Rob Allen has published another post covering the use of serverless technology and PHP to run your applications. In this new post he shows how to use img2lambda to publish your Serverless PHP layer out to an AWS Lambda instance.

[The] img2lambda tool will take the layers of a Docker container and convert them to AWS layers for use in Lambda.

I poked around with Clare’s example and updated my lambda-php project in order to understand how it works. I also rewrote my runtime’s bootstrap to make it clearer.

The clever thing from my point of view is that you can build your PHP runtime layer locally using Docker and then publish the layers to AWS for use in your Lambda functions. This means you can now use the layer in different projects and have them all reference the same PHP runtime.

He digs deeper into the tool, looking at the "magic" happening under the covers using Docker. He provides an example of the Dockerfile it creates and walks through what it does. He then shows how to create the layer in AWS and use a serverless framework and a PHP runtime to execute the "hello world" application. He wraps up the post showing how to test it locally, building from the Dockerfile and using a docker run on the result with simple user input.

Rob Allen has a tutorial posted to his site showing how you can run PHP using the serverless lambda functionality that Amazon Web Services provides.

There are other serverless providers, and AWS Lambda is the market leader, but until recently PHP support could most charitably described as cumbersome. That all changed at the end of 2018 with Lambda’s new runtime API and support for layers.

Let’s look at the practicalities of serverless PHP on Lambda with Serverless Framework.

If you'd like to skip to the "good parts" you can check out this repository of the resulting code. Otherwise, he provides a complete walkthrough of the setup and code required to get the lambda up and running:

• compiling the PHP binary on an EC2 instance (so it will be compatible)
• creating a bootstrap file for handling requests
• setting up the yml configuration for the Serverless framework
• writing the "hello world" function
• deploying to the lambda system

Finally he shows how to call the "hello" function using the command line and the response you should receive.

Rob Allen has continued his series of posts covering the use of PHP on the OpenWhisk platform. In his latest tutorial he shows how to use dependency injection for use in "non-trivial PHP applications".

Any non-trivial PHP applications use various components to do its work, from PDO though to classes from Packagist. It’s fairly common in a standard PHP application to use Dependency Injection to configure and load these classes when necessary. How do we do this in a serverless environment such as OpenWhisk?

This question comes up because we do not have a single entry point into our application, instead we have one entry point per action. If we’re using Serverless to write an API, then we probably

He uses a common connection type - PDO to a database - to illustrate a method for injecting dependencies in a serverless application. In his example, he starts with a simple script that returns a set of "todo" items from the database (with the PDO connection code embedded in it). Using dependency injection is a better way to manage that PDO connection so he shows how to update it to use the Pimple DI container and inject it via the constructor to make it available to the rest of the application.

Rob Allen has posted a quick tutorial to his site showing how to user Composer in a PHP project on OpenWhisk. OpenWhisk is Apache's serverless cloud platform that's easy to scale and relatively easy to use. This is the latest in a series of posts from Rob covering its use in PHP projects.

Every PHP project I write has dependencies on components from Packagist and my Serverless OpenWhisk PHP projects are no different. It turns out that adding Composer dependencies is trivial.

He uses a simple action that coverts a number to the matching string, showing the yaml configuration changes and code to include to define the action. The action makes use of the NFNumberToWord package which is then added via Composer. He deploys the action and calls it directly, showing the result to be the correct string for the number "123". He also mentions an archive file (zip) that the serverless functionality creates containing all of the files related to the project. He shows the configuration option you can use to split these by action, making it easier to create a more modular system.

In a new post to his site Matthieu Napoli shows how, with the help of the Bref package, to run a serverless Laravel instance. This is a continuation from his previous post covering the use of serverless functionality for running plain PHP.

Serverless basically means “Running apps without worrying about servers”. The main difference with a traditional hosting is that you do not maintain the servers and reserve their capacity. They are scaled up or down automatically and you pay only for what you use.

[...] Serverless hosting has the advantages of scaling very well since there are (theoretically) no limits. It can also help optimize costs by avoiding paying for unused server resources. You can read more about advantages and drawbacks here.

After briefly introducing what "serverless" computing is, he dives right into the creation of the first lambda on AWS. He then goes through the process of creating the new Laravel project, installing and configuring Bref, and wrapping the Laravel functionality in its HTTP handler. Next, he shares an example of the serverless.yml configuration, how to set up the file storage (for things like sessions and cache) and configure the application to run correctly on the lambda. The post finishes out with a look at setting up the logging, session handling and routing before finally deploying the app using Bref's own command.

In a new post to his site Rob Allen provides the steps you'll need to follow to use the Serverless Framework toolkit with OpenWisk to host PHP-based applications.

Serverless Framework is a toolkit to help you mange and deploy a serverless application. (Personally, I'm not a fan of the name as the word "Serverless" already has a meaning in the same space!) It's a useful tool and supports all the major providers, though AWS Lambda seems to be first-among-equals. The OpenWhisk plugin for Serverless is maintained by the rather excellent James Thomas, so if you have any questions, ping him!

As I build more complex PHP based OpenWhisk applications, I thought I'd explore how Serverless makes this easier.

He starts with helping you get the Serverless framework and the related OpenWisk plugin installed. He then helps you create a project, modify the configuration for a simple "Hello world" kind of script and create the PHP script to act as an endpoint. With the setup complete, he includes the steps to deploy and run the project, invoking the action and enabling it (as a Web Action) to make it reachable via the web.

Rob Allen has a post to his site for the OpenWhisk (a serverless cloud platform) users out there that want to use Composer to install dependencies required by your application.

When creating new OpenWhisk actions in PHP, It's likely that you'll want to take advantage of the rich ecosystem of Composer packages on Packagist.org.

The OpenWhisk PHP runtime has you covered with some pre-installed Composer packages and also the ability to upload your own using a zip file.

He starts by mentioning the two packages that come installed by default: Guzzle and the ramsey/uuid library. He then gets into the upload of your own project files as a ZIP file and how to install the package locally, bundle it up into this archive and push it using the wsk command line tool.

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.