I have always struggled with how packages are versioned and published to the npm registry.
My main concern is that you probably want to also add a git tag to your source code when you are releasing a new version, but npm packages have their own versioning system, and include a &quot;version&quot; field in the package.json
Because of this, most of the workflows I have seen, usually involve:
<ol>
<li>Running <code>npm version ...</code>. This will update the &quot;version&quot; field in the package.json file.</li>
<li>Publishing the package to the npm registry, using the version set in previous step.</li>
<li>Committing to git, so that we track the change in package.json file.</li>
<li>Adding a git tag.</li>
<li>Pushing to git remote to track new commit and new tag.</li>
</ol>
<blockquote>
Steps 3 and 4 are frequently done automatically as part of <code>npm version</code>.
</blockquote>
For me this flow has two main problems:
<ul>
<li>
My personal preference is that everything is driven by git tags, making them the single source of truth.
This would allow to just have one manual step -&gt; <code>git tag -a v1.0.0 -m &quot;...&quot; &amp;&amp; git push origin --tags</code>. Then, this would trigger a number of potential automations, including publishing to the npm registry, but also others like creating a release with the appropriate release notes, building release artifacts, etc.
</li>
<li>
The &quot;version&quot; field in the package.json file can very easily become outdated, if you git-tag by mistake before publishing the package, or if pushing the changes fails after <code>npm version ...</code> has been run.
I&#x27;ve seen this happening more often than it seems.
</li>
</ul>
Because of this, my current take when publishing npm packages for my personal projects is:
<ol>
<li>
Get rid of the &quot;version&quot; field from the package.json file. It&#x27;s misleading in source code, as it can very easily be out of date.
The only case where it&#x27;s useful is when the package has been installed and is inside node_modules, as other packages will assume this field to exist and have the right value on it.
In this case it&#x27;s always going to be correct due to the<code>npm version ...</code> + <code>npm publish</code> tandem (see next point).
</li>
<li>
Creating the git tag is the only &quot;manual step&quot;. This triggers an automation running <code>npm version ${GIT_TAG} --git-tag-version=false &amp;&amp; npm publish</code> (this is simplified. You probably also need to build your project and other potential extra steps).
The version to publish is inferred from the git tag (<code>${GIT_TAG}</code> is just a placeholder), and only at this stage we will set the &quot;version&quot; inside package.json, just before the package is published.
</li>
<li>
Other automations that need to happen during releases, can be also triggered now, like publishing release notes, building artifacts, etc.
</li>
</ol>
<blockquote>
As an example, you can see <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://github.com/shlinkio/github-actions/blob/24de7a2b89a9eb11b0acfd184de7187698b051b6/.github/workflows/js-lib-publish.yml">this GitHub actions workflow</a>, which follows this approach.
</blockquote>

I have always struggled with how packages are versioned and published to the npm registry. My main concern is that you probably want to also add a git tag to your source code when you are releasing a new version, but npm packages have their own versioning system, and include a "version" field in…

