<p>Two days ago I released the first major version in almost 2 years for <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://github.com/shlinkio/shlink-web-client">shlink-web-client</a>, a web UI for <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://shlink.io">shlink</a>, my self-hosted URL shortener.</p><p>This new version introduces several improvements to the project, and I thought it was worth writing a post to explain all of them in depth.</p><h3>New design</h3><p>The project has been using the same design almost since the beginning. It was clean, but it laked a bit of contrast and consistency in many sections.</p><p>Now the main background is light-gray, with components composed in white cards with a slight box shadow, that makes them easier to spot inside the app.</p><p>Also, the main area has now a max-width that prevents components from stretching too much on wide screens.</p><div class="row"><div class="col-md-6  "><img alt="Before" src="/assets/img/shlink-web-client-3/design-before.png" class="gallery-item"/><p class="text-center"><small>Before</small></p></div><div class="col-md-6  "><img alt="After" src="/assets/img/shlink-web-client-3/design-after.png" class="gallery-item"/><p class="text-center"><small>After</small></p></div></div><h3>Overview page</h3><p>Up until now, after connecting to a Shlink server, you went directly to the list of short URLs.</p><p>With this new version, you now see an overview page first, which displays some general stats, a quick short URL creation form, and the latest 5 short URLs.</p><p>From there, you can navigate to the full list of short URLs, with filtering capabilities, or go to the advanced short URL creation form.</p><div class="row"><div class="col-md-8 col-md-offset-2 "><img alt="Overview" src="/assets/img/shlink-web-client-3/overview.png" class="gallery-item"/><p class="text-center"><small>Overview</small></p></div></div><h3>Improved short URL creation form</h3><p>One of the sections with more room for improvement was the short URL creation form. It had all the inputs mixed, displaying just the &quot;long url&quot; one, with the option to un-collapsing the rest at will.</p><p>The new design groups the inputs by context, which makes it more clear. It also displays the inputs all the time, since the &quot;quick form&quot; is now located in the overview page.</p><div class="row"><div class="col-md-6  "><img alt="Before" src="/assets/img/shlink-web-client-3/creation-form-before.png" class="gallery-item"/><p class="text-center"><small>Before</small></p></div><div class="col-md-6  "><img alt="After" src="/assets/img/shlink-web-client-3/creation-form-after.png" class="gallery-item"/><p class="text-center"><small>After</small></p></div></div><h3>Enhanced visits page</h3><p>The visits page had a problem, it was trying to display too much information in a single place.</p><ul><li>Visits over time</li><li>Visits from every platform</li><li>Visits from every location</li><li>A list of visits as a table</li></ul><p>The new approach splits those in subsections with their own sub-route each (<code>/by-location</code>, <code>/by-context</code>, etc). This helps to render a smaller amount of charts at once, since they are a bit CPU greedy.</p><p>Also, only the visits from the last 30 days are loaded by default, making it load way faster for URLs with a lot of visits.</p><div class="row"><div class="col-md-6  "><img alt="Before" src="/assets/img/shlink-web-client-3/visits-before.png" class="gallery-item"/><p class="text-center"><small>Before</small></p></div><div class="col-md-6  "><img alt="After" src="/assets/img/shlink-web-client-3/visits-after.png" class="gallery-item"/><p class="text-center"><small>After</small></p></div></div><h3>Outer sections</h3><p>The app has some sections which are not related to a specific server, like creating/editing servers, or the settings page.</p><p>These sections have also been adapted to the new style, and they also have a max-width for wide screens.</p><div class="row"><div class="col-md-6  "><img alt="Before" src="/assets/img/shlink-web-client-3/create-server-before.png" class="gallery-item"/><p class="text-center"><small>Before</small></p></div><div class="col-md-6  "><img alt="After" src="/assets/img/shlink-web-client-3/create-server-after.png" class="gallery-item"/><p class="text-center"><small>After</small></p></div></div><h3>Date range selector</h3><p>A new component allows selecting date ranges either by relative time ranges (last 30 days, last 90 days...) or by selecting absolute start and end dates.</p><p>This component is used to filter both short URL lists and visits lists.</p><div class="row"><div class="col-md-6  col-md-offset-3"><img alt="Date range selector" src="/assets/img/shlink-web-client-3/date-range-selector.png" class=""/><p class="text-center"><small>Date range selector</small></p></div></div><h3>Domain selector</h3><p>Shlink has had multi-domain support for some versions, but changing the domain from the web client required to set the value manually, which is a bit error-prone.</p><p>This version introduces a new component which allows selecting from domains already used in the past (which is what you will want in most of the cases), preventing accidental typos.</p><p>It also allows setting new values in case you want to use a new domain that you never used before. This domain will then appear in the list the next time.</p><div class="row"><div class="col-md-6  "><img alt="Existing domains" src="/assets/img/shlink-web-client-3/domains-existing.png" class=""/><p class="text-center"><small>Existing domains</small></p></div><div class="col-md-6  "><img alt="New domain" src="/assets/img/shlink-web-client-3/domains-new.png" class=""/><p class="text-center"><small>New domain</small></p></div></div><h3>Other improvements</h3><p>The changes described so far were the major ones. However, v3.0.0 includes a few other minor improvements.</p><ul><li>Result and loading messages have been standardized: They are now more consistent and use the same set of components, which also ensures consistency in the future.</li><li>Error messages are now more descriptive: Instead of showing generic error messages when API calls fail, the actual error message is now always displayed, so that it&#x27;s easier to know what failed.</li><li>Dropped support for Shlink v1: All major versions come with some breaking changes that improve code maintainability. This one drops Shlink v1 support, which allows removing some conditional paths here and there.</li></ul><p>Other than the last point, Shlink v3.0.0 is mostly backwards compatible, so it&#x27;s safe to upgrade if you are already using Shlink v2.x</p><h3>Next steps</h3><p>Of course this doesn&#x27;t end here, and I have a lot of ideas to improve it even further.</p><ul><li>Dark theme: It&#x27;s what the cool kids do these days, and I have already done some experiments around it.</li><li>Shlink dashboard: Next gen web app for Shlink. You can read the whole reasoning in <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://github.com/shlinkio/shlink-web-client/issues/338">this issue</a>.</li><li>Filtering in lists added to URL: Many sections allow filtering lists, but the state is saved in memory, which means it gets lost if the page is refreshed, and it cannot be bookmarked. The intention is to make all filtering params to become part of the URL.</li><li>Exporting visits in CSV: It&#x27;s cool to see charts full of info, but sometimes admins need to feed other services with the data, and consuming the original API is not always an option. Exporting visits to a CSV file will be supported soon by shlink-web-client.</li></ul>

Released shlink-web-client v3.0.0

<p>Let&#x27;s not deny that <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://github.com/features/actions">GitHub actions</a> are hitting hard in the tech community, and many projects are transitioning from other continuous integration systems like <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://circleci.com/">Circle CI</a> or <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://travis-ci.org/">Travis CI</a>.</p><p>Personally I have been using Travis a lot during the past years, for all my OSS projects, and I have gotten very used to it.</p><p>However, people seem to be &quot;abandoning&quot; travis in favor of GitHub Actions, for different reasons. &quot;It&#x27;s faster&quot;, &quot;I can run smaller tasks in parallel&quot;, etc.</p><p>In my case, I have moved a few very specific tasks there, where travis was becoming a bottleneck, but I still have mixed feelings about the very-verbose yaml-based config needed to configure a few GitHub Actions, compared to the more concise travis one.</p><p>In this article I&#x27;ll explain how I improved a travis build to run several smaller tasks in parallel jobs, without having to completely move away from it.</p><h3>Initial state</h3><p>This project&#x27;s travis config is relatively simple. It is used to build a JS project for the web browser, and it has to run the next tasks:</p><ul><li>Lint the code, to make sure it fulfils the project&#x27;s coding standards.</li><li>Run unit tests.</li><li>Run mutation tests.</li><li>Build the docker image, to make sure none of the new changes broke it.</li><li>Conditionally publish a release on GitHub, with a dist file attached to it, if the build is being run for a git tag.</li></ul><pre><pre><code class="language-yaml">dist: bionic

language: node_js

branches:
  only:
    - /.*/

cache:
  directories:
    - node_modules

services:
  - docker

node_js:
  - &#x27;12.16.3&#x27;

install: npm ci

before_script:
  - echo &quot;Building commit range ${TRAVIS_COMMIT_RANGE}&quot;
  - export MUTATION_FILES=$(git diff ${TRAVIS_COMMIT_RANGE:-origin/main} --name-only | grep -E &#x27;src\/(.*).(ts|tsx)$&#x27; | paste -sd &quot;,&quot;)

script:
  - npm run lint
  - npm run test:ci
  - npm run mutate:ci
  - docker build -t project:test .

