<p>In the last couple of days I have been playing around with the idea of combining GitHub Actions and GitHub Pages to be able to dynamically build preview environments every time a pull request is opened against a repository hosting a client-side web app.</p><p>The idea is that you can quickly preview the changes made by some contributor, without having to clone their branch and running everything locally, something specially useful for open source projects.</p><p>In this article I will explain how to set everything up, and what are some considerations and problems you may face during the process.</p><h3>Enable github pages</h3><p>The first thing you need to do is enable your project to publish pages on some branch. I recommend creating a new branch for this, let&#x27;s say <code>preview-env</code>, and then enabling publishing on it.</p><p>In order to do that go to your repository and then <strong>Settings</strong> -&gt; <strong>Pages</strong>, look for the <strong>Source</strong> section, and you should see something like this:</p><p><img src="/assets/img/preview-envs/github-pages-before-enabling.png" alt="GitHub pages before enabling"/></p><p>Click in the dropdown and select your new branch, <code>preview-env</code>. Then click <strong>Save</strong>.</p><p><img src="/assets/img/preview-envs/github-pages-after-enabling.png" alt="GitHub pages after enabling"/></p><p>After saving you will see a message at the top of this section telling you what&#x27;s the URL in which the pages are published. It always follows the same pattern. If your organization is <code>my-org</code> and your repository is <code>my-repo</code>, the url will be <code>https://my-org.github.io/my-repo/</code>.</p><h3>Configure the workflow</h3><p>Now we need to configure a workflow that will &quot;deploy&quot; the preview environment for the branch every time a new pull request is created or updated:</p><p>Let&#x27;s imagine we have a React web app that is built with node.js. The configuration could look like this.</p><pre><pre><code class="language-yml"># .github/workflows/deploy-preview.yml
name: Deploy preview

on:
  pull_request: null

jobs:
  deploy:
    runs-on: ubuntu-20.04
    continue-on-error: true
    steps:
      - name: Checkout code
        uses: actions/checkout@v2
      - name: Use node.js 14.15
        uses: actions/setup-node@v1
        with:
          node-version: 14.15
      - name: Generate slug
        id: generate_slug
        run: echo &quot;##[set-output name=slug;]$(echo ${GITHUB_HEAD_REF#refs/heads/} | sed -r &#x27;s/[~\^]+//g&#x27; | sed -r &#x27;s/[^a-zA-Z0-9]+/-/g&#x27; | sed -r &#x27;s/^-+\|-+$//g&#x27; | tr A-Z a-z)&quot;
      - name: Build
        run: npm ci &amp;&amp; npm run build
      - name: Deploy
        uses: JamesIves/github-pages-deploy-action@4.1.1
        with:
          branch: preview-env
          folder: build
          target-folder: ${{ steps.generate_slug.outputs.slug }}
      - name: Publish env
        uses: marocchino/sticky-pull-request-comment@v2
        with:
          header: Preview environment
          message: |
            ## Preview environment
            https://my-org.github.io/my-repo/${{ steps.generate_slug.outputs.slug }}/
</code></pre></pre><blockquote><p>If you are not familiar with GitHub Actions yet, take a look at the <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://docs.github.com/en/actions">official documentation</a>.</p></blockquote><p>This workflow will follow the next steps:</p><ul><li>Checkout the code from the repository.</li><li>Set-up node.js 14.15</li><li>Based on the branch name, generate a slug that we will use to have separated deployment folders for every pull request we receive. The slug is exposed to next steps as an output.</li><li>Build the project. This step will obviously depend on the needs of your project.</li><li>Using <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://github.com/JamesIves/github-pages-deploy-action">JamesIves/github-pages-deploy-action</a>, deploy the contents we previously built in the GitHub page, under a sub-folder matching the slug we generated a few steps above, and under the branch <code>preview-env</code> (remember we enabled GitHub pages for this branch).</li><li>Finally, using <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://github.com/marocchino/sticky-pull-request-comment">marocchino/sticky-pull-request-comment</a>, post a comment in the pull request with a link to the preview environment, so that you can just click on it and see the deployment.</li></ul><p>The steps may change depending on your needs and how you build your project. For example, I have an extra step to update a property in the <code>package.json</code> that is then used to allow serving the app in a sub-path instead of the root of the domain.</p><p>You may also not build your site with node.js, as you could be using any of the multiple existing static site generators out there, but you get the idea.</p><p>Finally, you have probably noticed the config includes <code>continue-on-error: true</code>. This will allow the pull request to be merged even if this process fails for some reason.</p><h3>Considerations when using forks</h3><p>While the configuration above will work perfectly when creating pull requests inside the same repository, there are some limitations when the pull request comes from a fork (which is the usual in OSS projects).</p><p>For security reasons, the <code>GITHUB_TOKEN</code> injected in those cases doesn&#x27;t have write permissions, which will make the &quot;deploy&quot; step fail.</p><p>Also, you cannot define your own token with more permissions and inject it as a secret, as the secrets are not exposed to workflows running on forks.</p><p>However, with a couple small config changes, we can work around these limitations:</p><h4>Change event</h4><p>The first thing we need to do is use the <code>pull_request_target</code> event instead of the <code>pull_request</code> one.</p><pre><pre><code class="language-diff">on:
-  pull_request: null
+  pull_request_target: null
</code></pre></pre><p>According to the documentation, this is equivalent to the <code>pull_request</code> event, but it runs in the scope of the base repository.</p><p>Thanks to this, the <code>GITHUB_TOKEN</code> will come with write permissions, and we will have access to secrets if needed.</p><h4>Checkout the fork</h4><p>The second thing we are going to change is that we now need to specify the repository to checkout.</p><p>In order to do that, we need to add two inputs to the &quot;Checkout code&quot; step, like this:</p><pre><pre><code class="language-diff">    steps:
      - name: Checkout code
        uses: actions/checkout@v2
+       with:
+         repository: ${{ github.event.pull_request.head.repo.full_name }}
+         ref: ${{ github.event.pull_request.head.ref }}
</code></pre></pre><p>This will ensure we checkout from the fork repository, instead of the base one, which is the default, as it&#x27;s the one where the <code>pull_request_target</code> event is scoped to.</p><p>And that&#x27;s it. With these two changes you can now deploy preview environments for pull requests coming from forks.</p><blockquote><p><strong>IMPORTANT!</strong> The limitations of the <code>pull_request</code> event are there for a reason. People could potentially get access to your secrets or manipulate your code. Proceed at your own risk.</p></blockquote><h3>Other considerations</h3><p>Other than the limitations for forks, there are a few other minor things to take into consideration.</p><ul><li>Changes in GitHub Pages do not reflect immediately. It may take up to a couple of minutes for the deployment to be available, but considering you will usually not review a PR right after it has been created, this should not be a big issue.</li><li>As you have seen, every time a pull request is created, the deployment will generate a new folder in your GitHub Pages branch. This may result in a lot of old folders to pile-up, so you may want to set up some way to clean them up periodically or after the pull request has been merged.</li><li>Due to the fact that GitHub Pages only allows static pages to be served, this process cannot be used with apps that require some kind of back-end or server-side logic.</li><li>If your project is already using GitHub Pages for something else (serve the project&#x27;s website or docs), that may conflict with this, preventing you from having this kind of preview envs.</li></ul>

