In a post to his site Joe Ferguson, the maintainer on the Laravel Homestead project, has announced a change in the 7.1.0 version: compatibility with Zend's Z-Ray debugging tool.

Since the release of Homestead version 7.1.0 and base box version 5.1.0 Homestead now supports the Zend Z-Ray plugin for PHP 7.2. You can start leveraging the power of Z-Ray in your application with a small changes to your Homestead project.

He includes the instructions to help you upgrade your current installation to this latest versions and the configuration changes required. He also walks through the commands you'll need to use and the resulting output so you can be sure you're on the right track. The end result integrates Z-Ray directly into the site without any additional work.

On the Master Zend Framework site Matthew Setter has posted a new tutorial showing you what it takes to get started using Zend Expressive. The article is more about the environment the framework would live in (well, the application written with it) than the actual framework itself.

Ever thought that it's hard to get started with Zend Expressive? Ever think you need to know Vagrant, Ansible, Docker, Puppet, Linux, and more? Nope, you don't! In this post, I'm going to show you that, while these tools can help, if you’re just getting started with the framework (such as learning about it), you don't need them.

I want to be clear, before we go any further, that I’m not talking about doing fully-fledged development. [...] So what I’m talking about here is when you’re just starting out and getting a feel for Zend Expressive, right up to building a test application. I’m not talking about a fully-fledged, deployed application that requires copious tests, one backed by a CI/CD pipeline.

He then talks a bit about the history of Zend Framework and how one of Expressive's goals it to help take some of the sting out of using it. Following this he covers some of the possible tooling you could use including two environment tools: Docker (useful but not required) and Vagrant (handy but also not a must). Finally he gets to the actual requirement - a version of PHP 7 installed on the system. He shows how it, along with its included web server, can be used in development to host an Expressive site by itself.

The SitePoint PHP blog has posted a tutorial showing you how to get started with Sulu CMS and Vagrant. Sulu CMS is a content management system based on Symfony.

In this tutorial, we’ll learn how to get started with Sulu CMS the right way – meaning, we’ll deploy a Sulu “Hello World” instance using Homestead Improved and be mindful of performance issues and configuration values while we’re at it. We’ll also cover some common pitfalls, all in an attempt to get a good base set up for future Sulu tutorials. It is recommended you follow along with the instructions in this post and drop a comment with any problems you might run into.

The tutorial walks you through the installation of the Sulu CMS instance but you'll need to have Vagrant already installed and running. Next up they show you how to configure the system to work along with Vagrant including database setup, running the build and ensuring the system is up and running. There's a bit at the end with some pitfalls and FAQs to help you get started on the right foot.

The Zend Framework blog has a new post from Enrico Zimuel talking about the use of SQL Server for Linux from inside a PHP-based application. This makes use of the preview release of SQL Server for Linux directly from Microsoft.

This week we tested the public preview of Microsoft SQL Server for Linux using PHP 7 with our component zendframework/zend-db.

Microsoft announced the availability of a public preview of SQL Server for Linux on the 16th of November, 2016. [...] Moreover, the performance of the new DBMS seems to be very impressive. Microsoft published a case study with 1.2 million requests per second with In-Memory OLTP on a single commodity server.

The tutorial shows you how to get the SQL Server software installed on a Ubuntu-based system and install it via apt-get. They also show how to install the command line tool for SQL Server and get the msodbcsql driver needed to make the connection. Finally they show how to set up the driver with PHP 7 (via PDO) and running the Zend/Db integration tests using a Vagrant-created and configured VM instance.

The Laravel News site has a new post announcing the release of the latest version of Laravel Homestead, the Vagrant-driven environment that makes it easy to set up a Laravel environment. In this latest version, 4.0, there's a few changes including a major one: support for PHP 7.1.

Laravel Homestead the Vagrant box for easily running Laravel on any platform has just released v4.0 that includes support for the just released PHP 7.1.

The upgrade is easy but the instructions do vary depending on how you have it installed.

They walk you through the steps for the upgrade:

• Backup all your Homestead databases
• update the Homestead Global installation (or per-project installation)
• Destroy the current Vagrant box
• Use "vagrant up" to download the latest version and bring the box back up

It's a pretty easy process that should be pretty painless. Everyone's setup is slightly different so there might be a few issues in your own upgrade and minor version releases will be made if there are issues because of the upgrade.

The SitePoint PHP blog has a new article posted taking a look at Packer (from Hashicorp) and if it's something that's relevant to a PHP developer's needs. Packer is a tool that makes it easier to machine images that can be reused across platforms based on a single configuration.