after_success:
  - node_modules/.bin/ocular coverage/clover.xml

before_deploy: npm run build ${TRAVIS_TAG#?}

deploy:
  - provider: releases
    api_key:
      secure: &lt;key&gt;
    file: &quot;./dist/project_${TRAVIS_TAG#?}_dist.zip&quot;
    skip_cleanup: true
    on:
      tags: true
</code></pre></pre><h3>Problems with this approach</h3><p>This is more or less ok, but the last two commands in <code>script</code> can be relatively slow and can delay the whole process.</p><p>Also, specially the mutation tests one, which is currently always considered successful regardless the result, can make the build reach the maximum run time allowed by travis, making the whole build falsely fail.</p><blockquote><p>The reason for the <code>before_script</code> step is to determine which source code files changed, and run mutation tests on them only, in order to mitigate this.</p></blockquote><p>Other than this, the build config defines &quot;global&quot; customizations that are actually only used for some tasks:</p><ul><li>Running <code>npm ci</code> is not required for the <code>docker build</code> task.</li><li>Getting the <code>docker</code> service is not required by any of the other tasks.</li><li>Determining changed files is only used by the <code>mutation tests</code> task.</li></ul><h3>Making use of jobs</h3><p>One cool feature travis supports is the use of a job <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://docs.travis-ci.com/user/build-matrix/">build matrix</a>, that lets you define multiple jobs that run in parallel as part of the same build, and make each one of them do unrelated tasks.</p><p>Using this feature it is possible to improve the <code>.travis.yml</code> file, making it look like this:</p><pre><pre><code class="language-yaml">dist: bionic

language: node_js

branches:
  only:
    - /.*/

cache:
  directories:
    - node_modules

node_js:
  - &#x27;12.16.3&#x27;

jobs:
  fast_finish: true
  allow_failures:
    - name: &#x27;Mutation tests&#x27;
  include:

    - name: &#x27;Lint&#x27;
      install: npm ci
      script: npm run lint

    - name: &#x27;Unit tests&#x27;
      install: npm ci
      script: npm run test:ci
      after_success:
        - node_modules/.bin/ocular coverage/clover.xml

    - name: &#x27;Mutation tests&#x27;
      install: npm ci
      before_script:
        - echo &quot;Building commit range ${TRAVIS_COMMIT_RANGE}&quot;
        - export MUTATION_FILES=$(git diff ${TRAVIS_COMMIT_RANGE:-origin/main} --name-only | grep -E &#x27;src\/(.*).(ts|tsx)$&#x27; | paste -sd &quot;,&quot;)
      script: npm run mutate:ci

    - name: &#x27;Build docker image&#x27;
      services:
        - docker
      install: skip
      script: docker build -t project:test .

    - name: &#x27;Publish release&#x27;
      if: tag IS present
      install: skip
      script: skip
      before_deploy: npm run build ${TRAVIS_TAG#?}
      deploy:
        - provider: releases
          api_key:
            secure: &lt;key&gt;
          file: &quot;./dist/project_${TRAVIS_TAG#?}_dist.zip&quot;
          skip_cleanup: true
          on:
            tags: true
</code></pre></pre><p>This approach introduces all these benefits:</p><ul><li>Now linting, testing, mutation testing and building the docker image run in parallel, making the build finish earlier.</li><li>The mutation testing step is allowed to fail, and thanks to the <code>fast_finish</code> flag, travis won&#x27;t even wait for it to finish, considering the build successful once the rest have passed.</li><li>Configs that are only meaningful for certain jobs are defined in the job itself, instead of globally.</li><li>The &quot;publish release&quot; job only runs conditionally if the build is for a tag, thanks to the <code>if: tag IS present</code> condition. (More info about <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://docs.travis-ci.com/user/conditional-builds-stages-jobs/">conditional jobs</a> in travis).</li><li>As soon as any of the jobs fails, the whole build fails and you don&#x27;t have to continue waiting. Before this, if the third task failed, you still had to wait for the previous two to finish.</li><li>Each job can have a name, making it more clear in travis UI what tasks are being run:</li></ul><p><img src="/assets/img/travis-multiple-jobs/travis-jobs.png" alt="Travis CI jobs"/></p><h3>Conclusion</h3><p>The main purpose of this article was to showcase that travis still has a lot to give. Github Actions are definitely cool, but there&#x27;s usually no silver bullet for everything, and a combination with other tools might be more suitable.</p><p>Also, this allows people using travis to improve their builds without having to change everything. Then, once you have split your tasks, if you still want to move to Github Actions, it should be easier.</p><blockquote><p>If you are curious, this is the project in which I use this travis configuration: <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://github.com/shlinkio/shlink-web-client">shlinkio/shlink-web-client</a>.</p></blockquote>

