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The &quot;version&quot; field in the package.json file can very easily become outdated, if you git-tag by mistake before publishing the package, or if pushing the changes fails after 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 It&#x27;s misleading in source code, as it can very easily be out of date.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

I have written a lot of posts about Zend Framework in general and Zend Expressive in particular, but I have noticed that I have never talked about one of the things that, from my point of view, makes Expressive so game-changing, Interoperability.
<h3>Some context</h3>
In the past, PHP frameworks used to be very big libraries, which tried to provide solutions to any possible problem in order to retain users.
At that time, you had to decide which framework you wanted to use, by weighing pros and cons. People ended up saying &quot;I prefer framework foo, because it has a better templating system&quot;, &quot;ok, but framework bar has a better performance and its dependency injection approach is delightful&quot;.
It wasn&#x27;t easy to pick the best part of each framework (or the parts you liked the most) and be able to use them in the same project. You couldn&#x27;t just take the templating system from foo and make it work with the dependency injection approach from bar.
Because of this, the <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.php-fig.org/">PHP Framework Interop Group</a> was born (PHP-FIG from now on). Its goal was to define standard recommendations that frameworks and libraries could adhere to.
At some point this would mean that frameworks would use compatible APIs in their different components and people would be able to easily change one specific component by another.
<h3>Expressive&#x27;s interoperability</h3>
Mostly all frameworks which are part of the PHP-FIG have more or less adopted these standard recommendations. If you have been working with PHP in the last 3-4 years, you know it is now much easier to &quot;mix&quot; libraries and frameworks in the same project.
However, the one which has been capable of making interoperability part of its essence is <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://docs.zendframework.com/zend-expressive/">Zend Expressive</a> (probably because it was born in that period and interoperability was one of its main design goals).
Expressive itself does not provide solutions to almost anything. Instead, it relies in a series of interfaces and abstractions in order to get everything working.
Some of those abstractions are PHP Standard Recommendations (PSRs) from the PHP-FIG.
<ul>
<li>It is a middleware-based framework, so it expects your middlewares and actions (request handlers) to implement <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.php-fig.org/psr/psr-15/">PSR-15</a> interfaces. This way, your own code is not coupled with Expressive at all.</li>
<li>In order to dispatch this middlewares they use a middleware dispatcher, <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://docs.zendframework.com/zend-stratigility/">Zend Stratigility</a> in this case, which also implements PSR-15&#x27;s request handler interface.</li>
<li>It is also a web framework, so it needs to dispatch HTTP requests. For this, it expects you to include a library implementing <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.php-fig.org/psr/psr-7/">PSR-7</a>. They provide one implementation, <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://docs.zendframework.com/zend-diactoros/">Zend Diactoros</a>, but you can use whatever you want.</li>
<li>Expressive promotes Dependency Injection, so it expects a dependency injection container to be used. Once again, they expect any container implementing <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.php-fig.org/psr/psr-11/">PSR-11</a>, so you can use the container of your choice and everything will work.</li>
</ul>
The PHP-FIG still has some work to do in different areas. For those cases in which there&#x27;s no standard recommendation, Zend&#x27;s team has defined a few own interfaces and abstractions Expressive relies on in order to ease decoupling and extendability.
<ul>
<li>Routing: You can pick one of provided implementations or define your own (<a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://github.com/acelaya/expressive-slim-router">I&#x27;ve done it</a> and it wasn&#x27;t that hard)</li>
<li>Templating: If you need to render templates, expressive has official support for three templating systems, but as in previous case, you can use other engines with a minimal effort. 
