how we access our dependencies. Previously, wee could use the Slim shorthand.

$db = $this->ci->db;

Now we need to use the PSR-11 standard.

$db = $this->ci->get('db');

Exception handling

Previously, we could set error handling using the dependency injection container.

$container['notFoundHandler'] = function ($container) {
    return function ($request, $response) use ($container) {
        $controller = new \App\Controller\ExceptionController($container);
        return $controller->notFound($request, $response);
    };
};

In Slim 4, we need to use the bundled middleware.

$errorMiddleware = $app->addErrorMiddleware(true, true, true);

$errorMiddleware->setErrorHandler(
    Slim\Exception\HttpNotFoundException::class,
    function (Psr\Http\Message\ServerRequestInterface $request) use ($container) {
        $controller = new App\Controller\ExceptionController($container);
        return $controller->notFound($request);
    });

This also means changing the exception controller, too, if you use one. In Slim 3, we would still get a response object passed in.

    public function notFound(Request $request, Response $response)
    {
        return $this->render($response, 'not-found.html');
    }

With Slim 4, we need to create our own.

    public function notFound(Request $request)
    {
        $response = new \Slim\Psr7\Response;
        return $this->render($response, 'not-found.html');
    }

That should take care of most of the changes. If you run into anything else, let me know, and I’ll update this article.

My new course is all about using the Heroku cloud hosting platform with Node.js. I already have a course on using PHP with Heroku, and not bragging, but it has Udemy’s “Highest Rated” badge. Okay, there is a little bragging. Hopefully, this one will receive the badge, too.

Preview the course on Udemy or watch the trailer below.

My new course on Doctrine ORM is now available. If you are a PHP developer, adding Doctrine to your CV is a much=sought-after skill to have, being used by Symfony and thousands of other projects.

Here’s the trailer:

If you’re using the Slim framework in PHP, there is a breaking change between 3.12.2 and 3.12.3. You’ll need to change where you are inheriting your class from.

- use Interop\Container\ContainerInterface;
+ use Psr\Container\ContainerInterface;

Back in the day, unit tests and code coverage were the in thing. You wrote a class, you wrote a unit test for that class. Everything was tested at an individual level and you built integration tests on top of that.

Then we realised that maintaining all of these unit tests was a massive pain in the neck, made it tedious to refactor the code and didn’t provide much value when the real business value was only concerned with everything working together so that the user being able to successfully complete a journey. So, we started writing tests to the API boundary.

Fine. Except it wasn’t fine. The problem is that per-class unit tests are really useful when it comes to understanding other people’s code.

Let’s say we have a component and it is composed of many different internal functions and classes. We write a test to the API boundary so that people can use the component and we know that it works when people use it. That is fine if you are the only person maintaining the component and you have a good memory.

But what if multiple people work on the component and somebody else needs to refactor it? You could try looking in the docs. There are unlikely to be any, though, because it is an internal function. You could try reading the code. This approach is probably the one we rely on most of the time and often works. But if often isn’t too obvious, especially in loosely typed languages with lots of callbacks (*ahem* javascript).

How do you know what goes in and comes out of a function without docs and without types? You don’t. But having a unit test demonstrating stuff being passed in and out is really useful for making an educated guess.

I’m pleased to announce the release of the next major version of Rauma, 4.0.

Rauma is a full-stack PHP framework that gives you database, templating, session, authentication and many other functions out of the box. It’s the framework behind many of Worfolk Online’s websites.

Not much as changed in the 4.0 release, but it gets a major version bump because it’s a breaking change. Here’s what you need to know:

Authentication has been overhauled. The auth service now includes an isLoggedIn function to be a bit more verbose than checking for data. More importantly, you can now extend the base Authorisation class and create your own. This allows you to cache more data, connect to other services and implement persistent logins.

We’ve also deprecated the user description field, in favour of the new attributes feature that was added in version 3.6.

Two other things to be aware of:

There are now a set of proxy objects for things like JsonResponse so that you don’t have to import them from a different namespace.

This bumps the PHP version requirement from 5.6 to 7.1. This allows us to bring in a load of cool new stuff, including a far more up-to-date version of PHPUnit.

It’s available now on GitHub and Packagist.

Photo credit: Brett Donovan.

You’re trying to make your website accessible. Lovely stuff. But because screen reader technology is so bad, you need to add a bunch of inline span tags with the aria-label attribute on them so that you can add additional context, or, more usually, use some kind of hack to get around a screen reader bug.

This works well. However, it also splits the whole thing into separate groups. Consider the following example:

An annual subscription costs £20.00 per year.

Looks good. Except for VoiceOver on Mac and iOS, and probably other screen readers, too, will read out something like this:

Pound two zero zero zero

Oh no! It totally ignored the decimal point and now your user, if they are able to track the weird way it read out individual numbers, thinks that your product costs two thousand pounds. So, our old friend the Aria label is here to help.

An annual subscription costs <span aria-label=”twenty pounds”>£20.00</span> per year.

Hurray! It now sounds like normal language. But it’s still confusing. Now the screenreader reads them out as three separate blocks. “An annual subscription.” “Twenty pounds, group.” “Per year.” The user has to navigate through all three of them even though it is one sentence.

The fix

To fix it, we can use the role attribute. Sometimes.

If we set it to role="text" it will work in WebKit. For example:

<span role=”text”>An annual subscription costs <span aria-label=”twenty pounds”>£20.00</span> per year.</span>

Now it will read out the entire sentence as one string, but still using the Aria label.

Is role=”text” a thing?

No. That’s the drawback. it was proposed to be included in the Aria spec, but nobody could agree on whether it should be a thing or not. So, it was left out. Therefore, it is not implemented everywhere.

It is implemented in WebKit, so will fix the problem on Chrome, iOS, etc. But it won’t fix it in some other browsers. And, you might get pulled up by linting tools and validators because it is not part of any formal specification.

Where can I put it?

Anywhere you like given that it is a made up attribute.

But there are some things to be cautious of. It should only go on a block of text where you do not mind losing any of the context inside of it. If you have an element inside the paragraph, for example, that should be treated as a separate group, then leave it off.

It shouldn’t on headings because you don’t want to lose the context. Instead, put a span tag inside the heading with it on.

Also, you need to ensure you are using the aria-label attribute for anything inside. Normally, you can use an abbr tag with a title attribute and the screen reader will read out the title. However, if you wrap it in a role="text", this will only work if you use an aria-label instead/as well as the title attribute.