Setting-up a preview environment for your client-side apps with GitHub Actions and GitHub Pages

<p>I remember many years ago, when I released my first open source project, that every time I had a new release ready, I was never sure what should be the new version number.</p><p>Versioning software is not as straightforward as it might look when you don&#x27;t have a lot of experience.</p><p>In this article I&#x27;ll try to explain the <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://semver.org/">SemVer</a> approach to version software, and some things you might want to take into account on top of that.</p><h3>Semantic Versioning</h3><p>The first thing you need is a solid set of rules that help you decide which should your next version be.</p><p>I remember thinking <em>&quot;is this version big enough as to jump from 1.0 to 2.0?&quot;</em> or <em>&quot;I have seen projects using three numbers for the version, X.Y.Z, should I do the same?&quot;</em></p><p>Those questions are easier to answer if you stick to some standard that tells you what to do, and that will help others more easily understand your intention.</p><p>My recommendation is to use <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://semver.org/">Semantic Versioning</a>, as it defines a solid starting point, and it&#x27;s quite adopted by the community.</p><p>Semantic Versioning states that you should use three numbers to identify versions, <code>MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH</code>, and follow these rules in order to decide which one to increase:</p><ul><li><code>PATCH</code>: the new release includes only bug fixes. People are encouraged to update to this release and no changes are needed in their code bases.</li><li><code>MINOR</code>: the new release includes new backwards-compatible features. People can update to this version without changing their code bases, and make use of the new features afterwards if they wish.</li><li><code>MAJOR</code>: the new release includes <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backward_compatibility">backward compatibility</a> breaks. Changes in the code base will be needed when updating to this version.</li></ul><blockquote><p>These rules are easier to apply to libraries and frameworks than it is for apps and services. More about this later.</p></blockquote><h3>Try to keep backwards-compatibility</h3><p>Ok, we have some rules now. However, I have seen very frequently people mistaking what <em>can</em> be done with what <em>should</em> be done.</p><p>Yes, if you introduce a breaking change, you can update the major version and that&#x27;s it. However, if you do it too frequently, people won&#x27;t be happy, and you will end up with a fragmented user base, that stop updating to newer versions.</p><p>I remember using a library to deploy stuff that had a new major version every couple of months, changing things like &quot;The <code>host</code> function is now called <code>server</code>&quot;. Yes, ok, but why do I have to change my stuff so frequently.</p><p>It&#x27;s usually better to try to implement things in a backwards-compatible way, and keep track of the things you want to change and do it all at a time.</p><p>You can also deprecate things, and document the way you want those things to be done moving forward. That way you give people the chance to start changing their code and simplify a hypothetical upcoming major release.</p><h3>Provide clear upgrade paths</h3><p>As mentioned above, too frequent major version changes are not desirable, but sooner or later you will want to release a new major version for different reasons.</p><ul><li>Getting rid of that feature which is hard to maintain, introduces lots of bugs, and provides little value.</li><li>Supporting something new which is very hard to implement without breaking backwards compatibility.</li><li>Removing all those deprecated methods you have been dragging for months.</li><li>Fix design issues, where something was architected in the wrong way, and only spotted after some time.</li></ul><p>At the time this happens you will want your users to upgrade to the newer version, as you don&#x27;t want people to report bugs that only affect older versions, or to expect you to backport fixes to older versions because they haven&#x27;t updated to the new one.</p><p>The best way to achieve this is to provide clear and simple upgrade paths:</p><ul><li><p>Prepare your releases for the things to come: If you want to introduce new ways of doing things, do it before the major release, and deprecate the older ones. For example, you can have a new method that gets called by an older one, while you mark the old one as deprecated.</p><p>People will be more willing to update and change their code afterwards. By the time the major release is published, their code will be ready to upgrade.</p></li><li><p>Include a CHANGELOG file in your project, explaining the changes introduced in every version. A very good way to document a change log is the <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://keepachangelog.com/">Keep a changelog</a> initiative.