TJ Miller has written up a post for his site sharing a method he's created to verify the compatibility of a package in Laravel based on the version of Laravel installed.

I’ve been working with Honeybadger to build a new set of PHP integrations. I would like to write more about that soon, however, I feel like I’ve stumbled across something that could be useful to others. I wanted to share it as soon as I could.

For the Laravel package, I was aiming for Laravel 5.5 and newer support as it is the latest LTS version. [...] In hindsight, I don’t think that I actually ever tested it against a 5.5 install. I relied on the CI process to make those verifications for me.

[...] As Laravel 5.7 is now out, I needed to add support to both the package’s composer configuration and verification in CI. [...] Now that I am supporting three versions I felt that I needed a more specific way of verifying compatibility with different versions of Laravel.

He shares his initial version of his Travis-CI configuration, running tests on PHP 7.1 and 7.2 with the prefer-lowest flag. In order to make it easier, he updated this based on what he'd seen in other packages: adding a matrix that runs PHP 7.1 through 7.3 against versions 5.5.x, 5.6.x and 5.7.x to ensure compatibility across all variations. His resulting build looks something like this.

On the Zend Blog there's a new tutorial posted that covers the situation where a user has multiple roles and you're using ACLs (access control lists). The post shows how to accomplish this with the ZendAcl component of the Zend Framework.

After covering the essentials of the ZendPermissionsAcl component (Access Control unit, Cross Cutting Concerns module, in the Zend Framework Advanced course), many students have approached me to ask, “what happens if a user has multiple roles?”

In this article I discuss the “traditional” way of handling a user who has multiple roles, and then lay out an easy approach which I simply call Mr. X.

The tutorial starts with a bit of a refresher on the use of the ZendAcl component to define the list of roles and resources (and relating the two). It also covers the "everyone" (anonymous) role and adding that into the mix. The "one user, multiple roles" issue is then solved with a multiCheck function that can verify multiple roles at once. Finally it talks about "Mr. X" and how to add that to all users, assuming that they will have the groups/roles information we need.

The main PHP.net site has posted the announcement(s) of the release of updates for the three supported versions of the language: 7.1.15, 5.6.34 & 7.2.3.

The PHP development team announces the immediate availability of PHP 7.1.15, 5.6.34 and 7.2.3. This is a security fix release, containing one security fix and many bug fixes. All [PHP] users are encouraged to upgrade to this version.

Fixes include changes to the DateTime handling, LDAP connectivity, Phar construction, PostgreSQL issues and changes to the SPL. You can get these latest versions either from the main downloads page or on windows.php.net for the Windows binaries.

In a post to his site Christoph Rumpel shows the Laravel (well, Eloquent) users out there how to use groupBy at multiple levels for customizing and sorting the results of your database queries.

Since Laravel v5.5.29 you can group collections by multiple levels. Let's see what this means and how this works.

The post starts with some of the current functionality, showing how the groupBy could be used before with a simple collection to group student data by skill level. It then gets into the new functionality, modifying the example to group by both the skill level and by the "teacher" value. The result is a sorted set of results where the top level is the skill level and, inside of each, the teachers with students under that. The post finishes by "going crazy" and showing the grouping by event more criteria, adding "name" and "email" columns to the list.

The TutsPlus.com site has posted a new tutorial showing the CodeIgniter users out there how to manage multiple sites written using the framework. Traditionally CodeIgniter applications needed to be run as separate instances but their method simplifies the setup by needing only one instance for all.

Today, we’re going to explore how you can manage multiple applications in the CodeIgniter web framework using a single codebase. In the course of that, we’ll go ahead and create two different CodeIgniter applications that will share the core CodeIgniter codebase.

Sharing the core codebase across different applications is not something new as it’s already practiced by different frameworks and open-source systems, and CodeIgniter is no different. It easily allows you to manage multiple applications that share the core CodeIgniter library and API files, and at the same time you could use different databases and site-specific configurations.

The article then starts with some of the benefits of using a multisite setup including simpler maintenance and the ability to use different databases for each. It then gets into the process for creating multiple applications using separate directories under an "applications" directory and creating sample "welcome" content under each. Finally, they make some changes to the configuration to use an environment variable to switch out which front controller (index.php) file to direct the request to (as set up in the web server config).