Running several steps of a Travis CI build in parallel

<p>Asynchronous and non-blocking runtimes are pretty usual in many programming languages, as well as long-lived web apps that stay in memory and are capable of dispatching multiple HTTP requests without having to be fully bootstrapped every time. This has not been traditionally the case with PHP apps. </p><p>However, many projects are starting to get some adoption, that bring this long-lived approach to the PHP world.</p><p>The problem with this is that PHP developers are not used to this, and they tend to continue acting as they have always done. Also, libraries might have made some assumptions, making them not work as expected when used under this context.</p><p>Some of these projects are <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.swoole.co.uk">swoole</a>, <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://reactphp.org/">ReactPHP</a> or <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://amphp.org/">Amphp</a>, to give some examples.</p><p>In this article, I will be focusing on the first one, and explain how to approach some of the pain points I have found after using it for a year and a half on an <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://github.com/shlinkio/shlink">existing PHP project</a>.</p><h3>Introducing Swoole</h3><p>The main difference swoole has compared to other similar projects is that it&#x27;s written as a native PHP extension, and needs to be installed with <code>pecl</code>.</p><p>This is obviously a bit cumbersome, but the benefit is that, since it&#x27;s written in C++, it has a better handling of memory allocation, which is very important to achieve what it tries to do.</p><p>What swoole does is running a main process which bootstraps the PHP application once, and then keeps it in memory so that it can continue dispatching requests without having to load resources every time. This makes it really fast.</p><p>Those HTTP requests are handled by a set of child processes called &quot;web workers&quot;. Swoole forks the contents in memory for the main process to each one of the workers, so each worker has a &quot;copy&quot; of the application in memory.</p><p>Each worker is independent, but each one of them can only handle one request at a time, so you have to increase the number of workers if you expect a lot of concurrent traffic.</p><p>Other than web workers, swoole also has another set of child processes called &quot;task workers&quot;, which can be used to delegate long tasks at runtime to prevent web workers from getting blocked.</p><p>Here you can see a diagram of swoole&#x27;s architecture.</p><p><img src="https://www.swoole.co.uk/images/how-swoole-works.png" alt="How Swoole works"/></p><blockquote><p>More information can be found in <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.swoole.co.uk/how-it-works">Swoole&#x27;s website</a>.</p></blockquote><h3>Problems to solve</h3><p>Now that we know how swoole works, let&#x27;s see some of the challanges I have faced in th past, which are usually not that ovbious when you are used to think in terms of &quot;blocking&quot; and &quot;short-lived&quot;.</p><h4>Database connections are kept open</h4><p>One of the first things you find out is that, since the application stays in memory, any database connection that has been opened by a worker (either web or task worker), will be kept open and reused in subsequent executions or HTTP requests served by the app.</p><p>This, which is in theory good, has a side effect, which is not obvious during development: <strong>the opened connection will eventually expire</strong>.</p><p>Since most of the popular database abstraction layers in PHP are coming from the times in which PHP was just a bootstrap-on-every-request technology, they never cared too much about expired database connections, as they would be opened again on next request.</p><p>However, when using swoole and the like, you have to implement some mechanism which takes care of reconnecting or gracefully recovering when this happens.</p><blockquote><p>I wrote an article explaining how I solved this on a middleware-based app served with swoole and using doctrine: <a href="/2019/11/04/how-to-properly-handle-a-doctrine-entity-manager-on-an-expressive-application-served-with-swoole/">How to properly handle a doctrine entity manager on an expressive application served with swoole</a></p></blockquote><p>Obviously, swoole (and also others) provides some tools to work with databases (like this <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.swoole.co.uk/docs/modules/swoole-async-mysql-client">MySQL client</a>), which I&#x27;m sure do not have this problem (although, I haven&#x27;t personally tried this), but they are more limited than other well adopted libraries.</p><h4>In-memory caches don&#x27;t behave as expected</h4><p>It is a frequent practice to use local in-memory caches, like APCu, to improve applications performance in production.</p><p>Usually APCu is faster than other options, like redis or memcached, so it&#x27;s the choice when you only have one instance of your app running (meaning, you don&#x27;t have a cluster behind a load balancer).</p><p>However, even if you are running your app on just one server with swoole, because of the web worker system explained earlier, you actually have several copies of your app in memory, and each one of them will have a separated and not shared cache when using APCu.</p><p>This can lead to inconsistencies which are hard to debug, so you need to have it in mind.</p><p>Also, since the information that is being loaded is kept in memory anyway, you will not notice such a big improvement by using APCu or other in-memory caches.</p><blockquote><p>Notice that this problem does not happen when using distributed/centralized caching solutions, such as redis or memcached, as in that case, the caching technology is shared by all workers.</p></blockquote><h4>No need to optimize file including/requiring</h4><p>Many projects have complex configuration systems which are spread into several files. While this make it more maintainable, it also has a performance impact when all those files need to be loaded on every request.</p><p>Because of that, there are libraries like <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://github.com/laminas/laminas-config-aggregator">laminas-config-aggregator</a> that can dynamically load config from many sources and, if some conditions are met, they can merge the result in a single bigger file that can be used in later requests.</p><p>In the case of swoole, as all the files will be kept in memory once loaded for the first time, there&#x27;s no need for this kind of optimization.</p><h4>Class autoloading happens once</h4><p>This point is very related with the previous one.</p><p>Composer offers a lot of optimization options so that class autoloading is faster in production. While you usually will still want to use some of those so that the first time a class is being loaded it is still reasonably fast, any subsequent hits will just use the class which is already in memory.</p><p>One of the composer flags you will probably don&#x27;t want use with swoole is <code>--apcu-autoloader</code>, because of the reasons mentioned two points above this one.</p><h4>Services should be truly stateless</h4><p>This is something that you should always do anyway, but it&#x27;s specially important when a service instance is kept in memory between HTTP requests.</p><p>Sometimes it&#x27;s easy to end up having some small piece of internal state on a service, where we save something as a side effect of a method call, to end up using it when another one of the public methods is invoked.</p><p>While this could seem harmless when the whole app is bootstrapped on every request, it can have very dangerous side effects when the app is served with swoole, because the instance will persist until another request is dispatched by the same web worker.</p><p>Just imagine you saved some user data on a service, and it ends up being served to another user on the next request. That won&#x27;t look good.</p><p>Because of this, make sure your services are truly stateless, and if for any reason that&#x27;s not possible, at least remember to have some mechanism in place that flushes the data just before finishing the request.</p><h4>Hot reloading for dev envs is not that good</h4><p>One thing we usually take for granted is that we can modify a PHP file and just by making a new request, the new code will be executed. However, when the code is kept in memory, it&#x27;s not that straightforward.</p><p>When you are developing a project which is served with swoole, you will have to restart the server every time to get your changes applied.</p><p>Swoole has a mechanism to do a light server reload, which is faster. You can find the docs in <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.swoole.co.uk/docs/modules/swoole-server-reload">it&#x27;s website</a>.</p><p>The problem with this is that you need to implement the mechanism to invoke that when a file is changed, or use some library that does it for you.</p><p>Also, I have noticed that even calling that and seeing that the server is reloaded, does not always have the expected effect, and you have to still end up doing a hard reload. It&#x27;s something I don&#x27;t fully understand and I still need to investigate a bit further.</p><h3>Conclusion</h3><p>As it always happens when new technologies appear, it takes some time to get used to them, but I strongly suggest you to give a try to swoole or any other non-blocking runtime, because it makes your apps super fast.</p><p>Just remember to have all of the above in mind ;-)</p><p>That said, here you can find some libraries that will make your life easier when trying to serve existing projects with swoole, without having to couple with it and being able to continue using your favourite framework:</p><ul><li>IDE helper: <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://github.com/swoft-cloud/swoole-ide-helper">https://github.com/swoft-cloud/swoole-ide-helper</a></li><li>Mezzio (formerly Zend Expressive): <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://github.com/mezzio/mezzio-swoole">https://github.com/mezzio/mezzio-swoole</a></li><li>Symfony: <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://github.com/k911/swoole-bundle">https://github.com/k911/swoole-bundle</a></li><li>Laravel: <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://github.com/swooletw/laravel-swoole">https://github.com/swooletw/laravel-swoole</a></li></ul><p>Also, here you can find some more articles talking about this topic:</p><ul><li><a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.zend.com/blog/why-you-should-use-asynchronous-php">https://www.zend.com/blog/why-you-should-use-asynchronous-php</a></li><li><a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://samsonasik.wordpress.com/2020/04/05/using-swoole-in-mezzio-application-with-sdebug/">https://samsonasik.wordpress.com/2020/04/05/using-swoole-in-mezzio-application-with-sdebug/</a></li></ul>