</p><p>You can also use some other platform to document the change log, like GitHub releases.</p></li><li><p>Include documentation on how to upgrade to a major release: This is probably the most important one. Document all the steps that need to be followed and all the required changes to update from a release to the next major one.</p><p>A good way to do this is by including an UPGRADE file in your project. You can see <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://github.com/acmailer/acmailer/blob/main/UPGRADE.md">this example</a>.</p></li></ul><h3>Versioning libraries vs apps</h3><p>Semantic Versioning is a good standard to version software, but it plays much better with libraries and frameworks that are installed using some kind of package manager, than it does with apps and services that are not directly depended on.</p><p>For example, how do you identify a backward compatibility break on a web user interface?</p><p>With this kind of software there are more grey areas, and you will end up using your intuition.</p><p>For example, not long ago I released a <a href="/2020/12/24/released-shlink-web-client-v3-0-0/">new major version</a> for a web app I maintain, and it was completely compatible with the previous one. However, it introduced a larger amount of features than usual, and big UI changes, so I decided it was worth the bump.</p><p>Because of this there are projects that use different approaches to version apps. For example:</p><ul><li>Firefox and Chrome have 6-week cycles, and after each one of them they release a new major version no matter what.</li><li>Jetbrains publishes a few releases of their IDEs every year (I think 3) which always start with the year they were released on, like <code>2020.3.0</code>, and they increase the patch number for bugfixes.</li><li>Ubuntu releases 2 versions every year, one in April and one in October, and they are always identified by the year and month they were released on, like <code>19.04</code> or <code>20.10</code>.</li></ul><h3>Special versions</h3><p>There&#x27;s also a set of special versions that can be used to publish the so-called <strong>pre-release</strong> versions. These <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://semver.org/#spec-item-9">are covered</a> by Semantic Versioning, but sometimes they are not so easy to understand.</p><p>It is also very likely that you never have to use these, as only relatively big projects will need this level of granularity, but it&#x27;s still good to know what&#x27;s their purpose and what do they imply.</p><h4>0.x.y</h4><p>It is possible to release a version of your software where the major number is <code>0</code>. When this happens, it means your software is still in its early stages.</p><p>It does not mean it&#x27;s necessarily unstable, but it means you are still introducing frequent changes on it, and therefore, it might be a bit more fragile than a version starting with a number greater than <code>0</code>.</p><h4>Alpha</h4><p>The intention of an alpha release is that a subset of people con test some new functionality, but you don&#x27;t want people to use it in production</p><p>Alpha versions are on their very early stages. Their public API is very likely to change, and they probably contain bugs.</p><p>Semantic Versioning states that alpha versions are identified by this pattern: <code>MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH-alpha.NUMBER</code>, for example <code>2.0.0-alpha.1</code>.</p><h4>Beta</h4><p>Similar to alpha versions, beta versions are also prone to contain bugs, but their API will in theory not change. That means that you could potentially adapt your software to start using a beta version, and when the corresponding stable release is published, you shouldn&#x27;t need that many changes.</p><p>Semantic Versioning defines a pattern similar to the one for alpha versions: <code>MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH-beta.NUMBER</code>, for example <code>2.0.0-beta.1</code>.</p><h4>Release candidate</h4><p>Release candidates (RC) are pre-release versions that you will want to publish for the general user-base to test an upcoming release. You want to publish a RC so that it&#x27;s battle tested by as many people as possible, in order to find possible bugs and edge cases.</p><p>They should not contain many bugs, but some could be found. The public API should not change anymore.</p><p>According to Semantic Versioning, the pattern to identify a RC is <code>MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH-rc.NUMBER</code>, for example <code>2.0.0-rc.1</code>.</p><h3>Conclusion</h3><p>We have seen some approaches and considerations to properly version your software.</p><p>Versioning is not so straightforward when you don&#x27;t have a lot of experience, but as you have seen, you just need to know a small set of rules and use a bit your intuition.</p><p>With those tools, you will be able to properly version your software.</p>

