Nikita Popov has a new post to his site sharing a look behind the curtain of how the PHP 7 virtual machine works, the latest version in the Zend Virtual Machine that powers the language.

This article aims to provide an overview of the Zend Virtual Machine, as it is found in PHP 7. This is not a comprehensive description, but I try to cover most of the important parts, as well as some of the finer details.

This description targets PHP version 7.2 (currently in development), but nearly everything also applies to PHP 7.0/7.1. However, the differences to the PHP 5.x series VM are significant and I will generally not bother to draw parallels.

Most of this post will consider things at the level of instruction listings and only a few sections at the end deal with the actual C level implementation of the VM.

He then goes through many different points and piece of functionality in the VM and how they work including:

• variable types
• the stack frame layout
• fetch modes
• exception handling
• finally handling
• generators

There's lots of information here and it's definitely interesting to see what happens inside the language to create the fast and functional PHP 7 applications we have now.

On the Laravel News site there's a new post covering a new inclusion into the Homestead VM: Mailhog:

A new Homestead base box has been released: Version 1.1.0. This release includes a new local mail handing system named Mailhog. The grunt-cli npm package is now installed globally, OPcache is now always invalidated, and finally we added some package-cleanup to the build process to lower the download size of the final compressed base box.

Long time Homestead users may remember that it previously supported the Ruby application, MailCatcher. By moving from MailCatcher to Mailhog the installation and configuration is easier than ever before.

They talk briefly about the steps needed to upgrade to Mailhog from MailCatcher and how to update your Homestead environment to take advantage of this latest change.

On the /r/php subreddit from Reddit.com there's a post from Spvrtan asking the community what technologies they're using for local development in their day to day development work.

It's honestly been over 5 years since I last touched PHP on the back-end. At that time, other than "doing it live", XAMPP was the top dog for local environments. Is there a new player in the space or should I go with the same? I've been working primarily as a front-end engineer for the past few years during my full-time employment roles and touched the back-end on projects I've worked on but they've all been Java-based.

They also ask what other developers are using for their deployment tools and pipelines. Answers to the post so far include some of the usual tools and methods including:

• Docker
• puphpet (for use with Vagrant)
• Homestead from Laravel

Other comments also mention the manual creation of virtual machines and even support for local installations rather than virtual ones. What's your development environment like? Head over to the topic and share your own setup too.

James Wade has posted a tutorial to his site showing you how to combine Docker and WordPress after some experimentation of his own.

I’ve been meaning to get started with Docker since hearing about it in 2014. Having really enjoyed working with Vagrant, I’ve struggled to make a leap into the Docker realm. [...] My understanding at the moment is that docker takes up less resources, which for me is becoming more and more of an issue as I attempt to expand my development environments. Also, I’ve recently inherited a number of Vagrants that I discovered have varying operating systems and application versions, that vary from production.

This has unravelled a dependency hell when I came to build a continuous integration process. In light of this, at this stage, a complete rewrite of the architecture seems to be emerging as the most sensible way to being all the services in to line. I’ll be looking whether I can solve these problems (amongst others) with Docker.

He starts by helping you get all the tools you'll need installed with examples for multiple platforms (OSX, Windows, Unix-based). With those in place he helps you set up a VM as a Docker machine then get WordPress installed (complete with its database). He also shows how to use Docker Compose, using an existing WordPress instance and creating a custom image from the results (including database, environmental settings and hostname configuration).

In this new Medium.com post Andrew McLagan shows you some strategies you can use to scale your Laravel application horizontally with the help of Docker and a relatively simple configuration.

Homestead was created by Taylor [Otwell] to ease creation of PHP development environments, it offers developers a consistent environment across projects and is fully compatible with the Laravel ecosphere.

[...] Docker is basically programmable infrastructure, or more simply: Docker lets you create a server environment for your project from a configuration file. [...] I will demonstrate the power of the Docker ecosystem through another tool called Docker Compose a container orchestration tool built upon Docker. This tool enables us to start multiple Docker containers at once from a single configuration file, rather then starting each container individually.