However, you are not forced to use a templating system if you don&#x27;t need it, which is great.</li>
<li>Error handling: You shouldn&#x27;t handle errors the same way in production and development environments. Expressive&#x27;s abstractions let you use different approaches, with great integration to use <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="http://filp.github.io/whoops/">Whoops</a> in development, but you could use something like <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://tracy.nette.org/en/">Tracy</a> too.</li>
</ul>
All of these abstractions are defined in separated packages, so in the future, if the PHP-FIG accepts a PSR for any of these things, Zend Expressive will probably start supporting them and drop these packages&#x27; interfaces as far as possible.
<h3>Expressive&#x27;s extendability</h3>
There are a lot of things a real project needs which have been left out of expressive&#x27;s scope, which is in fact good.
You will probably need some way to handle configuration. Expressive doesn&#x27;t tell you what to use, because usually config is consumed before the request is even dispatched, so there&#x27;s no need for any kind of integration.
You will also need something to connect to a database, or consume external services. Once again, use whatever you want.
If you need to be able to run your app from the command line, expressive and the HTTP layer won&#x27;t even come in place. For that purpose, Zend&#x27;s team recommends using <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="http://symfony.com/doc/current/components/console.html">symfony/console</a> these days. In fact, there are a few CLI utilities for expressive which have been built with that component, like <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://github.com/zendframework/zend-expressive-tooling">zend-expressive-tooling</a>.
Of course, all of this flexibility is great for experienced developers, but newcomers need a little bit of help to begin with. That&#x27;s why a <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://github.com/zendframework/zend-expressive-skeleton">skeleton project</a> was created.
The skeleton is installed using an interactive process which let&#x27;s you choose the different components to be used, and the project approach you want to take.
This wide range focus makes expressive fit any project. Also, despite the fact that it can be considered a microframework, I can tell you it <a href="/2016/07/21/project-scalability-with-zend-expressive/">scales quite well</a>.
<h3>Proof of concept</h3>
Ok, perfect, interoperability runs in expressive veins, but I don&#x27;t want you to just take my word. That&#x27;s why I have built an example project where I use a variety of libraries and components for every task.
In order to build the project, I have used the skeleton mentioned before, and then tweaked it a little bit. You can find it here: <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://github.com/acelaya-blog/expressive-interoperability-proof-of-concept">https://github.com/acelaya-blog/expressive-interoperability-proof-of-concept</a>
These are the components I have used:
<ul>
<li>DI Container: <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="http://php-di.org/">PHP-DI</a></li>
<li>Router: <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://github.com/acelaya/expressive-slim-router">Slim framework v2</a></li>
<li>Template renderer: <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://twig.symfony.com/">Twig</a></li>
<li>HTTP abstraction: <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://github.com/guzzle/psr7">Guzzle PSR-7 HTTP message library</a></li>
<li>Error handling: <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="http://filp.github.io/whoops/">Whoops</a></li>
</ul>
The result is that very few of the code is actually from <code>Zend</code>&#x27;s namespace.
The project includes the instructions to run it and see how everything is in fact working. It also includes one option in the menu to see an error page.
<h3>Conclusion</h3>
From my point of view, full-stack and coupled frameworks are something from the past. I like to be free to choose the tools I want to use in a project for every task, and to be able to use the best ones or the ones I like the most.
For me, it makes no sense these days to ask &quot;What PHP framework do you use?&quot;, because thanks to the PHP-FIG and initiatives like Expressive it&#x27;s more and more hard to answer.
Of course, if the full-stack approach is the one that fits you and makes you be more productive, I&#x27;m nobody to say otherwise :-)