What to take into account when versioning software

<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>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>

Using UUID identifiers for databases in PHP projects with Doctrine

<p>One of the trending topics in the PHP world nowadays is the one about microframeworks. It started some years ago with <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="http://www.slimframework.com/">Slim</a> and <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="http://silex.sensiolabs.org/">Silex</a>, but recently it has been an explossion of new microframeworks.</p><p>First, Slim&#x27;s team announced the third version of its own framework, which implemented the psr-7 HTTP standard by taking advantage of the middleware concept. The previos version works with Middleware too, but psr-7 looks to be designed to be used with middleware.</p><p>Then, Laravel launched the <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://lumen.laravel.com/">Lumen</a> project, which is another microframework based on Laravel components, similar to Silex, which is based on Symfony components.</p><p>And finally, Zend framework&#x27;s team launched <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://github.com/zendframework/zend-expressive">Zend Expressive</a>, which is similar to Slim 3 in the fact that it works with middleware and psr-7, built on top of <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://github.com/zendframework/zend-stratigility">zend-stratigility</a> and <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://github.com/zendframework/zend-diactoros">zend-diactoros</a>.</p><p>Recently, after playing with Slim 3 and Zend Expressive, I decided to use the last one to rebuild my website, which used to be a ZF2 application.</p><p>It is open source and you can find it <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://github.com/acelaya/website-expressive">here</a>.</p><h3>Why microframeworks</h3><p>I have said several times that composer has completely changed PHP. Now it is possible to access to any package or component in any application, which is a really big advantage. You don&#x27;t have to stick to certain framework&#x27;s implementation if there is another one that you like better.</p><p>That&#x27;s made possible to start working with a framework that doesn&#x27;t have a solution for everything, and your poroject can still scale thanks to the fact that composer gives you access to almost anything.</p><p>There is where microframeworks have their power.</p><p>Also, having in mind that every time more and more packages depend on common abstractions (like the psr abstractions, psr-3 or psr-7, or the new <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://github.com/container-interop/container-interop">container interop</a>), those small frameworks can work with many existing powerful components.</p><h3>Why Zend Expressive</h3><p>The first thing that I liked in Zend Expressive is that it doesn&#x27;t force you to use an implementaiton for common tasks. </p><p>The router, the templates engine and the service container are based on abstractions, which means that you can virtually use whichever fits you the most. It comes with support for two or three of each one, but you could integrate any third party component by implementing an interface.</p><p>Also, since this framework has been created by the ZF team, it comes with support for ZF2 components, which I am more used to. Specially I like to be able to use the <code>Zend\ServiceManager</code>, like in Slim 3.</p><h3>Configuration driven apps</h3><p>All of the microframeworks that I&#x27;ve already mentioned have something in common. They work on top of the main <code>Application</code> object, which usually implements methods to define routes and add middleware.</p><p>For example, in Slim 3, you can do something like this to dispatch a request:</p><pre><pre><code class="language-php">$app = new Slim\App();
$app-&gt;get(&#x27;/hello/:name&#x27;, function ($req, $res, $args) {
    echo &#x27;Hello, &#x27; . $args[&#x27;name&#x27;] . &#x27;!!&#x27;;
});
$app-&gt;run();
</code></pre></pre><p>The same thing can be done like this with Silex:</p><pre><pre><code class="language-php">$app = new Silex\Application(); 
$app-&gt;get(&#x27;/hello/{name}&#x27;, function ($name) use($app) { 
    return &#x27;Hello, &#x27; . $app-&gt;escape($name) . &#x27;!!&#x27;; 
}); 
$app-&gt;run(); 
</code></pre></pre><p>And also, with Expressive, you do it like this:</p><pre><pre><code class="language-php">$app = Zend\Expressive\AppFactory::create();
$app-&gt;get(&#x27;/hello/{name}&#x27;, function ($request, $response, $next) {
    $response-&gt;write(&#x27;Hello, &#x27; . $request-&gt;getAttribute(&#x27;name&#x27;) . &#x27;!!&#x27;);
    return $response;
});
$app-&gt;run();
</code></pre></pre><p>It is very similar in every case, and it is good enough for prototyping and small applications. However this is not my favourite approach. I prefer to use the service container as the <strong>main</strong> object, and fetch the <code>Application</code> in the front controller as a regular service. The best microframework to work like this is Expressive.</p><p>For example, in my website, the front controller looks like this.</p><pre><pre><code class="language-php">chdir(dirname(__DIR__));

// [...]