If you do a lot of server work for your clients or on the job, along with development work, then yes. Packer can help you a lot.

If you are only a developer and don’t really do much work on the server directly, then no. Packer won’t be very helpful.

That being said, it is wise for any PHP developer to learn the basics of creating server environments. You will run into these technologies in your career in one way or another (everything you create runs on them!). This specialized knowledge will help your career in the future for sure! At a minimum, you’ll understand your dev-ops colleagues and the work they do much better.

The article starts with a "look back in time" to when server setup was more manual and server admins/developers had to go in and change configurations/update software by hand. From there they move forward to the changes that virtualized servers made possible followed quickly by tools like Vagrant. Vagrant makes it easier to create and configure virtual machines so why would you need something like Packer? The article provides a summary of the features that Packer provides and how its overall workflow operates.

With all this information under your belt, the tutorial then starts in on using the Packer tool:

• installing the Packer software
• creating a new server instance
• setting up the JSON configuration
• the build process
• working with provisioners
• installing the VM with VirtualBox

The environment is now all set up and configured so the next step is, naturally, installing a PHP-based application. They opt for a basic Symfony demo application, showing how to change the configuration to pull it in and set everything up.

On the SitePoint PHP blog they've posted a new tutorial looking at the combination of Symfony applications (well, one specific one) and Vagrant to optimize it for the best performance possible.

In this short tutorial, we’ll set up Sulu, a new Symfony based CMS, and optimize it on a Vagrant environment. Why a dedicated tutorial handling this? Besides the fact that Sulu has a rather complex initialization procedure, it is based on Symfony which is infamously slow on virtual machines with shared filesystems, and thus needs additional optimizations post-install. The performance hacks in this post, while Sulu-specific, can be applied to any Symfony application to make it faster on Vagrant.

The rest of the post walks you through the steps to get the box set up and the Sulu application up and running:

• New Box and Folder Sharing
• App Type and Vagrant Boot (configuration)
• Installing Sulu

Then they get into the speed improvements and "hacks" to make the overall system perform better. They make updates to the log/cache directory fetching, moving the "vendors" folder into the VM (non-synced) and enabling the APC caching on autoloading. The tutorial also includes a few helpful troubleshooting tips of things to check if a problem does happen to pop up.

Cees-Jan Kiewiet has a post on his site showing you how to run GrumPHP hooks in Vagrant, a tool that allows for code quality evaluation.

A couple of weeks back while attending AmsterdamPHP Mike Chernev gave a talk about GrumPHP. Very cool looking tool, but during implementation I found out it the default setup assumes running grumphp on the same machine (whether that is a VM or iron) as committing. That is a problem in my set up where all PHP related code runs in vagrant and comitting on the host using PHPStorm. Lets fix that.

The post includes the scripts you'll need to include in your Vagrant setup to execute the quality checks on commit, pre-commit and the Vagrant hook setup to run everything inside of the VM instead of locally.

On the SitePoint.com site's "Web" category they're posted a tutorial showing off an interesting piece of software that helps make automated installs of CMS/frameworks easy: a simple bash script tool called Please.

If you’re a web developer, possibly one of your most boring and repetitive tasks is the configuration of the basic setup for every new project. Configuring your my-project.dev domain, creating the database, installing WordPress (or any other CMS/Framework) for the thousandth time: you already know how to do it. What if you could automate all of that?

Well, actually, you can. Please is a simple bash script that helps to automate the installations of many CMSs and Frameworks by configuring them automatically into your Vagrant box, adding a development domain name into your host file, and even a database if needed.

They start off by helping you get a Vagrant box up and running to use for the Please handling. You then clone the Please repository locally and can use the command line tool to set up the process for multiple CMS/framework types including WordPress, Laravel and React. There's also a section covering the creation of your own environment if you need something more custom. Please is currently in beta at the time of this post so be aware that there may still be issues that need resolving before it becomes stable.

In a quick post on the Laravel News site they point out that the Laravel Homestead virtual machine now has support for PHP 7:

Laravel Homestead just received a new update with support for PHP 7 which is due out this month.

If you are already using the PHP 5.x Homestead box, you can upgrade your installation to PHP 7.0 by cloning the php-7 branch of the laravel/homestead repository into a new folder.

With two other simple steps you can quickly upgrade your box to be running PHP 7 - updating the Homestead.yml configuration and running a vagrant up. You can find out more information about this update in the official documentation.