Considerations when working with async PHP runtimes like swoole

<p>Some of you probably know that I have a pet project in which I like to work from time to time. This project is a self-hosted URL shortener called <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://shlink.io">Shlink</a>.</p><p>Shlink is built using expressive as the base framework for the HTTP-dispatching task. A while ago, an expressive module was released to officially support serving expressive apps with <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.swoole.co.uk/">swoole</a>, and I decided to include it on Shlink.</p><h3>How does swoole work?</h3><p>Swoole is an asynchronous non-blocking I/O framework which works in a similar way as node.js, but for PHP apps.</p><p>It has been conceived in a way that the app stays in memory between requests, removing the bootstrapping step and making apps to be served much faster.</p><p>Swoole can serve as many simultaneous requests as you tell it to. For this it makes use of workers. Each worker can serve one request at a time, and every worker has a separate instance of the app loaded in memory (this is something I <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://twitter.com/dominikzogg/status/1189403552399134720">learned recently</a>).</p><p>Because of this, you have to sometimes change a bit the way you design your code. For example, if a service needs to be stateful (it shouldn&#x27;t, but shit happens), you will have to remember that the state will persist between requests, and you will want to somehow reset it to avoid unexpected side effects.</p><h3>How does this affect the EntityManager?</h3><p>One of the main services that keeps this internal state in Shlink is the doctrine <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.doctrine-project.org/projects/doctrine-orm/en/current/tutorials/getting-started.html#obtaining-the-entitymanager">EntityManager</a>.</p><p>Due to the fact that it was originally designed to be used on a classical web server + CGI context, assuming it would be recreated on every request, there are a few considerations to take into account:</p><ul><li>It implements the unit of work pattern. It internally keeps track of all the entities that have been created/changed until you decide to flush it.</li><li>If something fails, the <code>EntityManager</code> can get closed, which makes it unusable after that moment.</li><li>If the database connection expires, the <code>EntityManager</code> will not gracefully recover. Instead, it will fail, since it&#x27;s not aware of the connection not being usable, getting yourself in previous point.</li></ul><h3>How to workaround it</h3><p>I learned about these issues by try and error, by using it on the app and getting the failures. Now, I want to share how I workaround those issues.</p><p>The first one I faced was the one making the app unusable after the <code>EntityManager</code> was closed. In order to solve this I created a decorated instance (naming, an object implementing <code>EntityManagerInterface</code> which in turn was wrapping an actual <code>EntityManager</code>), which was making sure the wrapped instance was transparently recreated if at some point it was closed.</p><p>However, this caused some side effects, and I finally realized that it was better to make the <code>EntityManager</code> to have to be reopened from the outside, and only once per request (this is closer to how it would behave on a classical set-up).</p><p>That&#x27;s how I came up with the <code>ReopeningEntityManager</code> Shlink is currently using (as of v1.20.0):</p><pre><pre><code class="language-php">&lt;?php

declare(strict_types=1);

namespace Shlinkio\Shlink\Common\Doctrine;

use Doctrine\ORM\Decorator\EntityManagerDecorator;

class ReopeningEntityManager extends EntityManagerDecorator
{
    /** @var callable */
    private $createEm;

    public function __construct(callable $createEm)
    {
        parent::__construct($createEm());
        $this-&gt;createEm = $createEm;
    }

    public function open(): void
    {
        if (! $this-&gt;wrapped-&gt;isOpen()) {
            $this-&gt;wrapped = ($this-&gt;createEm)();
        }
    }
}
</code></pre></pre><blockquote><p>You can find the actual code in <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://github.com/shlinkio/shlink-common/blob/master/src/Doctrine/ReopeningEntityManager.php">shlink-common</a>.</p></blockquote><p>It just expects a factory that creates the actual <code>EntityManager</code>, and exposes an <code>open</code> public method which re-creates the wrapped instance if closed.</p><p>This method is called from a <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.php-fig.org/psr/psr-15/">PSR-15</a> middleware which needs to be registered early in the middleware pipeline. It makes sure the method is called before the next middleware on the stack is invoked:</p><pre><pre><code class="language-php">&lt;?php

declare(strict_types=1);

namespace Shlinkio\Shlink\Common\Middleware;

use Psr\Http\Message\ResponseInterface;
use Psr\Http\Message\ServerRequestInterface;
use Psr\Http\Server\MiddlewareInterface;
use Psr\Http\Server\RequestHandlerInterface;
use Shlinkio\Shlink\Common\Doctrine\ReopeningEntityManager;

class CloseDbConnectionMiddleware implements MiddlewareInterface
{
    /** @var ReopeningEntityManager */
    private $em;

    public function __construct(ReopeningEntityManager $em)
    {
        $this-&gt;em = $em;
    }

    public function process(ServerRequestInterface $request, RequestHandlerInterface $handler): ResponseInterface
    {
        $this-&gt;em-&gt;open();

        try {
            return $handler-&gt;handle($request);
        } finally {
            $this-&gt;em-&gt;getConnection()-&gt;close();
            $this-&gt;em-&gt;clear();
        }
    }
}
</code></pre></pre><blockquote><p>Again, the code can be found in <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://github.com/shlinkio/shlink-common/blob/master/src/Middleware/CloseDbConnectionMiddleware.php">shlink-common</a></p></blockquote><p>This middleware also does two more things (this time, after calling the next middleware on the stack, and making sure it does it even if an exception is thrown).</p><ul><li>It first closes the database connection. By doing it so, we make sure the <code>EntityManager</code> will reconnect the next time it needs to interact with the database, and therefore, we avoid the &quot;expired connection&quot; issue.</li><li>Then it clears the <code>EntityManager</code> itself. This avoids memory leaks, and also prevents that any orphan/non-flushed entity &quot;transcends&quot; to the next request, solving the first problem.</li></ul><h3>Further considerations</h3><p>This approach has been working well so far, but it&#x27;s important to assume that the <code>EntityManager</code> was not really designed for this non-blocking kind of context.</p><p>You need to know that the worker making use of it will not be able to serve any request until the <code>EntityManager</code> finishes its job. Because of this you might want to increase the number of swoole workers.</p><p>Also, closing the DB connection on every request is not the most optimal approach. It would be perfect to have a connection pool that was able to recreate connections when expired, and to keep them open as long as possible for faster operations. However, the <code>EntityManager</code> was not designed for that, so it&#x27;s better to close it.</p><p>You also need a <code>callable</code> to pass to the <code>ReopeningEntityManager</code>. The way you solve this depends on your implementation and the dependencies you use.</p><p>In my case, in Shlink I make use of the <code>ServiceManager</code>, so I have a delegator factory which takes the actual factory and passes it to the <code>ReopeningEntityManager</code>:</p><pre><pre><code class="language-php">&lt;?php

declare(strict_types=1);

namespace Shlinkio\Shlink\Common\Doctrine;

use Psr\Container\ContainerInterface;

class ReopeningEntityManagerDelegator
{
    public function __invoke(ContainerInterface $container, string $name, callable $createEm): ReopeningEntityManager
    {
        return new ReopeningEntityManager($createEm);
    }
}
</code></pre></pre><blockquote><p>You can find the actual code in <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://github.com/shlinkio/shlink-common/blob/master/src/Doctrine/ReopeningEntityManagerDelegator.php">shlink-common</a>.</p></blockquote><h3>Conclusion</h3><p>I wanted to write this article as a recap for myself too, since I had to ask and investigate many times, and I couldn&#x27;t find a single source of truth explaining everything.</p><p>I hope that, if you ended up here, this article served you well.</p>

How to properly handle a doctrine entity manager on an expressive application served with swoole