My current take when publishing packages to the npm registry

A couple of weeks ago I migrated a React project using redux to <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://redux-toolkit.js.org/">Redux Toolkit</a>.
Redux has always been my preferred state management tool for React (which doesn&#x27;t mean I &quot;love&quot; it), but one of its main problems is the amount of boilerplate code it requires.
Because of that I had a couple of helper functions, but there was still some things not properly handled, like proper type inference on reducers and actions (I use TypeScript).
A bit by accident (I think it was on Twitter), I found out about Redux Toolkit (RTK from now on), an official library from the redux team, which provides some opinionated helpers to reduce the amount of boilerplate, and I decided to give it a chance.
These are my impressions.
<h3>TL;DR</h3>
I first started to use it in a proof of concept, and I quickly loved it.
RTK does not &quot;replace&quot; any of the redux principles, so you can progressively adopt it, by replacing small bits of code. My plan was to use it just for some reducers, but I liked it so much that I ended up migrating the whole project in a series of consecutive pull requests.
<h3>A bit of context</h3>
Before the migration, I used to follow the <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://github.com/erikras/ducks-modular-redux">ducks modular pattern</a>, which promotes putting all your action types, action creators and the reducer handling those actions on the same module.
This fits pretty well with RTK, as in most of the cases you will use <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://redux-toolkit.js.org/api/createSlice">slices</a>, and end up exporting the reducer and action creators returned by it, from the same module.
If you use <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://redux-toolkit.js.org/api/createAsyncThunk">async thunks</a>, they usually need to be used by that same slice, so it&#x27;s not a bad idea to export them also from there.
<h3>Why I love it</h3>
There are a couple of reasons for which I loved RTK right away. The main one is that they make an impressive work on making type inference in TypeScript work properly.
<ul>
<li>Slices detect the type of the initial state in order to know what is expected to be passed as <code>state</code> to reducers.</li>
<li>You can infer the type of your store from what is generated by <code>configureStore</code> or <code>combineReducers</code> functions, allowing you to also properly type the <code>dispatch</code> function.</li>
<li>Action creators are generated with the proper param types based on the reducers provided to <code>createSlice</code> or the callback provided to <code>createAsyncThunk</code>.</li>
<li><code>createSlice</code> can consume all the action creators generated by <code>createAsyncThunk</code>, and infer the proper payload for each one of them.</li>
</ul>
Thanks to this, the code is super predictable and potential bugs can be caught sooner.
<blockquote>
More details on how to use RTK with typescript https://redux-toolkit.js.org/usage/usage-with-typescript
</blockquote>
But this is not the only benefit. Other reasons that make it very nice to work with are:
<ul>
<li>It keeps the same concepts from Redux, but removing the boilerplate or your own helper functions if you have them (yes, I didn&#x27;t want to keep all those <code>switch</code> statements everywhere).</li>
<li>It is mostly transparent for the components dispatching the actions or consuming the state.</li>
<li>All the tests covering your reducers/actions/components should keep passing, as the outcome from RTK is the same as if you built everything manually.</li>
<li>It introduces a couple of extra helpers, like <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://redux-toolkit.js.org/rtk-query/overview">RTK query</a> or the <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://redux-toolkit.js.org/api/createListenerMiddleware">listener middleware</a>, which is very useful to dispatch actions as a result of other actions being dispatched.</li>
</ul>
<h3>Challenges I found</h3>
Of course, adopting a new tool always comes with some challenges.
The main &quot;problem&quot; I found is that RTK is a bit opinionated, but that&#x27;s precisely how they manage to reduce boilerplate code, and it&#x27;s also &quot;advertised&quot; in their website, so not a big surprise.
I usually prefer to be in control of everything (configuration over convention), but that&#x27;s just a personal preference, and sometimes it&#x27;s ok to accept a bit of magic for the sake of simplicity.
This caused the next challenges for my particular case:
<ul>
<li>
RTK assumes your project follows a strict <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://redux.js.org/tutorials/fundamentals/part-7-standard-patterns#flux-standard-actions">Flux pattern</a>, meaning your actions always have the properties <code>type</code>, <code>payload</code> and optionally <code>meta</code> and <code>error</code>.
I was not following this pattern (my actions had the payload &quot;mixed&quot; on the first object level), so I had to adapt all my actions first, fix the tests, then migrate the reducer to RTK and make sure the tests kept passing.
<div></div>
</li>
<li>
Immutability is no longer promoted in reducers. Instead, the library requires <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://immerjs.github.io/immer/">immer</a> internally, and using proxies they automatically ensure immutability, even if you &quot;mutate&quot; the state.
This feels a bit counterintuitive at first, because redux always promoted an immutable approach, and the use of immer is not obvious.
However, they have <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://redux-toolkit.js.org/usage/immer-reducers#why-immer-is-built-in">good reasons</a> to do it, and if your reducers return a state object, you can still use the immutable approach. It&#x27;s up to you.
<div></div>
</li>
<li>
Action creators resulting of <code>createAsyncThunk</code> can only have one argument.
This is because the async thunk callback receives a second argument containing the <code>dispatch</code> and <code>getState</code> functions, as well as a couple of other goodies, enforcing this convention to avoid human errors.
<div></div>
</li>
<li>
You cannot dispatch other actions after the callback passed to <code>createAsyncThunk</code>, because it has to return the payload and RTK dispatches the action for you.
However, this is probably something you usually should not be doing, and in my case, I resolved it with the <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://redux-toolkit.js.org/api/createListenerMiddleware">listener middleware</a>, listening for the second action in order to dispatch the second one.
</li>
</ul>
<h3>Conclusion</h3>
My conclusion is that RTK is definitely worth it if you use redux.
It makes code simpler, more predictable and better typed. However, it still requires knowing how redux works internally and what are its patterns, in order to understand why the library exposes the helpers it exposes and why.
For existing redux projects, you can migrate progressively, addressing the challenges bit by bit and not all at once, which simplifies its adoption.
For new projects in which you want to use redux, I would recommend starting right away with RTK.