/** @var Interop\Container\ContainerInterface $container */
$container = include &#x27;config/container.php&#x27;;
/** @var Zend\Expressive\Application $app */
$app = $container-&gt;get(Zend\Expressive\Application::class);
$app-&gt;run();
</code></pre></pre><p>This approach allows me to define some configuration files that are consumed by factories while creating services, and the Application object is treated like another Service, injecting middlewares and routes from config files.</p><p>You don&#x27;t even have to define the factory yourself, since Expressive includes an <code>ApplicationFactory</code> that can be registered and it fetches the outstanding configuration for you.</p><p>Another cool thing in Expressive is that the <code>Application</code> itself is middleware, and so, it can pipe nested <code>Applications</code>. It also treats routes as a middleware that is registered to be resolved as a result of certain route, instead of being resolved for every route.</p><p>So, in Expressive, everything is middleware lazily fetched from a service container to dispatch HTTP requests.</p><h3>Router</h3><p>Currently, Expressive includes implementations to integrate with three routers. <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://github.com/auraphp/Aura.Router">Aura.Router</a>, <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://github.com/nikic/FastRoute">FastRoute</a> and <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://framework.zend.com/manual/current/en/modules/zend.mvc.routing.html">ZF2 MVC router</a>. The first is used by default.</p><p>For small applications like my website, any of them should be good enough, but I needed routes to support optional params at the beginning of the path (the language). Neither Aura.Router or FastRoute do it, so I had to stick with ZF2&#x27;s router in combination with a custom Segment route that allows to skip certain parts of the route, otherwise I would have been forced to define the same route with different names, which would have made assembling routes with param inheritance much harder.</p><p>The fun thing is that Slim&#x27;s router does support optional route params at the beginning of the path, at least in version 2. Maybe I try to integrate it in the future with Expressive, since I don&#x27;t need all the power provided by ZF2&#x27;s router.</p><blockquote><p><strong>Update 2015-09-20:</strong> I have finally created a Slim&#x27;s router integration library and I&#x27;m now using it. You can find it here <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://github.com/acelaya/expressive-slim-router">https://github.com/acelaya/expressive-slim-router</a>.</p></blockquote><p>To make a router other than Aura.Router to be automatically injected in the Applicaiton when using the container&#x27;s <code>ApplicationFactory</code>, you need to register a service with the <code>Zend\Expressive\Router\RouterInterface</code> name.</p><h3>Template engine</h3><p>Similarly to the routers, Expressive works with an abstraction layer which eases the task of using any template engine with it. It comes with <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="http://twig.sensiolabs.org/">Twig</a>, <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="http://platesphp.com/engine/">Plates</a> and <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="http://framework.zend.com/manual/current/en/modules/zend.view.quick-start.html">Zend\View</a> integration, using the second one by default, but it shouldn&#x27;t be hard to use anyone else, like <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="http://laravel.com/docs/5.0/templates">Blade</a>.</p><p>I have used twig for my website, because I&#x27;ve been using it lately, and I really like it.</p><p>The template engine will be injected in the Applicaiton by fetching the <code>Zend\Expressive\Template\TemplateInterface</code> service.</p><h3>Service container</h3><p>The service container is very important in Expressive. All the services, middlewares and configurations are fetched from it. Expressive expects an <code>Interop\Container\ContainerInterface</code> object, which is implemented by the most used service containers (or dependency injection containers if you prefer so).</p><p>Documentation on how to use <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://framework.zend.com/manual/current/en/modules/zend.service-manager.html">Zend\ServiceManager</a>, <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="http://pimple.sensiolabs.org/">Pimple</a> and <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://github.com/auraphp/Aura.Di">Aura.Di</a> is included in the project. Depending on how big you expect your application to become, you can use one or another, but you should be able to replace it in case of need.</p><p>If no container is provided, the Application will use the first one. Also, it has been my choice, and as I said earlier, everything in my website&#x27;s project is managed by the ServiceManager, even the <code>Application</code> object itself.</p><p>It&#x27;s one of my favourite PHP components and I use it whenever I can.</p><h3>Error management</h3><p>Another thing that any framework has to provide is a way to catch requests to invalid routes or uncaught exceptions and errors. In Expressive that&#x27;s made by the so called <code>FinalHandler</code>.</p><p>By default it just displays plain text errors, and returns the proper status code (404 or 500). If you want certain template to be rendered, you have to register a <code>TemplateErrorHandler</code> in your container, via the <code>Zend\Expressive\Container\TemplatedErrorHandlerFactory</code>. It will use a configuration block to know which template has to be rendered in each case, and use the registered template engine to render them.</p><p>In development, a <code>WhoopsErrorHandler</code> can be used too. It extends the functionality of the <code>TemplatedErrorHandler</code> by using <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://filp.github.io/whoops/">Whoops</a> to display nice errors. Make sure to never use it in production.</p><h3>Other considerations</h3><p>You know now how to use the main components in the framework, but you need to know how <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="http://www.php-fig.org/psr/psr-7/">psr-7</a> works and how to use middleware. You should read these articles if you are not familiar with those concepts, since the whole framework is built on top of them.</p><ul><li><a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://mwop.net/blog/2015-01-26-psr-7-by-example.html">PSR-7 By Example</a></li><li><a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://mwop.net/blog/2015-01-08-on-http-middleware-and-psr-7.html">On HTTP, Middleware, and PSR-7</a></li></ul><p>You should also take a look at the official documentation. It is not very long and it&#x27;s very well structured. <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="http://zend-expressive.readthedocs.org/en/stable/">https://zend-expressive.readthedocs.org/en/stable/</a></p><h3>Conclusion</h3><p>Those are all the things that can be done with Expressive. It could seem too basic, but it is also very extensible via composer. That&#x27;s its forte.</p><p>Probably, for my website I could have used any other microframework (Indeed I was planning to use Slim 3 before Expressive was launched), but I liked Expressive from the beginning and decided to go with it despite it is not stable yet.</p>