<p>For a long time, I have been trying to include tests in every project in which I&#x27;ve worked on.</p><p>There are several types of automated tests (or what should actually be called <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://abstracta.us/insights/guide-continuous-testing/automated-checks">automated checks</a>). From unit tests, integration and functional tests, to end-to-end tests.</p><p>Each one of them differs from the rest by the scope they try to cover. From small units of code which are tested completely detached from external dependencies, to a whole app which is tested as a black box like if an end consumer was using it.</p><p>I&#x27;m not going to deeply discuss the semantics behind this, or where an integration test ends and an end-to-end test starts, because it&#x27;s quite frequently a blurry line.</p><p>I want to focus on unit tests, and a frequently used practice (even in my own tests), which I have read (and felt) several times, it might not be the best approach.</p><blockquote><p>This article is not focused on any particular technology, since I have found this in a lot of different projects.</p></blockquote><h3>What&#x27;s a unit test</h3><p>According to <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_testing">Wikipedia</a>, unit testing is a &quot;method by which individual units of source code [...] are tested to determine whether they are fit for use&quot;.</p><p>While this might look like a clear definition, it&#x27;s actually quite open because, what&#x27;s a &quot;unit&quot; in the context of unit testing?</p><p>Very often, in object oriented programming projects, people take a class as a unit to test, and create a unit test for every class. In other paradigms, like functional programming, you might consider a function as the unit to be tested, or a set of functions which you have decided to put together in a module.</p><p>This is not really important for the purpose of this article. What&#x27;s really important is to take into account that, in order to properly &quot;unit test&quot; a &quot;unit of source code&quot;, you have to do it by isolating it from any dependency of that unit.</p><p>One of the better ways to achieve this is by following the <strong><a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dependency_inversion_principle">Dependency Injection Principle</a></strong>. Without it you will probably end up trying to hack yourself in order to detach a &quot;unit&quot; from its dependencies.</p><blockquote><p>You can find other articles about <a href="/tag/dependency-injection/">Dependency Injection</a> in my blog.</p></blockquote><h3>Replacing dependencies</h3><p>A very frequent practice when unit testing a unit of source code is to replace its dependencies with <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Test_double">test doubles</a>, in order to properly isolate every unit when testing it.</p><p>Test doubles are basically objects compatible with the dependencies of the subject under test, that are created just for the purpose of the test and have some useful capabilities, like capturing how they have been called, or what should they return when called.</p><p>When you use one of those test doubles to assert how they were called as part of the test itself, you are using them as &quot;spies&quot;.</p><h3>Over-trusting spies</h3><p>All this introduction and contextualization had a single purpose.</p><p>I find myself (and others) in the situation in which you prepare a test double to behave in a certain way, then you call your subject under test, and then assert that your expectations on how the test double was called are correct, by spying on it.</p><p>This sometimes feels wrong, since it seems you are testing the test double/s instead of the subject under test.</p><p>I have read many times that, in a unit test, we should not actually know the internal implementation of the subject under test, but only test that, based on certain input, the expected output is returned (so, trust its public API).</p><p>However, there are cases in which some function/method does not really have any output, and we can only verify everything is going right by spying on the test doubles.</p><p>So, at the end of the day, I have mixed feelings about this practice.</p><h3>Conclusion</h3><p>Sadly, I cannot state a clear conclusion. This is actually an open article, and I would love to get your point of view in the form of a <a href="#comments-box">comment</a>.</p><p>It would be great to see how others face this, if you use other kinds of test doubles instead of spies, or if you are just ok with the implications.</p>

Is spying on mocks a bad practice for unit tests?

<p>Performance is an important subject when a project grows.</p><p>There are some good practices that make projects more maintainable, like <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dependency_injection">dependency injection</a>, however, creating all the objects at the beginning of the request could reduce the application performance.</p><p>If some of the created objects are not finally used, we have wasted CPU time and memory for no reason.</p><h3>DI pattern basics</h3><p>The dependency injection pattern is &quot;simple&quot;. It is one way to implement the <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dependency_inversion_principle">Dependency Inversion Principle</a>, and it says that all the objects that certain subject depends on should be injected on it when the subject is created, rather than letting the subject internally create them at runtime.</p><p>This decouples every part of the application and eases testing each subject.</p><p>However, what happens if some of those objects are not finally used?</p><h3>The proxy pattern to the rescue</h3><p>A proxy is a lightweight wrapper for an expensive object. It implements the same type of the wrapped object, but delays the object creation until it is going to be really used, for example by overriding all the public methods and initializing the wrapped object the first time one of them is called.</p><p>If we used proxies for every expensive dependency, the previous problem would be solved. We can still inject the dependency, but it will be wrapped by the proxy, which will create the object itself once we need it, or never, if it is not finally used.</p><p>This is the principle behind lazy services. The ServiceManager makes use of the <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://github.com/Ocramius/ProxyManager">ocramius/proxy-manager</a> package to create proxies on the fly for all the services configured as lazy.</p><h3>Lazy services config</h3><p>The <code>lazy_services</code> config block used to be an independent block on v2 of the ServiceManager. On v3 it has been integrated on the ServiceManager configuration itself, along with <code>factories</code>, <code>invokables</code> and such.</p><p>This is an example of <code>lazy_services</code> usage:</p><pre><pre><code class="language-php">use Acelaya\Database\DbConnFactory;
use Acelaya\Service\MyExpensiveService;
use Acelaya\Service\MyExpensiveServiceFactory;
use Zend\ServiceManager\Proxy\LazyServiceFactory;
use Zend\ServiceManager\ServiceManager;

$sm = new ServiceManager([
    &#x27;factories&#x27; =&gt; [
        &#x27;db_connection&#x27; =&gt; DbConnFactory::class,
        MyExpensiveService::class =&gt; MyExpensiveServiceFactory::class,
    ],

    &#x27;lazy_services&#x27; =&gt; [
        &#x27;class_map&#x27; =&gt; [
            &#x27;db_connection&#x27; =&gt; \PDO::class,
            MyExpensiveService::class =&gt; MyExpensiveService::class,
        ],
        &#x27;proxies_target_dir&#x27; =&gt; &#x27;data/proxies&#x27;,
        &#x27;proxies_namespace&#x27; =&gt; &#x27;AcelayaProxy&#x27;,
        &#x27;write_proxy_files&#x27; =&gt; getenv(&#x27;APPLICATION_ENV&#x27;) === &#x27;prod&#x27;,
    ],

    &#x27;delegators&#x27; =&gt; [
        &#x27;db_connection&#x27; =&gt; [
            LazyServiceFactory::class,
        ],
        MyExpensiveService::class =&gt; [
            LazyServiceFactory::class,
        ],
    ],
]);
</code></pre></pre><p><strong>But how does this work?</strong></p><p>The first thing we have to do is register our services the regular way. In this case I have registered 2 services in the <code>factories</code> block, the <code>db_connection</code>and the <code>MyExpensiveService</code>. I can fetch those services in a normal way, and their factories will be hit in order to create them.</p><p>But we don&#x27;t want that. We want a proxy to be returned, wrapping the factory that will be hit only when the object is going to be used.</p><p>The next block, <code>lazy_services</code>, wraps some config params, like the <code>class_map</code>, which determines the class that needs to be proxied for each service (sometimes the service name is the class itself, but we still have to map it).</p><p>Finally, by making use of the <code>delegators</code> block, we have to add a built-in delegator to each lazy service, the <code>Zend\ServiceManager\Proxy\LazyServiceFactory</code>.</p><p><strong>Important!</strong>: If your service needs more delegators, this one should be the last one of the list, so that it is the first one hit.</p><p>This delegator is the one which makes the magic. Instead of calling the next delegator until the factory is hit, it returns the generated proxy, and makes it wrap the next factory, so that the delegators chain which ends on the main factory, is only hit the first time the object is going to be used.</p><p>The rest of the <code>lazy_services</code> properties are only used for convenience.</p><ul><li>The <code>proxies_target_dir</code> tells where proxies should be created. If you don&#x27;t define it, the system temp dir will be used.</li><li>The <code>proxies_namespace</code> tells the namespace to be used for proxy classes.</li><li>The <code>write_proxy_files</code> property is a boolean which tells whether to persist generated proxies or generate them every time. It is a good idea that you set it to false on development, so that proxies are regenerated every time, in case the proxied classes have changed, and true on production to improve performance, so that once a proxy has been created, the same file is used every time.</li></ul><h3>How to fetch lazy services</h3><p>The good thing is that the whole process is transparent. You don&#x27;t need to change your code.</p><p>If you were already fetching services and you want to make them lazy, you just need to map them and add the <code>LazyServiceFactory</code> delegator in the ServiceManager config. Everything else remains the same.</p>

