On the Symfony blog they've made a post about a change in all Symfony versions around how .env files are handled and what prompted the change.

When Symfony 4.0 was released, the .env file was introduced as a way to set environment variables. The core of the system has not changed. But, thanks to recent updates to some core Symfony recipes, .env loading has some new features that can be enjoyed on any Symfony Flex project!

If you have an existing Symfony app (started before today), your app does not require any changes to keep working. But, if/when you are ready to take advantage of these improvements, you will need to make a few small updates.

The post outlines what changed exactly including the removal of the .env.dist, allowing a .env.local to override the settings and that the .env file is now pulled in for testing. The final point is the main reasoning for the changes to make testing much easier when it relies on these environment variable values. It doesn't require any changes to your current application but can be optionally implemented to take advantage of these updates.

TutsPlus.com has continued their series of posts covering some of the basics of the PHP language with their latest article. In this newest tutorial they cover reading from and writing to files using functionality already included with the language.

In this tutorial, you'll learn several important functions in PHP which are sufficient for all your basic file reading and writing needs. You'll learn how to read a file, write to a file, write to a text file, and check if a file exists.

Luckily, PHP provides a lot of functions to read and write data to files. In this tutorial, I'll show you the easiest ways to read data from a local or remote file and how to use flags to write to files exactly how we want.

The tutorial is broken down into several sections:

• checking if a file exists
• reading data from a file
• writing data to a file
• reading and writing data to files

Each section comes with a bit of description and code examples showing it in action. The post wraps up with some final thoughts and "gotchas" that you need to know when working with files in PHP (especially large ones).

The TutsPlus.com site has a new tutorial posted with an introductory level tutorial showing how to upload files with PHP and some example code to illustrate the process.

In this article, I’ll explain the basics of file upload in PHP. Firstly, we’ll go through the PHP configuration options that need to be in place for successful file uploads. Following that, we’ll develop a real-world example of how to upload a file.

The starts with the settings you'll need to update in your php.ini file for the temporary storage directory, the max file size, maximum post size and several others. They explain what each of the settings is for an suggest values you can use for most upload situations. They then move on to the code, showing the HTML to create the upload form and the PHP to handle the form submission. They also add in some filename sanitization and file extension restrictions.

In this new post to his site Sameer Borate looks at using the TOML configuration file format in a PHP application.

As any one who has programmed knows about configuration files. Configuration files are mostly text files used to configure the parameters and initial settings for computer programs – mostly user applications, operating system settings.

[...] In this post we will look into parsing TOML files in PHP. TOML is a configuration file format that is intended to be easy to read due to its obvious semantics and is designed to map unambiguously to a dictionary data structure. “TOML”, the name, is an acronym for “Tom’s Obvious, Minimal Language” referring to its creator Tom Preston-Werner.

He starts with an example of a configuration file in the TOML format and, following the installation/used of the yosymfony/toml library, the result of it being parsed. He also includes an example of using the same library to build out a TOML configuration and dump it to a string for output.

On the Laravel News site today there's a tutorial posted introducing you to TOML configuration, a new configuration file structure that's designed to be easy for humans to read and highly flexible (all while staying relatively simple).

TOML is a configuration file format language that is intended to be minimal and easy to read. TOML stands for “Tom’s Obvious, Minimal Language,” which refers to the creator Tom Preston-Werner.

[...] TOML aims to be a minimal configuration file format that’s easy to read due to obvious semantics. TOML is designed to map unambiguously to a hash table. TOML should be easy to parse into data structures in a wide variety of languages.

In order to work with it in PHP (since there is no native support) they show you how to install the yosymfony/toml package. The tutorial then walks you through an example TOML configuration file and what the result of using the package to parse it looks like. It then takes it a step further an converts one of the database configuration files for a Laravel application to the TOML format. It also shows the reverse - using the package to create a TOML file and the resulting output.

On the RIPSTech.com site they've posted a warning to the WordPress users out there about a vulnerability that would allow a malicious user to delete any file in the WordPress installation, not just file uploads.

At the time of writing no patch preventing this vulnerability is available. Any WordPress version, including the current 4.9.6 version, is susceptible to the vulnerability described in this blogpost.