A couple of weeks ago I migrated a React project using redux to Redux Toolkit. Redux has always been my preferred state management tool for React (which doesn't mean I "love" it), but one of its main problems is the amount of boilerplate code it requires.

Because of that I had a couple of helper…

My experience migrating to Redux Toolkit (RTK)

In 2019, GitHub published their own solution to run automated workflows called GitHub Actions, which allowed those hosting their code in GitHub, to be able to define and run their CI/CD pipelines in the same platform. When it was released, one of the main pain points to use it was that defining…

How to reduce duplication in your GitHub Actions workflows

Recently ReactJS v18 was released. I started to look into its improvements, and checked which of my projects could benefit from them.
The main react-based project I maintain at the moment of writing this article is <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://github.com/shlinkio/shlink-web-client">shlink-web-client</a>, so I naturally created a new branch and started the process.
The update was quite smooth, as most of the other dependencies I was using from the react ecosystem were already updated to support v18. All but one, <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://enzymejs.github.io/enzyme/">enzyme</a>, the testing framework I was using to unit-test react components.
To be precise, I was able to continue running my tests, but some of them (those using <code>mount</code> instead of <code>shallow</code>) were still rendering components with the &quot;old&quot; React v17 approach, causing them to behave as in that version and a warning being printed in the console.
<h3>First fix attempt</h3>
The way enzyme integrates with the react version you are using is through an adapter library. The last official one supports only React v16, but someone released an <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://github.com/wojtekmaj/enzyme-adapter-react-17">unofficial adapter for v17</a> which, with close to 650k weekly downloads, quickly became the way to go.
I checked if there was one for React 18, but sadly there wasn&#x27;t.
Also, the author of the adapter for v17 posted an article indicating <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://dev.to/wojtekmaj/enzyme-is-dead-now-what-ekl">enzyme is dead</a>, he was not going to release one for v18, and publishing one for v17 was a mistake.
With those facts in mind, I started to face what was probably going to be the moment to migrate to <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://testing-library.com/docs/react-testing-library/intro">react testing library</a>.
<h3>Migration strategy</h3>
I decided to follow a migration strategy similar to the one suggested in the article above, but with a couple of modifications:
<ul>
<li>I update to React 18 anyway, as tests still pass.</li>
<li>Migrate right away all tests using <code>mount</code>, as those are the ones behaving differently.</li>
<li>New tests should be written directly with react testing library (RTL from now on).</li>
<li>When an existing test needs to be changed, consider migrating it to RTL, and do it if there&#x27;s time.</li>
<li>Introduce some PR from time to time just migrating a handful of tests.</li>
<li>Once everything is migrated, get rid of everything related with enzyme.</li>
</ul>
<h3>First contact and impressions</h3>
I was a bit sceptical with RTL, as it was focused more on integration tests, instead of unit tests, which meant I had to completely change the mindset to write tests.
It also didn&#x27;t support shallow rendering, meaning that you will end up sometimes rendering a bigger component tree when testing container-like components, potentially causing side effects that could affect your test.
On the other hand there&#x27;s more and more people stating that <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://kentcdodds.com/blog/why-i-never-use-shallow-rendering">shallow rendering is an anti-pattern</a>, and that&#x27;s probably the reason of enzyme getting &quot;discontinued&quot;.
Also, RTL has become the <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://reactjs.org/docs/testing.html#tools">officially recommended framework</a> to test react components, it has become very popular, and it has even joined a wider group of testing libraries under the <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://testing-library.com/"><code>@testing-library</code></a> organization.