Using ServiceManager 3 lazy services to improve your PHP application performance

<p>Everyone who regularly visits my blog knows that I&#x27;m an absolute fan of the <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://zendframework.github.io/zend-servicemanager/">Zend\ServiceManager</a> component.</p><p>It is always my choice to deal with dependency injection in any kind of project, more now that v3 has been released, which is faster and has a better public API.</p><p>The workflow while working with the <code>ServiceManager</code> is usually the same. You create a factory or abstract factory that creates a service and then you register that service into the <code>ServiceManager</code> itself.</p><p>Of course you have to optimize your code, and you should try to reuse the same factories whenever possible, and try not to abuse of abstract factories and initializers.</p><h3>Detecting a problem</h3><p>The thing is that if your project grows, you will end with lots of services, and probably lots of factories too.</p><p>There are services that are complicated to create, like the <code>Application</code> object in many frameworks, or services like doctrine&#x27;s <code>EntityManager</code>. They need to check a lot of configuration elements, and not only get some dependencies injected.</p><p>The factory pattern is perfect for these kind of services, but there are a lot of services too where you end up creating a factory just to fetch a couple services from the <code>ServiceManager</code> and injecting them in the new service constructor.</p><p>This could be an example:</p><pre><pre><code class="language-php">namespace Acelaya\Factory;

use Acelaya\Foo;
use Acelaya\MyService;
use Interop\Container\ContainerInterface;
use Zend\ServiceManager\Factory\FactoryInterface;

class MyFactory
{
    public function __invoke(ContainerInterface $container, $requestedName, array $options = null)
    {
        $foo = $container-&gt;get(Foo::class);
        $bar = $container-&gt;get(&#x27;bar&#x27;);
        
        return new MyService($foo, $bar);
    }
}
</code></pre></pre><p>In my applications, these kind of services are very usually more than a half of the total registered services, and at the end it is boring and repetitive, and you have to maintain a lot of classes that don&#x27;t really do much.</p><h3>Proposing a solution</h3><p>So I decided to find a solution that would allow me not to repeat the same task over and over.</p><p>After some research and trying some different solutions I ended up creating the <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://github.com/acelaya/zsm-annotated-services">acelaya/zsm-annotated-services</a> package, which allows you to annotate your service constructors and use a common factory which is already provided. It supports both v2 and v3 of the ServiceManager.</p><p>By making use of the <code>$requestedName</code> argument that all ServiceManager factories receive (even in v2, although it is not in the FactoryInterface), and assuming that the service name is the fully qualified class name, that factory reads a special <code>@Inject</code> annotation in the service constructor, which contains the name of the services that need to be injected.</p><p>This way, the service in the previos example could be defined like this:</p><pre><pre><code class="language-php">namespace Acelaya;

use Acelaya\ZsmAnnotatedServices\Annotation\Inject;

class MyService
{
    /**
     * @Inject({Foo::class, &quot;bar&quot;})
     */
    public function __construct(Foo $foo, $bar)
    {
        // [...]
    }
}
</code></pre></pre><p>The <code>@Inject</code> annotation receives an array of service names in the same order that they need to be injected in the constructor. Then the provided <code>AnnotatedFactory</code> reads that list and fetches them from the <code>ServiceManager</code>, and finally creates the service and injects the dependencies in the same order. You just need to register the service like this:</p><pre><pre><code class="language-php">use Acelaya\MyService;
use Acelaya\ZsmAnnotatedServices\Factory\V3\AnnotatedFactory;
use Zend\ServiceManager\ServiceManager;

return new ServiceManager([
    &#x27;factories&#x27; =&gt; [
        MyService::class =&gt; AnnotatedFactory::class,
    ],
]);
</code></pre></pre><p>This is perfect, because we don&#x27;t need to create a new factory for every service. We can always use the provided factory to register many services.</p><p>That allows us not to have to maintain so many classes, so many tests and also it means that a lot less includes are going to be done by the autoloader.</p><p>Also, using factories instead of abstract factories is faster at runtime.</p><h3>Considerations</h3><p>There are, however, a couple of things to have in mind while using this package.</p><p>Processing the annotations on every request is very slow. That&#x27;s why this package allows you to provide a <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://github.com/doctrine/cache">doctrine/cache</a> adapter where the result of processing the annotations is saved. If you use an in-memory cache adapter (like <code>ApcuAdapter</code>), this package has almost no performance penalty.</p><p>In order to register a cache adapter, you just need to register a service with the <strong>Acelaya\ZsmAnnotatedServices\Cache</strong> key that returns a <code>Doctrine\Common\Cache\Cache</code> instance. The key is provided as a <code>CACHE_SERVICE</code> constant in the <code>AnnotatedFactory</code> class, so the previos example could be improved like this:</p><pre><pre><code class="language-php">use Acelaya\MyService;
use Acelaya\ZsmAnnotatedServices\Factory\V3\AnnotatedFactory;
use Doctrine\Common\Cache\ApcuCache;
use Doctrine\Common\Cache\ArrayCache;
use Zend\ServiceManager\ServiceManager;

return new ServiceManager([
    &#x27;factories&#x27; =&gt; [
        MyService::class =&gt; AnnotatedFactory::class,
        AnnotatedFactory::CACHE_SERVICE =&gt; function () {
            return getenv(&#x27;APP_ENV&#x27;) === &#x27;production&#x27; ? new ApcuCache() : new ArrayCache();
        }
    ],
]);
</code></pre></pre><p>It is a good idea to provide a non-persistent cache for development environments.</p><p>Also, the package has currently some limitations. Some of them will probably get fixed in the future, as new versions are released.</p><ul><li>It is not possible to perform setter or property injection, just constructor injection. Since setter injection is not a good practice, I&#x27;m not sure if this is going to change.</li><li>It is not possible to inject something that is not registered in the container. All the dependencies need to be services themselves.</li><li><del>If a service returns an array, you cannot pick just a key from it, but I will probably support this in future versions.</del><br/>**Update 2016-04-10.** As of v0.2, it is already possible to fetch just one part of an array by using dot notation. For example, **config.mail.smtp**</li><li>The <code>AnnotatedFactory</code> cannot create services that are not identified by their fully qualified class names.</li></ul><p>Anyway, if there is a service complex enough that you can&#x27;t create with annotations, you can always use regular factories.</p><h3>Performance improvements</h3><p><strong>Update 2016-05-15</strong></p><p>Since I published this article, we have started to use this library in one of my company&#x27;s biggest projects, and this is the result.</p><p>At the beginning, I started benchmarking the library by checking how much time was used to create thousands of services with or without it, and the result was that it was a very little bit slower with the <code>AnnotatedFactory</code>.</p><p>However, when a project grows, maintainability is also important, not only performance. Also, my benchmarks were made against a non-shared service, but always the same one, which was being created by the same factory.</p><p>My surprise was that after performing an important refactoring which allowed us to replace more than 150 factories by the same <code>AnnotatedFactory</code>, performance was improved by about a 20% (while using cache, of course).</p><p>I suppose this is due to the fact that the same factory instance is used to create many objects, which reduces the number of autoloader hits, the number of factories instantiated and the number of files included per request.</p>