For exploiting the vulnerability discussed in the following an attacker would need to gain the privileges to edit and delete media files beforehand. Thus, the vulnerability can be used to escalate privileges attained through the takeover of an account with a role as low as Author, or through the exploitation of another vulnerability/misconfiguration.

The post includes more details around the impact of the issue and where in the code the problem lies. It also offers a temporary "hotfix" as a way around the issue by adding a new filter that uses the basename function to reset the thumbnail data.

Sergey Zhuk has posted another ReactPHP tutorial to his site, this time focusing on working with the filesystem from a ReactPHP application.

I/O operations in the filesystem are often very slow, compared with CPU calculations. In an asynchronous PHP application this means that every time we access the filesystem even with a simple fopen() call, the event loop is being blocked. All other operations cannot be executed while we are reading or writing on the disk.

[...] So, what is the solution? ReactPHP ecosystem already has a component that allows you to work asynchronously with a filesystem: reactphp/filesystem. This component provides a promise-based interface for the most commonly used operations within a filesystem.

He starts the code with a bit of setup, creating the initial event loop, the related Filesystem instance and a pointer to a "test.txt" file. He then walks through the basic filesystem operations and the code required: reading in the file contents, creating a new file and writing content back out to a file. The next section goes through the same functionality for directories. He ends the post with a look at symbolic link creation, read and delete operations.

The Laravel News site has a quick post sharing a helpful topic for the Laravel users out there. In the tutorial they show how to create custom helpers for use across the entire application in any scope.

Laravel provides many excellent helper functions that are convenient for doing things like working with arrays, file paths, strings, and routes, among other things like the beloved dd() function.

You can also define your own set of helper functions for your Laravel applications and PHP packages, by using Composer to import them automatically.

If you are new to Laravel or PHP, let’s walk through how you might go about creating your own helper functions that automatically get loaded by Laravel.

The tutorial starts off by recommending the placement of the custom helper file and how to ensure it's autoloaded when the application is bootstrapped. It then covers the creation of the helper functions including the use of if checks to ensure there's not a function naming collision. Finally the post includes an example of a helper file, sharing the creation of two methods: show_route and plural_from_model. The post ends with a look at packages and how to include helper files inside of them for use in your application.

On the SitePoint PHP blog, there's a tutorial posted showing you how to deal with large files without "killing your server". In this case, it's not about the upload process but about the handling of large files on the server side.

It’s not often that we, as PHP developers, need to worry about memory management. The PHP engine does a stellar job of cleaning up after us, and the web server model of short-lived execution contexts means even the sloppiest code has no long-lasting effects.

There are rare times when we may need to step outside of this comfortable boundary — like when we’re trying to run Composer for a large project on the smallest VPS we can create, or when we need to read large files on an equally small server. It’s the latter problem we’ll look at in this tutorial.

They start off by describing how they plan to measure the success of the improved file handling, mostly around the memory usage required to work with the file. It then gets into some of the options available including:

• reading files line by line
• piping between files
• using filters

The last option, the filters, seems to be the best one. He uses this one and customizes the handling with different configurations and custom protocols. All related code is included in the post and is avaialble on GitHub.

On his Medium.com site Jeff Madsen shows you how to use contexts in the PhpStorm IDE to switch between environments or current work using a more streamlined process.

Switching context is a pain.

Not just because you need to mentally switch the complex web of ideas in your head. Think about all the physical files on different git branches you have to remember in order to answer a “quick question about task #123”. [...] PhpStorm has a lot of great context links and shortcuts to help you navigate among all these, but it is still a royal pain whenever you need to put one set of files aside and work in a different area of the codebase.

[...] When I finished something and pushed it up for review if there was even a small request to change a default or label I had to reopen the branch and track down the correct files where the work was done. How could I turn that all into a single, easy step?

Enter Contexts and Tasks!

He starts off by defining what a "context" is in the world of PhpStorm - a group of open files with a name attached - and how they can be created/saved inside the IDE. Next is the idea of "tasks" that help with performing operations and relating them to contexts and groupings of files. He then shows how to switch between tasks related to a certain feature and how to close it out when you're done.