The thing is that I started to use it, and I was quickly surprised with how it felt to work with it, and all the benefits it was bringing to my tests.
<h3>Benefits I have experienced</h3>
Once I started migrating the first tests I noticed some benefits:
<ul>
<li>Changing my mindset was actually easier than I thought. The docs are very well written, so it&#x27;s relatively easy to start using RTL.</li>
<li>My tests got simpler, and required less of those nasty global mocks that jest allows (I&#x27;m looking at you, <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://jestjs.io/es-ES/docs/mock-functions#mocking-modules"><code>jest.mock</code></a>).</li>
<li>Tests were way less coupled with implementation details. I moved from testing the component props, to test what the user would see on the screen.</li>
<li>Related with previous point, I started to write my tests by looking at the screen instead of the component&#x27;s implementation.</li>
<li>Changes in source code led to fewer tests requiring to be changed.</li>
<li>A progressive migration was possible, where some tests still use enzyme and others are already using RTL.</li>
</ul>
And overall, it felt good and I have already dedicated a couple of PRs just to migrate more tests.
<h3>Challenges I faced</h3>
But of course, migrating to a new tool always comes with its own challenges, and this was not an exception. I&#x27;ll explain the main ones I have faced so far and how I tackled them:
<ul>
<li>
RTL lets you do some things in a couple of different ways, and the docs may not be super clear about what&#x27;s the recommended option.
For this I recommend reading <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://acel.me/DCMb1">this article</a> from Kent C. Dodds, RTL&#x27;s author, which explains some common mistakes when using the library.
</li>
<li>
At first, I struggled a bit with asynchronous side effects and state changes in components, which can easily end up printing a warning like <code>Warning: An update to MyComponent inside a test was not wrapped in act</code>.
The warning also explains how you are supposed to solve this by wrapping your code in <code>act()</code>, but this warning comes from React, not RTL, and what it is not telling you is that RTL already wraps all needed operations in <code>act()</code>.
What this error usually mean is that you are not waiting for something to happen. <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://acel.me/jnUdT">This other article</a>, also from Kent C. Dodds, explains everything you need to know about the things that can lead to this warning, and how to solve them.
</li>
<li>
Since you start testing from the user point of view, some use cases can be challenging to test without coupling with implementation details. For example, when you have a component which dynamically renders different images or icons, I used to directly check the component properties.
For this I found the best solution was to use <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://jestjs.io/docs/snapshot-testing">jest snapshots</a>. I didn&#x27;t want to manually check which SVG was being rendered in the DOM, just that different ones were being used in every case.
<pre class="language-tsx"><code class="language-tsx">// I went from this...
test(&#x27;...&#x27;, () =&gt; {
 const wrapper = shallow(&lt;MyComp dynamicValue=&quot;foo&quot; /&gt;);
 expect(wrapper.find(FontAwesomeIcon).prop(&#x27;icon&#x27;)).toEqual(someIcon);
})

// To this
test(&#x27;...&#x27;, () =&gt; {
 const { container } = render(&lt;MyComp dynamicValue=&quot;foo&quot; /&gt;);
 expect(container.firstChild).toMatchSnapshot();
})
</code></pre>
</li>
<li>
Something very similar happens if you use some library that renders canvas. There&#x27;s no way to test that from a DOM point of view, which is what RTL does.
In my case I was using <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.chartjs.org/">Chart.js</a> to render some charts, so I used <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://github.com/hustcc/jest-canvas-mock">jest-canvas-mock</a>, which exposes a method on the canvas to see which are all the events invoked from the library.
Then I used snapshots again to verify they had the expected &quot;shape&quot;.
<pre class="language-tsx"><code class="language-tsx">// I went from this...
test(&#x27;...&#x27;, () =&gt; {
 const wrapper = shallow(&lt;MyCompWithCanvas /&gt;);
 expect(wrapper.find(Chart).prop(&#x27;data&#x27;).datasets).toEqual(...);
})