I have written a lot of posts about Zend Framework in general and Zend Expressive in particular, but I have noticed that I have never talked about one of the things that, from my point of view, makes Expressive so game-changing, Interoperability. Some context

In the past, PHP frameworks used to be…

Demonstrating the interoperability and decoupling of Zend Expressive

A couple hours ago I have released the seventh major version of a module I created more than 4 years ago.
<div></div>
It was born as an abstraction to send emails in Zend Framework 2 applications, but trying to make the process simpler than directly working with the lower-level zend/mail component.
I initially created it to use it in my own project, but at some point decided to publish it as a packagist package to ease others to use it.
The module used to receive more updates in the beginning, but the number of changes decreased with time.
The thing is that there were a lot of things I wanted to do, but never had the time. It goes without saying that 4 years ago I didn&#x27;t have the knowledge I have today (I hope 4 years from now I see my current self the same way), and the package had some design problems that needed to be fixed.
In this post I&#x27;m going to explain the changes that come with this new version, and the reason they were made.
<h3>Stateless services</h3>
Business services have to be, by definition, stateless. In AcMailer, that wasn&#x27;t the case.
I made a mistake when designing the <code>AcMailer\Service\MailService</code> class, and wrapped the <code>Message</code> object to be sent inside of it.
That made the service to depend on the email data. That was a problem, when you wanted to send different emails on the same request, or even send the same email more than once.
It needed a few internal ugly tricks to ensure headers were not duplicated and things like that.
In this version the <code>AcMailer\Service\MailService</code> is stateless. It is just responsible of sending emails, and emails are passed or built at runtime. You can send any number of emails or send them as many times as you want. No side effects.
<h3>Real compatibility with expressive</h3>
The module was already including a <code>ConfigProvider</code> for Zend Expressive, but it was not very functional.
Yes, it was exposing the configuration to expressive apps, but the user was responsible of orchestrating and creating everything.
Also, the module was tightly coupled with zendframework components that are not usually used in expressive, making it harder to integrate.
This release reduces the number of dependencies to the bare minimum, and provides real compatibility with expressive, allowing any of their renderers to be used to render emails, while keeping backward compatibility as much as possible with the way things used to be.
<h3>Emails can be preconfigured</h3>
As I&#x27;ve mentioned above, emails are no longer part of the service.
Now, emails can be preconfigured with a name, the same way services are. Then, you can use any of the service instances to send them by just referencing to them by their name.
A new service, the <code>EmailBuilder</code>, will create those emails and let the mail service send them.
It is also possible to extend emails to reuse parts that are equal, the same way it is possible with mail services.
<h3>Code quality improved</h3>
As I&#x27;ve said, I want to think my programming skills have been improved in the last four years.
I was seeing a lot of parts of the code with the knowledge that they weren&#x27;t fulfilling best coding practices, like clean code or object calisthenics, and that the cyclomatic complexity was high.
I have refactored a lot of parts of the code, and the result is much better now. The code is cleaner and easier to maintain. No more <code>if/else</code> all over the place.
I have also forced a stricter coding standard that extends PSR-2.
<h3>Tests rewritten</h3>
As part of this code quality improvement, I have rewritten almost all unit tests.
They are simpler now, and make use of data providers, which has reduced code duplication, and phpspec/prophecy, which allowed me to drop all custom mocks (I used to build my own mocks and stubs).
The number of tests has been reduced, and they are now faster to run.
<h3>Goodbye PHP 5</h3>
I have added support for PHP 7.2, and dropped support for PHP 5. The code now has stricter type hints and is more predictable.
<h3>Meaningful exceptions</h3>
I have included more package exceptions. They are now better used, and the semantics are clearer.
Also, exception messages include more information now, and explain how to fix the problem when possible.
<h3>Dropped controller plugin</h3>
I used to include a controller plugin to use with Zend MVC controllers. I have completely removed it in this version.
I want to promote constructor dependency injection, and controller plugins allow to pseudo-magically access external services, so I have decided to remove it.
Also, controllers are not probably the best place to send emails.
And finally, it made no sense in a zend expressive context, so ultimately I could create a separate package to bring back the controller plugin, but not include it in the main module.
<h3>Upgrading</h3>
Sadly, most of these changes require the introduction of BC breaks. That&#x27;s why this version increases the major version number.
I have tried to properly document how to upgrade to this version, by including an <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://github.com/acelaya/ZF-AcMailer/blob/master/UPGRADE.md#upgrade-from-5x6x-to-7x">UPGRADE.md</a> document.
I have also created a small console tool that currently allows to migrate from the old configuration to the new structure, but will probably include more features in the future. <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://github.com/acelaya/zf-acmailer-tooling">https://github.com/acelaya/zf-acmailer-tooling</a>
<h3>Conclusion</h3>
And that&#x27;s probably it.
I have updated the module, improved the code, and made it worthy of modern Expressive and MVC applications.

A couple hours ago I have released the seventh major version of a module I created more than 4 years ago. It was born as an abstraction to send emails in Zend Framework 2 applications, but trying to make the process simpler than directly working with the lower-level zend/mail component.

I…

Alejandro Celaya | Blog

Software development, agile methodologies and open source software.

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