The TutsPlus.com site has posted their latest tutorial in their "Building Your Startup" series today. In this new article they show you how to update the application to support multiple domains in one Yii2 application.

The Yii2 advanced template allows you to run a number of sites in one code tree. I used its front-end tree to build Meeting Planner and its back-end tree to build the administrative suite of tools for the service. Today, however, I'll focus on launching another domain on top of the existing front-end tree—and all the small and large complexities that go along with this.

[...] I presumed it would be fairly simple (no pun intended) to launch Simple Planner, but it ended up taking a few days of work.

He points out that the work to get the frontend of the application working with a different domain name was relatively simple. It was the update to the email handling that took the most time (the application is very email-driven). He then shows the configuration changes required to add multiple domains, how to change the homepage for each domain and update images/links/etc to match the new domain. He then moves on to configuring the services used for each domain and, finally, the pieces that need to be updated to have the emails support the multiple domains.

Sameer Borate has a new post to his site today showing how you can handle multiple exceptions in PHP 7.1, the latest release in the PHP 7.x series.

Exception handling is one of the ways in which modern languages handle errors. PHP usually handles exception in a separate catch block for each different type of exception. Below is a example exception code that uses three custom exceptions ‘MyFooException’, ‘MyBarException’ and ‘MyBazException’ that is later handled in a ‘try’ block.

He includes a bit of code showing the "old way" of doing it with multiple catch statements, one for each type of exception. With PHP 7.1 however, you can collapse all of those down into a single catch statement and type hint each type you want caught (pipe delimited). This can make for much cleaner code and a lot less repetition in your error/exception handling.

In this new post to the Laravel News site they list out some of the deprecations coming in PHP 7.2 based on this RFC.

The PHP 7.2 RFC for deprecating some current functionality has been approved. The following items are included in this list and will begin throwing deprecated notices.

The list of features to be deprecated includes:

• the magic __autoload function
• the create_function function
• the (unset) cast
• the each function

Most of the things in the list are functionality that you just don't see much in recent PHP development. It could cause problems for older codebases but for those already on PHp 7 it shouldn't take much to make the necessary changes.

The Exakat.io blog has a post with an interesting method for preventing the execution of multiple instances of a script at once - locking execution with an external indicator (like files, semaphores and streams/sockets).

Like everything, it all started from a simple problem : how to prevent multiple PHP scripts at the same time. And turned into an odyssey of learning, full of evil traps and inglorious victories. In the end, it works, that’s the most satisfying and it possibly matters to no one except me. But "the way is the goal", as said Confucius, so, I decided to share the various findings.

Exakat runs in command line, and it uses a graph database. The database is central to the processing, and it is crucial to avoid running several scripts at the same time : they will write over each other. So, the problem is simple : preventing several instances to run at the same time, on the database. In commandline, there is no web server that may serve as common place between scripts, sharing some memory and implementing a locking system. It requires to use another common ground : the system.

He shares some of the methods he tried to help prevent the simultaneous execution of the Exakat process including:

• file locking using flock
• creating a "lock" file
• making it "crash proof"
• using semaphores
• using a socket for the lock

He describes some of the issues he found when running the tool using locking inside of a Docker container and, finally, the use of sockets and streams to place a "hold" until the script closes (also preventing issues on a crash). He ends the post talking about the "final boss" in his battle for locking support - the handing off of the socket connection to another process between parent and child. The final list in the post is a list of each method he tried, their benefits and downsides (but only in certain situations).

With the recent release of PHP 7.1 you might be asking how you can quickly and easily update your current installation, regardless of the platform. Thankfully Colin O'Dell is here to help with this guide to upgrading to v7.1 on multiple Linux distributions, OSX and Windows.

PHP 7.1 has been released, bringing some great new features and enhancements to the language such as nullable types, the iterable pseudo-type, catching multiple exceptions, and much more.

Here's a brief guide on how to install PHP 7.1 on several different operating systems.

He includes instructions for Ubuntu, Debian, CentOS/RHEL, Mac OS 10.6+ and Windows. Complete commands and links to the downloads are also provided. You have no excuse now not to upgrade - get downloading!