// To this
test(&#x27;...&#x27;, () =&gt; {
 const { container } = render(&lt;MyCompWithCanvas /&gt;);
 const events = container.querySelector(&#x27;canvas&#x27;)?.getContext(&#x27;2d&#x27;)?.__getEvents();

 expect(events).toBeTruthy();
 expect(events).toMatchSnapshot();
})
</code></pre>
</li>
</ul>
<h3>Conclusion</h3>
For better or worst, enzyme should no longer be considered an option. If you are starting a new project or are using it on small ones, consider migrating to RTL as soon as possible.
If you are using it in bigger projects, following the process described in this article will probably help you.
In any case, you will get surprised. React testing library is a great tool and provides many benefits over enzyme.
Its main issue is that it&#x27;s not a drop-in replacement for enzyme, so you will have to change a bit your mindset.

Recently ReactJS v18 was released. I started to look into its improvements, and checked which of my projects could benefit from them. The main react-based project I maintain at the moment of writing this article is shlink-web-client, so I naturally created a new branch and started the process.

The…

My experience migrating from enzyme to react testing library

Capturing code coverage for a test suite is a very useful way to know which parts of your source code are actually getting executed by tests. This is useful not only to know if you need to add more tests to your project (in case the coverage is too low), but also, if you want to apply technics like…

Capturing remote code coverage in API tests with PHPUnit

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>.
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.
<h3>How does swoole work?</h3>
Swoole is an asynchronous non-blocking I/O framework which works in a similar way as node.js, but for PHP apps.
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.
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>).
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.
<h3>How does this affect the EntityManager?</h3>
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>.
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:
<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>
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.
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.
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).
That&#x27;s how I came up with the <code>ReopeningEntityManager</code> Shlink is currently using (as of v1.20.0):
<pre class="language-php"><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>
<blockquote>
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>.
</blockquote>
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.
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:
<pre class="language-php"><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>
<blockquote>
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>
</blockquote>
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).
<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>
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.
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.
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.
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.
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>:
<pre class="language-php"><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>
<blockquote>
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>.
</blockquote>
<h3>Conclusion</h3>
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.
I hope that, if you ended up here, this article served you well.

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 Shlink. Shlink is built using expressive as the base framework for the HTTP-dispatching task. A while ago, an expressive module was released to…

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

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.
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.
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:
<ul>
<li>A UUID (Universally Unique IDentifier) 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 <a href="https://twitter.com/tomas2387/status/658237457117368320" target="_blank">@tomas2387</a> for mentioning this)</li>
</ul>
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>.
<h3>Creating entities</h3>
Entities will have an ID, but instead of setting them with an autoincrement strategy and an integer type, we are going to use the uuid doctrine type and typehint the ID as a <code>Ramsey\Uuid\UuidInterface</code>.
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.
<pre class="language-php"><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>
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.
<h3>Registering the type</h3>
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 uuid type.
<pre class="language-php"><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>
Once this is set, we can use the uuid 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.

It'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. The PHP community is recommending to better use UUIDs these days, because it hides…

Using UUID identifiers for databases in PHP projects with Doctrine

Doctrine is currently the most used ORM in PHP. It makes it very easy to work with databases in an object oriented way.
It comes with a set of built-in column types that map database types with PHP types. For example, the datetime 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.
Type conversions work both ways, so column types take care of casting database to PHP types and vice versa.
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.
<h3>PHP enums</h3>
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.
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.
Using this package, we can limit the values of properties in doctrine entities, but we need to tell doctrine how to persist those enumerations.
<h3>Custom Doctrine type</h3>
Let&#x27;s imagine we have this enum, and we want it to be a valid doctrine type.
<pre class="language-php"><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>
We also have this entity with a column of type <code>Acelaya\Enum\Action</code>.
<pre class="language-php"><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>
We have used the column type php_enum_action 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.
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>.
<pre class="language-php"><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>
This is what each method does:
<ul>
<li><code>getName</code>: It just returns the name of the type that is used in the <code>Doctrine\ORM\Mapping\Column</code> annotation.</li>
<li><code>getSQLDeclaration</code>: 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><code>convertToPHPValue</code>: 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><code>convertToDatabaseValue</code>: 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>
We now have to register this custom type so that doctrine is able to handle it.
At your application&#x27;s bootstrap, make this call.
<pre class="language-php"><code class="language-php">// [...]

