Tomas Votruba has put together a new post with a list of five helpful hints for working with GitHub in your development projects.

The best programmers aren't the smartest in the field. They're lazy, they know their tools well and they know good tools other programmers don't.

Do you know the following tips?

His tips include using single-character console command aliases, receiving notifications only when a new package release is made, and the use of the refined-github browser (Chrome/FireFox/Opera) to help reduce required clicks. He also shows how to implement Composer "scripts" for use on the command line - a very useful extension to your Composer configuration.5 Tips to Effective Work with Github Repository

On the TutsPlus.com site there's a new tutorial posted showing you how to use the Symfony Console component to create custom CLI commands.

In this article, we're going to explore how you could create custom command-line interface (CLI) commands in your PHP applications using the Symfony Console component. After installing the necessary libraries, we'll create a few handful of examples to demonstrate the concepts of the Console component.

In fact, this component is used by several PHP frameworks to develop CLI applications, and a few popular frameworks are already using this component as a starting point.

The tutorial starts with a brief introduction to the Console component and what kind of features it offers. Following this it includes the instructions to get the component installed, configured and shows the creation of a first "hello world" command. With some of the basics in place, the tutorial then moves on to a more real-world example showing the creation of a "clear cache" command that includes a "groups" input option.

Tomas Vortuba has continued his series looking at building command line tools with PHP and the Symfony Console component. In this latest post he shows how to create an application using dependency injection in just four files.

Series about PHP CLI Apps continues with 3rd part about writing Symfony Console Application with Dependency Injection in the first place. Not last, not second, but the first. Luckily, is easy to start using it.

He starts with a bit of information about how Symfony has evolved from the previous method of using controllers as services to create CLI tools. Now commands can be used as services and be pushed into/pulled from a dependency injection container. He then walks through the three steps to adding a command as a service:

1. updating the services.yml file to include linking for the console application class.
2. updating the Kernel to load the yml configuration.
3. creating the bin file to execute the application.

With this structure in place, he then shows how to share functionality between services using a CompilerPass.

In a new tutorial on the Laravel News site, the author (Eric Barnes) shows you how to create a Laravel command that will send a daily email newsletter with the help of the Campaign Monitor service.

Here on Laravel News, we offer multiple ways of staying up to date with new content. Everything from auto-sharing to all the social media channels, a read-only Telegram channel, a weekly newsletter and last March we started offering a daily email digest.

To send the daily email we utilize the Laravel scheduler and Campaign Monitor so it’s completely automated. In this tutorial let’s look at how its all setup and how you can easily add this to your site to start sending out automated emails.

The tutorial starts by helping you get the Campaign Monitor SDK package installed (via Composer) and configured to use their API with your own key. Next it walks you through the creation of the console command to hook into the Scheduler for automated sending. It includes the code you'll need to find the data (in this case the latest blog posts) and the email method to send the information to the Campaign Monitor API. There's a brief mention of the creation of the HTML for the newsletter based on the Zurb Foundation and the configuration change to add the command to the scheduler for execution.

The Yappa.be blog has a tutorial posted sharing the method they used to implement queued and scheduled execution of Symfony commands. This is made possible by the Enqueue package.

At Yappa, we have always used Johannes' JMSJobQueueBundle to run and schedule Symfony console commands for background jobs.

However, we've stumbled upon a much more elegant solution called Enqueue. [...] It's packed with features, supports major brokers such as RabbitMQ, Kafka, Amazon SQS, Google PubSub, Redis etc. and has a bundle ready to be used with Symfony.

[...] One downside is that the Enqueue Symfony bundle doesn't provide an out of the box solution to queue Symfony console commands and there's no 100% straight forward way to implement this. In this post I'll cover the basics in setting up the Enqueue Symfony bundle so we can easily queue Symfony console commands!

The tutorial then walks you through the installation of the Symfony bundle, adding it to the list of installed bundles and configuring it with basic parameters and queue connection details. Next they've included the code to create the processor used when a command is pushed to the queue. To handle the other side (execution of the command when the queue is handled) they create a "QueuedCommand" value object and a command handler class. With this structure in place they show the addition of test commands to the queue and the result when the queue is consumed.

On his Medium.com site Agustín Houlgrave has posted a tutorial with some suggestions about building PHP console applications correctly.

Googling this topic, I could only find official documentation on Symfony’s Console Component and some tutorials on quick building, but i’d like to write about making a real scalable console application that you could use in an actual production project. I’ll explain the reasons we do each of the things.

I like to write decoupled, reusable and as raw as possible code, so we’ll try to aim on that direction. Also, we’ll take advantage of all of the new features of PHP 7.

He decided on the combination of the Symfony Console Component and the Zend Service Manager to handle the use of the decoupled components. He then gets into the installation of the required packages and the initial code to create the Symfony command. He then sets up the Composer autoloading and the "factory" configuration for the command. From there he includes the code to build out the command runner and gives an example of executing the command and the output.

On the Laravel News site today there's a post that highlights a package that makes it easier to create beautiful CLI menus for artisan commands in the Laravel framework.

Nuno Maduro, author of Laravel Zero and Collision (which nunomaduro/laravel-console-menu.

The post includes an example of code that can create the menu and its options. It also shows how you can change the look of the default menu, changing colors, the "selected" marker, padding and width. The package makes use of the php-school/cli-menu package for a lot of the base menu rendering and functionality.

Those on OSX using PHP via Homebrew may be wondering how they can upgrade their systems to the latest version of the language, PHP 7.2. Fortunately, as Freek Van der Herten shows in this new post the upgrade process is just a few quick commands away.

PHP 7.2 was released almost two months ago. I decided to wait a bit until a stable version of Xdebug with PHP 7.2 compatibility was available. And that happened yesterday with the release of Xdebug 2.6.

To make the switch over to PHP 7.2 from 7.1 (or really any other PHP version) it's a simple matter of unlinking the current version and installing PHP 7.2 with the matching Xdebug package. He also includes the commands for installing the packages for Imagick and Redis handling.

On the TutsPlus.com site there's a new tutorial posted introducing you to task scheduling in Laravel, a feature that allows you to run code in the application periodically similar to a cron job.

In this article, we’ll go through one of the exciting features of the Laravel web framework—task scheduling. Throughout the course of this article, we’ll look at how Laravel allows you to manage scheduled tasks in your application. Moreover, we’ll also end up creating our own custom scheduled tasks for demonstration purposes.

The Laravel framework allows you to set up scheduled tasks so that you don't have to worry about setting them up at the system level. You can get rid of that complex cron syntax while setting up scheduled tasks since Laravel allows you to define them in a user-friendly way.

The article starts with a brief introduction to cron jobs, how they're set up and some issues that come along with them. Next the article describes the "Laravel Way" of handling task scheduling, showing how to use Laravel's artisan command to run the scheduler. With the basics laid out, the author then walks through how to create a custom task either using a closure/callable, making an artisan command or using the exec command. Code examples are included for each and more information about scheduling options and functionality can be found in the Laravel manual.

As this post to Laravel News mentions the upcoming v5.6 release of the framework will remove the artisan optimize functionality from the project's artisan command line tool.

The Artisan optimize command is deprecated as of 5.5, and a commit in master has already removed it from 5.6. Waiting until 5.6 gives you time to update your build scripts and composer.json files ahead of the release.

As of Laravel 5.5, the composer.json no longer references optimize in the post-install-cmd and post-update-cmd scripts. The Optimize command is still defined, but does nothing in 5.5.

The project has provided some reasoning behind the change, mostly having to do with the overall performance improvements in the PHP language itself. Additionally, there was some discussion around the removal before it was finalized.