My first approach to Zend Expressive

<p>About a year ago I wrote two articles discussing the best way to work with modules with sub-namespaces in Zend Framework 2.</p><p>Here you can find <a href="/2014/05/21/create-modules-with-sub-namespaces-in-zend-framework-2/">Part 1</a> and <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="http://alejandrocelaya.blog/2014/06/21/create-modules-with-sub-namespaces-in-zend-framework-2-part-ii/">Part 2</a></p><p>The solution provided in those articles was functional, but it introduced some new problems to deal with. It happens that after some time working with sub-namespaced modules I have found the best way to solve those new problems, and I wanted to write this new article explaining it.</p><p>For this article I&#x27;m going to use the example namespace <code>ZasDev\AtomicReader</code>, which belongs to a real <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://github.com/zasDev/atomic-reader">application</a> I&#x27;m working on. For example, in my <code>Auth</code> module, a real fully qualified class name could be <code>ZasDev\AtomicReader\Auth\Controller\LoginController</code>.</p><h3>The problems</h3><h4>Autoloading</h4><p>By default, ZF2 uses a psr-0-like way to perform autoloading. This would force us to create a new folder per namespace level in our module, but since <code>Module</code> classes &quot;are loaded&quot; from the root of the module and the rest of the classes are loaded from the nested src folder, it would be 2 new folders per namespace instead.</p><p>With the previously mentioned namespace, the module&#x27;s folder structure would be this.</p><pre><pre><code>modules
└── ZasDev
    └── AtomicReader
        └── Auth
            ├── config
            │   └── ...
            ├── view
            │   └── ...
            ├── src
            │   └── ZasDev
            │       └── AtomicReader
            │           └── Auth
            │               ├── Controller
            │               │   └── LoginController.php
            │               ├── Form
            │               │   └── ...
            │               └── Service
            │                   └── ...
            └── Module.php
</code></pre></pre><p>There are people that think that is the correct way to work, but I don&#x27;t like to have so many &quot;empty&quot; folders.</p><h4>View scripts resolution</h4><p>As I mentioned in previous articles, the automatic view script resolution in Zend Framework 2 when a controller&#x27;s action returns a <code>ViewModel</code> instance is to use the action&#x27;s name as the script name, the controllers&#x27; class name as the parent folder, and the first level namespace as the root folder. That is a problem when all the modules have a common top-level namespace.</p><p>In the original articles we found that the solution was to use the <code>controller_map</code> option for the <code>view_manager</code> configuration like this.</p><pre><pre><code class="language-php">&lt;?php
return [
    &#x27;view_manager&#x27; =&gt; [
        &#x27;controller_map&#x27; =&gt; [
            &#x27;ZasDev&#x27; =&gt; true
        ]
    ]
];
</code></pre></pre><p>That will make the view resolver to use all the controller&#x27;s namespace levels as folders, which solves the original problem but generates a similar problem as in the autoloading case, by making us to have a lot of empty folders.</p><p>The last example would produce this folder structure for view scripts.</p><pre><pre><code>modules
└── ZasDev
    └── AtomicReader
        └── Auth
            ├── config
            │   └── ...
            ├── view
            │   └── zas-dev
            │       └── atomic-reader
            │           └── auth
            │               └── login
            │                   └── index.phtml
            ├── src
            │   └── ...
            └── Module.php
</code></pre></pre><h3>The solutions</h3><p>It turns out that the solution to both problems is really easy.</p><p>This days everybody uses <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://getcomposer.org/">composer</a> on their PHP projects. Using composer&#x27;s autoloading we can solve the first problem.</p><p>By having this module&#x27;s folder structure, which is much more usable.</p><pre><pre><code>modules
└── Auth
    ├── config
    │   └── ...
    ├── view
    │   └── ...
    └── src
        ├── Controller
        │   └── LoginController.php
        ├── Form
        │   └── ...
        ├── Service
        │   └── ...
        └── Module.php
</code></pre></pre><p>We just need to define this psr-4 autoloading strategy in our composer.json and all the classes will be properly loaded.</p><pre><pre><code class="language-javascript">// composer.json
{
    &quot;autoload&quot; : {
        &quot;psr-4&quot; : {
            &quot;ZasDev\\AtomicReader\\Auth\\&quot; : &quot;modules/Auth/src&quot;
        }
    }
}
</code></pre></pre><p>And then just refresh the autoloader by running <code>composer dumpautoload</code>.</p><p>Repeat that for each module and that&#x27;s it. Also you won&#x27;t need to define the module&#x27;s autoloading in the <code>Module</code> class.</p><p>The problem with the view scripts resolution can be fixed by changing the <code>controller_map</code> configuration a little bit. It turns out that it allows to map module namespaces to folder structures, so that not all the levels are replaced by folders in the path resolution.</p><p>With this configuration, we will get controllers in the <code>ZasDev\AtomicReader\Auth</code> namespace to be resolved to the <code>auth</code> folder.</p><pre><pre><code class="language-php">&lt;?php
return [
    &#x27;view_manager&#x27; =&gt; [
        &#x27;controller_map&#x27; =&gt; [
            &#x27;ZasDev\AtomicReader\Auth&#x27; =&gt; &#x27;auth&#x27;,
            // ...
        ]
    ]
];
</code></pre></pre><p>And our complete module&#x27;s folder structure will end like this.</p><pre><pre><code>modules
└── Auth
    ├── config
    │   └── ...
    ├── view
    │   └── auth
    │       └── login
    │           └── index.phtml
    └── src
        ├── Controller
        │   └── LoginController.php
        ├── Form
        │   └── ...
        ├── Service
        │   └── ...
        └── Module.php
</code></pre></pre><h3>Other approaches</h3><p>Of course, even though I think this is the best solution, it is not the only one.</p><p>For the templates problem, you could use a <code>template_map</code> to get view scripts resolved, but during development that&#x27;s not the best scenario, since you will be forced to update that map every time you create a new template file.</p><p>Also, you could think that the first approach with a lot of folders is the best one. Be free to use it if you are more confortable with it.</p><p>Another solution would be to &quot;pack&quot; all the namespaces in a unique namespace that includes the vendor name, the applicaton name and the module name, like <code>ZasDevAtomicReaderAuth</code>, with classes like <code>ZasDevAtomicReaderAuth\Controller\LoginController</code>, but I don&#x27;t think that&#x27;s the best solution either.</p><p>Anyway, following this rules, you will be able to use sub-namespaces in modules in a very easy way. </p>