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

// [...]

Type::addType(&#x27;php_enum_action&#x27;, ActionEnumType::class);
</code></pre>
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.
<h3>The Doctrine enum type package</h3>
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>.
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.
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.
For example, using this package, the <code>Acelaya\Type\ActionEnumType</code> would have been like this:
<pre class="language-php"><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>
The rest of the process is the same.

Doctrine is currently the most used ORM in PHP. It makes it very easy to work with databases in an object oriented way. It comes with a set of built-in column types that map database types with PHP types. For example, the datetime column type, persists the value of an entity column as a datetime in…

Working with custom column types in Doctrine. Enums.

Some time ago I published an article talking about different Doctrine configurations when using the DoctrineORMModule in Zend Framework 2 applications, so that you can create multiple database connections, either by using one entity manager or more than one. Since then, many people have asked me…

Dynamically create doctrine entity managers in Zend Framework 2

There are many situations where you need multiple database connections in your application.
In this post I am going to explain how to configure a connection to 2 databases to be used by Doctrine in Zend Framework 2 and how to configure a master-slave connection. Both examples will be using MySQL.
Lets asume we have a <code>doctrine_connection.global.php</code> configuration file, where we are going to define the doctrine database connection configuration. Any other doctrine configuration should be defined in other configuration files.
For further information on how Zend Framework 2 configuration works take a look at its <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://framework.zend.com/manual/2.2/en/tutorials/config.advanced.html">documentation</a>.
<h3>Two connections. Two entity managers.</h3>
Sometimes we could need to connect to two different databases and handle their connections separately, maybe because we need to work with our application database and a third party application database that can&#x27;t be integrated in our system.
For this purpose, Doctrine allows us to define multiple connections and different EntityManagers to handle them. This could be our configuration file.
<pre class="language-php"><code class="language-php">&lt;?php
return array(

 &#x27;doctrine&#x27; =&gt; array(

 // Connections
 &#x27;connection&#x27; =&gt; array(
 &#x27;orm_default&#x27; =&gt; array(
 &#x27;driverClass&#x27; =&gt;&#x27;Doctrine\DBAL\Driver\PDOMySql\Driver&#x27;,
 &#x27;params&#x27; =&gt; array(
 &#x27;host&#x27; =&gt; &#x27;localhost&#x27;,
 &#x27;port&#x27; =&gt; &#x27;3306&#x27;,
 &#x27;user&#x27; =&gt; &#x27;root&#x27;,
 &#x27;password&#x27; =&gt; &#x27;foobar&#x27;,
 &#x27;dbname&#x27; =&gt; &#x27;main_database&#x27;,
 &#x27;driverOptions&#x27; =&gt; array(
 PDO::MYSQL_ATTR_INIT_COMMAND =&gt; &#x27;SET NAMES utf8&#x27;
 ),
 )
 ),
 &#x27;orm_another&#x27; =&gt; array(
 &#x27;driverClass&#x27; =&gt;&#x27;Doctrine\DBAL\Driver\PDOMySql\Driver&#x27;,
 &#x27;params&#x27; =&gt; array(
 &#x27;host&#x27; =&gt; &#x27;localhost&#x27;,
 &#x27;port&#x27; =&gt; &#x27;3306&#x27;,
 &#x27;user&#x27; =&gt; &#x27;root&#x27;,
 &#x27;password&#x27; =&gt; &#x27;foobar&#x27;,
 &#x27;dbname&#x27; =&gt; &#x27;another_database&#x27;,
 &#x27;driverOptions&#x27; =&gt; array(
 PDO::MYSQL_ATTR_INIT_COMMAND =&gt; &#x27;SET NAMES utf8&#x27;
 ),
 )
 ),
 ),

