Following the recent release of PHP 7.3, Colin O'Dell has put together a guide for those wanting to install it, walking you through the setup for several popular operating systems.

PHP 7.3 has been released, bringing some great new features to the language such as trailing commas in function calls, throwing errors when JSON parsing fails, array_key_first() / array_key_last() functions, and much more!

In the post he includes instructions for:

• Ubuntu
• Debian
• CentOS / RHEL & Fedora
• Mac OS X
• Windows

He even includes instructions for two other tool-based installations: phpbrew and Docker.

Right on the heels of the release of PHP 7.2.0, Colin O'Dell has posted a guide to installing it on several different operating systems.

type hints, saner count() behavior, and much more.

He then provides the commands you'll need to get your OS of choice updated (well, most of the popular ones at least):

• Ubuntu 14.04, 16.04, 17.04, & 17.10
• Debian 8 (Jessie) and 9 (Stretch)
• Debian 7 (Wheezy)
• CentOS / RHEL 6+ & Fedora 25+
• Mac OS X
• Windows
• phpbrew
• Docker

Each includes the command(s) you'll need to grab the package and perform the installation. If you need something more customized or your OS isn't listed, you can always compile from source too.

The TutsPlus.com site has posted another tutorial in their "Introduction to the Yii Framework series" showing you how to install the framework on Windows and Mac. The usual instructions walk you through installation on a unix-based system, so this helps those without access to a system like that.

In today's tutorial, we'll explain how to install Yii in a local development environment for both Windows and macOS. For the Windows guide, we'll rely on WAMP Server, a Windows web development environment for Apache, PHP and Mac, and for the Mac guide, we'll use its cousin, MAMP. Although Rod uses WAMP in today's tutorial, there is also a Windows version of MAMP.

There's a brief section at the start describing the Yii framework for those who aren't familiar with it (including what "Yii Advanced" is). Next, comes the installation instructions for Mac using MAMP including the install of the MAMP software and the configuration to change to get Yii up and running. Following this comes to Windows installation using WAMP and the configuration changes needed there. The remainder of the post shows the configuration of the Yii framework application itself and how to ensure everything is working correctly.

Raphael Stolt has a new post to his site for the PHP on Windows users out there helping you to keep your integration tests green when little things (like line ending differences) can cause issues between the Windows and unix-based platforms.

Lately on a Windows system, some failing integration tests for CLI commands utilising the Symfony Console component caused me some blip headaches by PHPUnit insisting that two strings are not identical due to different line endings. The following post documents the small steps I took to overcome these headaches.

He starts with the error message that the failing test was giving, a slightly unhelpful response with the "actual" and "expected" values looking basically the same. He suspected it to be something different with the encoding or line endings (a common issue between Windows and Linux platforms). To confirm his suspicions he looked deeper into the Symfony Console code and, on locating the difference, extended the "CommandTester" class to automatically disable the "decorated" setting across all tests.

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!

The SitePoint PHP blog has a recently posted tutorial showing you how to send event messages from PHP to a remote Logstash server running your PHP on a system with Windows installed. Logstash's goal is to centralize the logging in your environment, allowing you to input log information from a wide range of sources and stored in an Elasticsearch database.

By opening this article you’ve endeavored yourself to expanding your knowledge of PHP applications as part of event-based distributed systems. You’ll be given a quick intro into what we are referring to when we say event messages, what Logstash is, and why it is so cool.

If you’ve already heard of Beats or understand you can run Logstash locally to ship logs to another Logstash instance or directly to a datastore such as Elasticsearch, this article is still for you and will show you an easy-to-configure-and-run, hopefully more effective and certainly fun-to-use alternative.

They start with the quick introduction to Logstash and how the event handling they'll add in later will relay messages over to the waiting server. A code example is included showing how to manually write to rsyslog, pointing out that it and Logstash use a similar protocol to receive messages. The tutorial then shows how to view the messages in the log to ensure they're making it correctly and how to use this agent to stream messages over to the waiting server.

On the Symfony Finland site there's a new article posted talking about the use of the Windows subsystem for Linux, an environment that allows for the execution of Linux binaries in a Windows environment.

Windows has always been somewhat of an oddball when it comes to PHP development. In the past years it has lost out on developer mindshare to UNIX-like Operating Systems like Linux and macOS.

With the release of Windows 10 Anniversary Update in August 2016 Microsoft now offers an interesting option for PHP development in the Windows environment: The Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). The Windows Subsystem for Linux allows the execution of Linux binaries in Windows 10. The feature is not enabled by default and is targeted for developers.

They show you how to get into the Linux-compatible shell on your Windows system after enabling it in your System Settings. From there, he says, it's basically like working in a Linux-based server and includes some of the actions he took (including installing PHP 7, Symfony and Composer). He also shows the integration the environment has back with the Windows system including access to local drives (but that there's still some tricky bits involved in using them).

Michelango van Dam has a new post on his site today walking you through the process of running Apigility on Windows Azure. Apigility is a project from Zend that makes creating and maintaining APIs much simpler (based on the Zend Framework).

Since a couple of years I've been a fan of Microsoft Azure, the cloud platform by Microsoft. It offers a platform as a service (PaaS) in the form of Azure Websites which makes it a great solution to prototype and to play with new stuff. Last year Matthew Weier O'Phinney announced Apigility at ZendCon, a manager for API design. It was immediately clear that it would revolutionise the way we would design and manage REST API's.

Michelangelo walks you through the entire process, starting locally. He shows you how to clone and set up the latest version of Apigility and create a basic endpoint named "demo". He adds in a bit of code to handle the API request (returning user data) and includes an example of what the REST request looks like. With that up and running, he moves on to the Azure side of things. He shows you how to create a "web.config" file to configure the Azure server and run Composer as the install is being processed. He helps you get an Azure account set up and shows how to set up the website instance where you'll deploy the application, pointing it to a GitHub repository as a deploy source.

On the Expert Developer site there's a new tutorial showing you how to get the PHP CodeSniffer tool up and working on a Windows installation. PHP CodeSniffer provides functionality to enforce standards and best practices in your application's development (providing code quality).

In this article we will focus on improving Code Quality. Very first step towards improving code quality is to maintain coding standards across developers. [...] Here we will talk about PHP CodeSniffer, which help us to maintain coding standard across multiple developer. Dealing with CodeSniffer is much easier: create rule set, validate your file against your rule set and get the result immediately. It will immediately show how many mistakes you have made in terms of following coding standards and eventually all developer will start coding as per coding standards you have defined.

There's two main parts to the article: first is getting PEAR installed (a package manager for PHP) and then using it to install CodeSniffer. Complete instructions and commands are included as well as a few screenshots along the way.

The /Dev/Hell podcast has released their latest episode today, number 48: Old As Dirt. In this episode hosts Chris Hartjes and Ed Finkler are joined by guest Elizabeth Smith about being "old as dirt" and mentoring other developers.

Our guest this week is Elizabeth Smith, PHP internals veteran and guru of PHP on Windows (she says “I wish every company was as good at giving back to open source as Microsoft”). We talk about being Old as Dirt in relation to a blog post Ed made last week, how to mentor up and coming developers, and the history of PHP on Windows.

They also talk about Ed's The Developer’s Dystopian Future article, PHP-GTK and the PHPMentoring project. You can listen to this latest episode either through the in-page player or by downloading the mp3 directly.