Improving Zend\ServiceManager workflow with annotations

<p>I&#x27;m sure you are familiar with those &quot;remember me&quot; checkboxes in login forms. They are a common way to allow a user to keep his/her session in a web application for an extended period of time when he is in a trusted computer.</p><p>One could think that it is a small and easy-to-implement feature, but it has indeed a lot of considerations.</p><p>I wasn&#x27;t able to properly implement it in the first projects I worked in, and I&#x27;m trying to explain everything I&#x27;ve learned about it in the last years.</p><blockquote><p>In this article I&#x27;m not going to show you how to implement a persistent login in one or another programming language, but what are the good practices that should be followed when you implement it in the way you want.</p></blockquote><h3>First thoughts.</h3><p>The first thing that one could try is to extend the lifetime of the system that persists the session and identifies the user between requests (usually a cookie). </p><p>The problem is that many systems doesn&#x27;t allow to do that in an isolated way, you are forced to extend the lifetime of all sessions. Also, it is not always easy to change the session lifetime dynamically.</p><p>So it&#x27;s not a good idea, because the user could be accessing your app from a public computer, and his session could be stolen if he forgets to logout. </p><p>Because of this, the best way to do it is to have another element (another cookie) that keeps the persistent session and is used to transparently regenerate the regular session when it expires.</p><h3>How to implement it.</h3><p>When a user logs in and he has checked the &quot;remember me&quot; field, you will create a cookie with an extended lifetime (for example, 2 weeks).</p><p>That cookie will contain a unique token that will identify a user. It should be backed in the database by creating a table that relates the token with a user. It could contain other metadata too, like the client&#x27;s IP address or a flag that says if the session is still valid.</p><p>In consecutive requests, your system will keep checking if an authenticated user exists, but if not, instead of redirecting to a login or returning a 403 status, it should check for the persistent login cookie first.</p><p>When that cookie exists, you will find the user it belongs to, and authenticate him. Then, you will invalidate the cookie and the session in the database, and generate a new one that will expire in the same date as the previous one. Finally, the new token should be returned in a new persistent login cookie that will replace the previous one by having the same name.</p><p>When the user manually logs out, the persistent login cookie should be dropped too.</p><h3>Security considerations</h3><p>Now you have a basic idea on how to implement it, but there are some security considerations to take into account in order to avoid problems in the future.</p><p>The first thing that we have to assume is that persistent sessions have their risks. There is no way to implement a completely secure persistent login, but following this instructions the system will be reasonably secure.</p><ul><li>Persistent login will be handled by a cookie in the client and a database in the server (or a similar persistence system).</li><li>Persistent sessions will have an expiration time, for example 2 weeks. During that time, any regular session will be regenerated by the persistent session. Once it has passed, the user will be prompted to provide his credentials when the regular session expires. The expiration time will be set both in the cookie and in the database.</li><li>Persistent login cookies will contain one-time tokens. Once a token has been used it will be invalidated and a new one will be generated.</li><li>In order to protect these tokens from <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-site_scripting">XSS</a> attacks in the site, persistent login cookies should be <code>HttpOnly</code>, so that they cannot be read from the browser.</li><li>Multiple valid persistent sessions will be allowed.</li><li>When a user logs out, its current persistent session in the database and the persistent login cookie will be invalidated.</li><li>The user should be able to invalidate all the persistent sessions that are still valid.</li><li>Invalid persistent sessions won&#x27;t be deleted. This way, if the user tries to access with an invalid cookie, he will be notified of a possible stolen cookie, and immediately all the other persistent sessions will be invalidated.</li><li>When the user changes his/her password, all the persistent sessions should be invalidated.</li><li>The token needs to be unique. Just generate some hash including the date and some other field. It doesn&#x27;t need to be super secure, but make sure to not send critical information to the client (like usernames or passwords).</li><li>And finally, there should be some operations restricted to users whose regular session has been regenerated by a persistent session, like changing a password or performing some kind of payment. In those cases, the user should be prompted for his current password anyway.</li></ul><p>Of course, if your system manages critical data, you shouldn&#x27;t implement persistent login at all. I don&#x27;t think you have seen it at any bank application.</p><p>In any other case, this should be a good way to go.</p>

How to properly implement persistent login

<p>I have spoken many times at this blog about dependency injection, and how the ZF2 ServiceManager is one of the best tools to solve it.
You can read these related articles to know more:</p><ul><li><a href="/2014/07/03/how-to-properly-use-the-zend-framework-2-service-manager-as-a-dependency-injection-container/">How to properly use the Zend framework 2 service manager as a dependency injection container</a></li><li><a href="/2014/10/09/advanced-usage-of-service-manager-in-zend-framework-2/">Advanced usage of ServiceManager in Zend Framework 2</a></li><li><a href="/2015/02/06/managing-objects-creation-and-dependency-injection-with-zend-service-manager/">Managing objects creation and dependency injection with Zend\ServiceManager</a></li></ul><p>In this article I&#x27;m going to speak about another utility that comes with the <code>Zend\ServiceManager</code> package, the <code>AbstractPluginManager</code>.</p><h3>Injecting a service container</h3><p>Generally it is a very bad practice to inject a service container into any object, but there are some situations where it could be even good, when certain conditions are met. </p><p>In one of the ZF2 mailing lists somebody asked which were these situations. I couldn&#x27;t find the email, but the answers said that you can do it when the service container manages resources of the same type, and your object virtually depends on all of them. </p><p>For example, imagine you have a database connections pool. It is responsible of creating connection objects, and knowing which one should be returned. </p><p>If you have another object that needs to perform database connections, you don&#x27;t want to inject all of the connection objects into it, you should rather inject the connection pool. That will reduce the number of dependencies of your object. </p><p>In this situation, the connection pool is some kind of service container, but injecting it has more benefits than disadvantages.</p><h3>The AbstractPluginManager implementation</h3><p>Once we know the theory, we can see how to implement it. </p><p>The AbstractPluginManager is a class that extends the ServiceManager, but includes an abstract method <code>validatePlugin</code> that implementors should use to validate objects when they are created. It just needs to throw an exception if it is not valid, for example because it doesn&#x27;t implement certain interface.</p><p>This way we can be sure that all the services managed by it can be used for a specific task. In the connection pool example, all the managed objects should be capable of connecting to a database.</p><h3>A real example</h3><p>Imagine that we have a service that needs to connect to different social networks in order to generate social login URLs and get user information from them.
That service abstracts the concrete implementation for each social network, and to do it, it gets concrete social connectors injected.</p><p>It could look like this:</p><pre><pre><code class="language-php">namespace Acelaya\Social;

use Acelaya\Social\Connector\FacebookConnector;
use Acelaya\Social\Connector\LinkedinConnector;
use Acelaya\Social\Connector\TwitterConnector;

class SocialUsers
{
    public function __construct(
        FacebookConnector $fConnector,
        TwitterConnector $tConnector,
        LinkedinConnector $lConnector
    ) {
        // [...]
    }
    
    /**
     * @return string
     */
    public function getLoginUrl($socialNetwork)
    {
        if ($socialNetwork === &#x27;facebook&#x27;) {
            return $this-&gt;fConnector-&gt;getLoginUrl();
        } elseif ($socialNetwork === &#x27;twitter&#x27;) {
            return $this-&gt;tConnector-&gt;getLoginUrl();
        } elseif ($socialNetwork === &#x27;linkedin&#x27;) {
            return $this-&gt;lConnector-&gt;getLoginUrl();
        }
    }
    
    /**
     * @return array
     */
    public function getUserData($socialNetwork, $authToken)
    {
        if ($socialNetwork === &#x27;facebook&#x27;) {
            return $this-&gt;fConnector-&gt;getUserData($authToken);
        } elseif ($socialNetwork === &#x27;twitter&#x27;) {
            return $this-&gt;tConnector-&gt;getUserData($authToken);
        } elseif ($socialNetwork === &#x27;linkedin&#x27;) {
            return $this-&gt;lConnector-&gt;getUserData($authToken);
        }
    }
}
</code></pre></pre><p>The service methods call to the proper connector based on the social network we specify. Apparently, it&#x27;s a simple implementation.</p><p>But there is a problem. If the number of social networks we support grows too much, at some point this service is going to have too many dependencies, and that&#x27;s a code smell. Also, having a lot of <code>if</code> statements per method is not very clean either.</p><p>The solution would be to create a <code>SocialPluginManager</code>, an object that extends <code>Zend\ServiceManager\AbstractPluginManager</code> and manages and creates each social connector transparently. Then, we just need to make the <code>SocialUsers</code> service to depend on the <code>SocialPluginManager</code>.</p><p>Each social connector should implement an interface like this.</p><pre><pre><code class="language-php">namespace Acelaya\Social\Connector;

interface SocialConnectorInterface
{
    /**
     * @return string
     */
    public function getLoginUrl();
    