 // Entity managers
 &#x27;entitymanager&#x27; =&gt; array(
 &#x27;orm_another&#x27; =&gt; array(
 &#x27;connection&#x27; =&gt; &#x27;orm_another&#x27;,
 )
 ),

 )
);
</code></pre>
As you can see, two connections have been defined, the standard <code>orm_default</code> and a new <code>orm_another</code> connection.
To access the standard connection we can use the already existing <code>Doctrine\ORM\EntityManager</code> service or even the <code>doctrine.entitymanager.orm_default</code> service.
To access any other connection we should use, for example, the <code>doctrine.entitymanager.orm_another</code> service, where the last part of the service name is the connection name. This will return a new EntityManager instance that can be used to handle the other database
Then we only need to inject the desired EntityManager on each service that will need to make use of them.
<h3>Master-slave connection. One entity manager.</h3>
The master-slave connection is very important in a high performance environment.
We can have a good cache system or server replication with load balancer, but finally if we only have one database, that will slow down the whole application. The master-slave system allows us to define &quot;multiple&quot; database connections that MySQL will internally synchronize.
It defines a unique database entry point, that is used for write operations (INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE) and multiple databases for reading operations (SELECT).
To set up this kind of connection in our <code>doctrine_connection.global.php</code> configuration file we could use something like this.
<pre class="language-php"><code class="language-php">&lt;?php
return array(

 &#x27;doctrine&#x27; =&gt; array(
 &#x27;connection&#x27; =&gt; array(
 &#x27;orm_default&#x27; =&gt; array(
 &#x27;wrapperClass&#x27; =&gt; &#x27;Doctrine\DBAL\Connections\MasterSlaveConnection&#x27;,
 &#x27;params&#x27; =&gt; array(
 &#x27;driver&#x27; =&gt; &#x27;pdo_mysql&#x27;,
 &#x27;master&#x27; =&gt; array(
 &#x27;host&#x27; =&gt; &#x27;localhost&#x27;,
 &#x27;port&#x27; =&gt; &#x27;3306&#x27;,
 &#x27;user&#x27; =&gt; &#x27;root&#x27;,
 &#x27;password&#x27; =&gt; &#x27;foobar&#x27;,
 &#x27;dbname&#x27; =&gt; &#x27;mydatabase&#x27;,
 ),
 &#x27;slaves&#x27; =&gt; array(
 array(
 &#x27;host&#x27; =&gt; &#x27;localhost&#x27;,
 &#x27;port&#x27; =&gt; &#x27;3306&#x27;,
 &#x27;user&#x27; =&gt; &#x27;root&#x27;,
 &#x27;password&#x27; =&gt; &#x27;foobar&#x27;,
 &#x27;dbname&#x27; =&gt; &#x27;mydatabase2&#x27;,
 ),
 array(
 &#x27;host&#x27; =&gt; &#x27;localhost&#x27;,
 &#x27;port&#x27; =&gt; &#x27;3306&#x27;,
 &#x27;user&#x27; =&gt; &#x27;root&#x27;,
 &#x27;password&#x27; =&gt; &#x27;foobar&#x27;,
 &#x27;dbname&#x27; =&gt; &#x27;mydatabase3&#x27;,
 ),
 ),
 ),
 )
 )
 ),

);
</code></pre>
In this example we have defined a master connection and two slave connections. Doctrine will be aware of handling connections internally, it is transparent for us, we only need to use one EntityManager by getting the <code>Doctrine\ORM\EntityManager</code> service and we won&#x27;t need to change anything in the code.

There are many situations where you need multiple database connections in your application. In this post I am going to explain how to configure a connection to 2 databases to be used by Doctrine in Zend Framework 2 and how to configure a master-slave connection. Both examples will be using MySQL.

L…

Alejandro Celaya | Blog

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