Rob Allen has continued his look at running a PHP application on Bluemix via Cloud Foundry with a new post showing how to use a PostgreSQL database on the platform.

Having successfully deployed a PHP application to Cloud Foundry, I needed a PostgreSQL database for persistent storage. I found Lorna Mitchell's Connecting PHP to MySQL on Bluemix helpful and this article expands on that information.

I want to create a cloud-based PostgreSQL database and connect it to Laravel's Eloquent in a Cloud Foundry application. This is how to do it.

He starts off by showing how to create the database instance on the Cloud Foundry platform via their command-line tool. Next he shows how to bind the database service to the application instance and get the credentials you'll need to connect from your application. Finally he moves over to the PHP side and shows how to configure Eloquent to connect to the database service using these credentials and make a sample query.

Rob Allen has a new post to his site today showing you how to deploy your PHP application to Cloud Foundry, an open source cloud platform that helps to automate deployment onto multiple cloud infrastructures.

I recently had a requirement to deploy a Slim application somewhere. As I already have a Bluemix account, it seemed sensible to deploy it to their Application Runtimes service which is an installation of the Open Source Cloud Foundry project.

This turned out to be quite easy, but there are a number of steps involved, so I'm documenting it here.

After installing some of the command line tools he then prepares the PHP application by selecting a version, creating a manifest file, setting up buildpack options and defining rewrite rules. He then walks you through the deployment steps required to push the code out to the Bluemix host via Cloud Foundry, including the commands needed to make it all work.

Rob Allen continues his series looking at the "serverless PHP" environment that is a part of the IBM Bluemix offering. In his previous post he introduced some of the basic concepts of using the service and helped you create a sample "Hello World" function. In this new tutorial he shows how to update that environment and create a user and allow them access to the PHP functions already created.

I'm at the stage where I need to give another developer access to my IBM Cloud Functions actions. I'm not really an infrastructure person and I found the user management pages on the Bluemix console incomprehensible, so used the command line. This is how I did it so that I don't have to work it all out again.

There's only two steps to the process: adding the user to your organization and adding the user to the space. He goes through both steps, explaining how it works and the command line calls to make it happen. This also provides the added user with access to related resources (like databases).

In a new post to his site Rob Allen talks about getting up and running with "serverless PHP" using the Apache OpenWhisk cloud platform that executes as events are fired rather than sitting as an entire application.

I've been interested in Apache OpenWhisk for a little while now and recently submitted a new feature to add PHP support to the project. As OpenWhisk is a serverless environment, most users do not run their own copy and instead use a commercial provider with IBMs Bluemix available now along with Adobes I/O Runtime and RedHat coming soon. As a result, my contribution, isn't practically useful until it's in production with a provider.

Fortunately, and remarkably quickly, IBM have added support for PHP to the Bluemix "IBM Cloud Functions" platform, so now we can use PHP to develop serverless applications and deploy them into the wild! This is a rebranding, so you'll see this referred to as "Bluemix OpenWhisk" around the web too.

He walks you through the setup of an account on the bluemix.net service and how to install OpenWhisk locally rather than the IBM "Bluemix CLI" tool. He then shares the code to create a simple "Hello World" function in PHP (7.1) and push it up to your account. He then executes the action from the command line, returning his JSON formatted greeting. Next he shows how to set this function up as a web action and give it a URL for the outside world to access. He finishes the post with some examples of calling the URL and how it would receive parameters via a POST or a GET.

On the SitePoint PHP blog author Prosper Otemuyiwa shares what they call the ultimate guide to deploying PHP apps in the cloud with examples for Heroku, Google Cloud, IBM BlueMix, Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services and Laravel Forge.

There is a popular mantra amongst developers that goes like this write, test and deploy. In this tutorial, I’ll show you how to deploy your PHP apps to different cloud server platforms such as Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Heroku, IBM Bluemix, and others.

Cloud servers are basically virtual servers that run within a cloud computing environment. There are various benefits to hosting and deploying your applications in the cloud. [...] In fact, many companies have moved their infrastructure to the cloud in order to reduce cost and complexity. It’s a great option for small, mid-sized, and enterprise scale businesses. If you write a lot of tutorials and do POCs (Proof-of-concepts) like me, it’s also a great choice for you!

He starts off by covering the technologies that will be involved in each deploy: Linux, Apache, MySQL and of course PHP. Then, for each of the platforms previously mentioned, he goes through the setup and configuration of the same functionality. Most include screenshots of the UI in the service setting up the account and application. He also links to two tools that can make it easier to deploy your actual application to these newly configured cloud instances: Envoyer and Deployer.