He shows you how to get the required tools installed including a fresh Laravel installation. He then includes the Docker YAML configuration to create the environment, setting up a load balancer, Redis, MySQL and a HHVM instance. He then creates the docker machine to tie all of the pieces together as a VirtualBox VM instance. With this setup up and running, you can then test a URL to be sure the Laravel install is up and running correctly. He then gets to the horizontal scaling part and talks about docker's "scale" functionality making it simple to set up multiple "web" container instances to handle the incoming requests.

Joe Ferguson has a quick post to his site today showing you how to use a Homestead VM to run a Slim 3 application with just a few quick commands.

I’ve been a fan of SlimPHP for a really long time. Recently I started using it for a site that I do freelancing development for and wanted to share a quick solution to local development. It’s no secret that I love Laravel’s Homestead vagrant environment. Using the per-project installation method, you are only three commands away from running a SlimPHP skeleton application in a local Homestead VM.

The remainder of the post shows the commands to:

• create a new Slim application based on the Skeleton
• Setting up Homestead
• And creating a new instance to host the Slim application

With a quick vagrant up your virtual machine is ready to go with the application ready to run.

On the Zend blog there's a recent post showing you how to run Zend Server on the Google Cloud Platform, an easy to use service that makes deploying new sites a few clicks away.

Day 1 at ZendCon in Las Vegas has seen some pretty interesting announcements, one of them being the availability of Zend Server on Google’s Cloud Platform. Just in case you want to check it out, this article will help you get started.

Google’s Cloud Platform boasts a highly-scalable and reliable infrastructure, with computing, storage and application services for developing, testing and deploying your apps. With Zend Server, you get a certified and secure PHP stack, advanced development tools which include Z-Ray, and a bunch of additional features to aid your development workflow. Taken together, you get a powerful development setup.

They walk you through the simple process you'll need to follow to get the Zend Server instance up and running, complete with screenshots. They help you create the instance, create the server password and launch the result.

Lorna Mitchell has a post to her site showing you how to get a PHP7 setup and working so you can test out your current application, preparing it for this next major version's release.

PHP 7 is coming, which is nice, but what does it mean for the majority of PHP developers? PHP as a community is notoriously slow in adoption, some of us are still waiting for 2012's new shiny to be available as standard on our hosting platforms. However with the performance benefits and a few really nice new features, PHP 7 is well worth everyone's attention, and it's actually quite easy to get started so here's my quick howto.

The large part of the post is the steps you'll need to get the php7dev box (from Rasmus Lerdorf) up and running, complete with a shared folder mounted from your local machine and a custom Nginx configuration. She also mentions the "Go PHP7" initiative that's aiming to help make the transition to PHP7 as easy as possible for everyone (including various extensions).

Rob Allen has posted a guide to his site today showing how to install XHGui via Ansible. XHGui is a graphical interface to view the results of XHProf, a performance evaluation tool.

I'm still using Ansible to provision Vagrant VMs. This is how I added the XHGui profiler to my standard setup.

He walks you through the five steps his process follows to get the necessary software installed and configured to get up and running:

• Install Composer
• Install the uprofiler PHP extension
• Install XHGui
• Set up for profiling
• Set up host for XHGui website

Each step includes the commands to execute or the lines to add/update to the configurations to get the system up and working.

Lorna Mitchell has a new post today showing you how you can use XHGui in a virtual machine, sorting the resulting performance data on the VM rather than your local machine.

I'm doing some performance tuning on a project at the moment and my favourite tool is still XHGui - but it's designed to run on the same machine as its victim and since this is a vagrant VM, the chances of me destroying the machine and therefore the data are pretty high! Instead, I set it up to store the data onto the host and I thought I'd share how I did that. All these instructions for Ubuntu on both host and guest, and I've tried not to be specific about the vagrant elements in order to focus on how the pieces fit together rather than what you should type.

She walks you through all the steps you'll need to get the software up and running as well as configuring the actual guest VM to direct the data to the right place. She sets up the data source to push the results into (a MongoDB) and configures the PHP installation with an "auto prepend" of the XHGui header file. Finally, she includes the commands you'll need to view the data on the VM itself, running the built-in PHP web server as an ad-hoc instance on the VM itself.