    /**
     * @return array
     */
    public function getUserData($authToken);
}
</code></pre></pre><p>Then the <code>SocialPluginManager</code> will just need to check if any created object implements it.</p><pre><pre><code class="language-php">namespace Acelaya\Social;

use Acelaya\Social\Connector\SocialConnectorInterface;
use Zend\ServiceManager\AbstractPluginManager;
use Zend\ServiceManager\Exception;

class SocialPluginManager extends AbstractPluginManager
{
    /**
     * Validate the plugin
     *
     * Checks that the filter loaded is either a valid callback or an instance
     * of FilterInterface.
     *
     * @param  mixed $plugin
     * @return void
     * @throws Exception\RuntimeException if invalid
     */
    public function validatePlugin($plugin)
    {
        if ($plugin instanceof SocialConnectorInterface) {
            return;
        }
        
        throw new Exception\RuntimeException(sprintf(
            &#x27;Plugins managed by &quot;%s&quot; must implement &quot;%s&quot;. &quot;%s&quot; provided&#x27;,
            __CLASS__,
            SocialConnectorInterface::class,
            is_object($plugin) ? get_class($plugin) : gettype($plugin)
        ));
    }
}
</code></pre></pre><p>We now need to refactor the <code>SocialUsers</code> service so that it depends on the <code>SocialPluginManager</code>.</p><pre><pre><code class="language-php">namespace Acelaya\Social;

use Acelaya\Social\Connector\SocialConnectorInterface;
use Acelaya\Social\Exception\InvalidSocialNetworkException;

class SocialUsers
{
    public function __construct(SocialPluginManager $socialPlugins)
    {
        // [...]
    }
    
    /**
     * @return string
     */
    public function getLoginUrl($socialNetwork)
    {
        return $this-&gt;getSocialConnector($socialNetwork)-&gt;getLoginUrl();
    }
    
    /**
     * @return array
     */
    public function getUserData($socialNetwork, $authToken)
    {
        return $this-&gt;getSocialConnector($socialNetwork)-&gt;getUserData($authToken);
    }
    
    /**
     * @return SocialConnectorInterface
     */
    protected function getSocialConnector($socialNetwork)
    {
        if (! $this-&gt;socialPlugins-&gt;has($socialNetwork)) {
            throw new InvalidSocialNetworkException($socialNetwork);
        }
        
        return $this-&gt;socialPlugins-&gt;get($socialNetwork);
    }
}
</code></pre></pre><p>The resulting code is much cleaner, and now we can add any new social network without having to change the <code>SocialUsers</code> service. We just need to create and register the new social connector.</p><p>The last thing we have to do is defining the <code>SocialPluginManager</code> configuration. Since the <code>AbstractPluginManager</code> extends the <code>ServiceManager</code>, it is exactly the same as the one used for it. To make the previous code work, we have to use the social network name as the service name for each connector, so the configuration could look like this.</p><pre><pre><code class="language-php">use Acelaya\Social\Connector;

return [
    &#x27;factories&#x27; =&gt; [
        &#x27;facebook&#x27; =&gt; Connector\FacebookConnectorFactory::class,
        &#x27;twitter&#x27; =&gt; Connector\TwitterConnectorFactory::class,
        &#x27;linkedin&#x27; =&gt; Connector\LinkedinConnectorFactory::class,
    ]
];
</code></pre></pre><p>I have used factories as an example, but you can use any valid strategy you want.</p><p>You can see a small example project <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://github.com/acelaya-blog/di-with-plugin-manager">here</a>. The concrete social connector doesn&#x27;t do nothing, but you can see how they work.</p><p>The plugin managers are widely used in <code>Zend\Mvc</code> for tasks like this. The controller plugins, view helpers, form elements and such can all be managed by its own plugin managers.</p>

Improve dependency injection in PHP apps with Zend Framework plugin managers

<p>It&#x27;s well known that using autoincrement identifiers for resources in a public API is not a very good idea, since you are exposing too much information about the size of your database and your business in general.</p><p>The PHP community is recommending to better use UUIDs these days, because it hides that information and can be generated anywhere and still be unique.</p><p>It has a number of advantages. The first one, as I already said, is the fact that it hides critical information of the system when you have to publicly share it, it is not easy to find out anything about the application business if you only have a UUID. But there are more:</p><ul><li>A UUID (<strong>U</strong>niversally <strong>U</strong>nique <strong>ID</strong>entifier) is universally unique. That menas that it is not unique only in the scope of a table, like an autoincrement, but unique accross any system in the world.</li><li>Since it is globally unique, it can be generated before being stored in the database or even in client-side, and we can be sure (almost) it won&#x27;t be duplicated.</li><li>Allows to easily migrate and merge information from different tables and databases, by keeping their identifier, since it will still be unique.</li><li>Decouples your application with the persistence layer, since all the information is generated before being persisted. (Thanks to <strong><a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://twitter.com/tomas2387/status/658237457117368320">@tomas2387</a></strong> for mentioning this)</li></ul><p>I&#x27;m going to explain now, how to take advantage of UUIDs when working with databases in PHP applications by using Doctrine and the fantastic <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://github.com/ramsey/uuid">ramsey/uuid</a> package, with the bridge library <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://github.com/ramsey/uuid-doctrine">ramsey/uuid-doctrine</a>.</p><h3>Creating entities</h3><p>Entities will have an ID, but instead of setting them with an autoincrement strategy and an integer type, we are going to use the <strong>uuid</strong> doctrine type and typehint the ID as a <code>Ramsey\Uuid\UuidInterface</code>.</p><p>We are also going to initialize the ID in the entity&#x27;s constructor. Once the entity is created, it will have an ID, generated outside the database, but unique, so we can safely persist the entity.</p><pre><pre><code class="language-php">namespace Acelaya\Blog\Entity;

use Ramsey\Uuid\Uuid;
use Ramsey\Uuid\UuidInterface;

/**
 * @Entity
 * @Table(name=&quot;user&quot;)
 */
class User
{
    /**
     * @var UuidInterface
     *
     * @Id
     * @Column(type=&quot;uuid&quot;)
     */
    protected $id;
    /**
     * @var string
     *
     * @Column(length=256)
     */
    protected $username;
    /**
     * @var string
     *
     * @Column(length=256)
     */
    protected $password;
    /**
     * @var string
     *
     * @Column(length=256)
     */
    protected $fullName;

    public function __construct()
    {
        $this-&gt;id = Uuid::uuid4();
    }

    // Getters and setters...
}
</code></pre></pre><p>As you can see, we don&#x27;t have to set the <code>@GeneratedValue</code> annotation in the <code>id</code> property, since the value is not generated in the database. Instead, it is initialized in the contructor.</p><h3>Registering the type</h3><p>The last example is very simple. We don&#x27;t have to do anything, and our <code>id</code> will be a <code>Ramsey\Uuid\Uuid</code> instance, so we can compare it with other UUIDs and serialize it in many ways, but Doctrine doesn&#x27;t know how to serialize and deserialize that field while exchanging data with the database. We need to register the <strong>uuid</strong> type.</p><pre><pre><code class="language-php">use Doctrine\DBAL\Types\Type;
use Ramsey\Uuid\Doctrine\UuidType;

// Some kind of bootstrapping...

Type::addType(&#x27;uuid&#x27;, UuidType::class);
</code></pre></pre><p>Once this is set, we can use the <strong>uuid</strong> doctrine type for any property and it will be properly serialized/unserialized. We just need to initialize those properties in our entities&#x27;s constructors with the desired UUID version.</p>

Alejandro Celaya | Blog

Software development, agile methodologies and open source projects.

Using ServiceManager 3 lazy services to improve your PHP application performance

Improving Zend\ServiceManager workflow with annotations

How to properly implement persistent login

Improve dependency injection in PHP apps with Zend Framework plugin managers

Using UUID identifiers for databases in PHP projects with Doctrine