Working with sub-namespaced modules in Zend Framework 2 the right way

<p>Doctrine is currently the most used ORM in PHP. It makes it very easy to work with databases in an object oriented way.</p><p>It comes with a set of built-in column types that map database types with PHP types. For example, the <strong>datetime</strong> column type, persists the value of an entity column as a datetime in the database and handles it as a <code>DateTime</code> object when the entity is hydrated.</p><p>Type conversions work both ways, so column types take care of casting database to PHP types and vice versa.</p><p>In this article I&#x27;m going to explain how to define custom column types so that we can persist our own objects into the database and hydrate them back.</p><h3>PHP enums</h3><p>One of the features that PHP lacks of, is a consistent enumerations API. You can always define a class full of constants, but PHP constants can only be scalars, so we can&#x27;t define custom methods. Also, it is not possible to limit the values of an enumeration or typehint arguments and return types when using those constants.</p><p>For this purpose I recently discovered the <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://github.com/myclabs/php-enum">myclabs/php-enum</a> package. It provides a very good way to mimic Java enumerations in PHP.</p><p>Using this package, we can limit the values of properties in doctrine entities, but we need to tell doctrine how to persist those enumerations.</p><h3>Custom Doctrine type</h3><p>Let&#x27;s imagine we have this enum, and we want it to be a valid doctrine type.</p><pre><pre><code class="language-php">&lt;?php
namespace Acelaya\Enum;

use MyCLabs\Enum\Enum;

class Action extends Enum
{
    const CREATE    = &#x27;create&#x27;;
    const READ      = &#x27;read&#x27;;
    const UPDATE    = &#x27;update&#x27;;
    const DELETE    = &#x27;delete&#x27;;
}
</code></pre></pre><p>We also have this entity with a column of type <code>Acelaya\Enum\Action</code>.</p><pre><pre><code class="language-php">&lt;?php
namespace Acelaya\Entity;

use Acelaya\Enum\Action;
use Doctrine\ORM\Mapping as ORM;

/**
 * @ORM\Entity()
 * @ORM\Table(name=&quot;my_entities&quot;)
 */
class MyEntity
{
    /**
     * @var int
     *
     * @ORM\Id
     * @ORM\Column(type=&quot;integer&quot;)
     * @ORM\GeneratedValue(strategy=&quot;AUTO&quot;)
     */
    protected $id;
    /**
     * @var string
     *
     * @ORM\Column()
     */
    protected $name;
    /**
     * @var Action
     *
     * @ORM\Column(type=&quot;php_enum_action&quot;)
     */
    protected $action;

    // Getters and setters...
}
</code></pre></pre><p>We have used the column type <strong>php_enum_action</strong> in the <code>Doctrine\ORM\Mapping\Column</code> annotation for the <code>$action</code> property. We now need to tell doctrine how to convert that type from PHP to database and how to hydrate the column back.</p><p>Defining a custom type in doctrine is as easy as creating a class extending <code>Doctrine\DBAL\Types\Type</code>, and overwriting the methods <code>getName</code>, <code>getSQLDeclaration</code>, <code>convertToPHPValue</code> and <code>convertToDatabaseValue</code>.</p><pre><pre><code class="language-php">&lt;?php
namespace Acelaya\Type;

use Doctrine\DBAL\Platforms\AbstractPlatform;
use Doctrine\DBAL\Types\Type;
use Acelaya\Enum\Action;

class ActionEnumType extends Type
{        
    /**
     * Gets the name of this type.
     *
     * @return string
     */
    public function getName()
    {
        return &#x27;php_enum_action&#x27;;
    }
    
    /**
     * Gets the SQL declaration snippet for a field of this type.
     *
     * @param array $fieldDeclaration The field declaration.
     * @param \Doctrine\DBAL\Platforms\AbstractPlatform $platform The currently used database platform.
     *
     * @return string
     */
    public function getSQLDeclaration(array $fieldDeclaration, AbstractPlatform $platform)
    {
        return &#x27;VARCHAR(256) COMMENT &quot;php_enum_action&quot;&#x27;;
    }
    
    public function convertToPHPValue($value, AbstractPlatform $platform)
    {
        if (! Action::isValid($value)) {
            throw new \InvalidArgumentException(sprintf(
                &#x27;The value &quot;%s&quot; is not valid for the enum &quot;%s&quot;. Expected one of [&quot;%s&quot;]&#x27;,
                $value,
                Action::class,
                implode(&#x27;&quot;, &quot;&#x27;, Action::keys())
            ));
        }
        return new Action($value);
    }
    
    public function convertToDatabaseValue($value, AbstractPlatform $platform)
    {
        return (string) $value;
    }
}
</code></pre></pre><p>This is what each method does:</p><ul><li><strong><code>getName</code></strong>: It just returns the name of the type that is used in the <code>Doctrine\ORM\Mapping\Column</code> annotation.</li><li><strong><code>getSQLDeclaration</code></strong>: Returns the SQL code used to create a field that is going to store the value of the enum in the database. A simple VARCHAR is enough in our case.</li><li><strong><code>convertToPHPValue</code></strong>: Gets the value of the database and casts it to a PHP value. In this case it is going to get a string (from the VARCHAR field) and return an <code>Acelaya\Enum\Action</code> instance with the correct value. It also checks that the value from the database is valid for the enum.</li><li><strong><code>convertToDatabaseValue</code></strong>: Finally this method casts the objects of type <code>Acelaya\Enum\Action</code> to something that can be stored in a VARCHAR column. Since objects of type <code>MyCLabs\Enum\Enum</code> implement the <code>__toString()</code> method, which returns the value of the corresponding constant, this operation is as simple as casting the value to string.</li></ul><p>We now have to register this custom type so that doctrine is able to handle it.</p><p>At your application&#x27;s bootstrap, make this call.</p><pre><pre><code class="language-php">// [...]

use Doctrine\DBAL\Types\Type;
use Acelaya\Type\ActionEnumType;

// [...]

Type::addType(&#x27;php_enum_action&#x27;, ActionEnumType::class);
</code></pre></pre><p>And that&#x27;s it! You can use your custom type wherever you want, and be sure that your entity properties will be objects properly persisted into the database.</p><h3>The Doctrine enum type package</h3><p>I couldn&#x27;t finish this article without mentioning a package that I published two days ago, the <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://github.com/acelaya/doctrine-enum-type">acelaya/doctrine-enum-type</a>.</p><p>You have probably seen that the previous process needs to be done once per enum, since each custom type will need to return a different object type and have a different name.</p><p>This package eases that process, by providing a base abstract class, the <code>Acelaya\Doctrine\Type\AbstractPhpEnumType</code>, which implements the common parts. You will just need to define the name and the enum&#x27;s object type, and then register each type.</p><p>For example, using this package, the <code>Acelaya\Type\ActionEnumType</code> would have been like this:</p><pre><pre><code class="language-php">&lt;?php
namespace Acelaya\Type;

use Acelaya\Doctrine\Type\AbstractPhpEnumType;
use Acelaya\Enum\Action;

class ActionEnumType extends AbstractPhpEnumType
{
    /**
     * You have to define this so that type mapping is properly performed
     */
    protected $enumType = Action::class;

    /**
     * @return string
     */
    protected function getSpecificName()
    {
        return &#x27;action&#x27;;
    }
}
</code></pre></pre><p>The rest of the process is the same.</p>

Alejandro Celaya | Blog

Software development, agile methodologies and open source projects.

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