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PHP and MySQL are two valuable tools for bringing data to the web both through customer applications as well as existing open source solutions based on these technologies. Learn how to connect MySQL from PHP in this blog!

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The problem: if you publish any document as PDF, in print, etc. and the text contains URLs, there is a chance that one day those URLs won’t work anymore.
There’s nothing to do about that, it happens.

Luckily, this is a solved problem.
The solution is to link to a stable and trustworthy website, that is, one that you maintain and host (of course, you’re trustworthy!).
Then in the document you link to that website, and the website redirects visitors to the actual location.

An example: my book contains a link to https://enjoy.gitstore.app/repositories/matthiasnoback/read-with-the-author.
When I moved that repository to a new organization on GitHub, this link resulted in a 404 Page not found error.
The proper URL is now https://enjoy.gitstore.app/repositories/read-with-the-author/read-with-the-author.
Chris from Gitstore was able to save the day by setting up a redirect on their site, but I wanted to make sure this kind of problem would never be a problem for me again.

The ingredients for the solution:

• A domain name (I registered advwebapparch.com)
• A simple website that can redirect visitors to the actual locations

I wanted to hook this new website into my existing Docker-based setup which uses Traefik to forward traffic to the right container based on labels.
It turns out, with a simple Nginx image and some custom setup we can easily set up a website that is able to redirecting visitors.

The Dockerfile for such an image:

FROM nginx:stable-alpine
COPY default.conf /etc/nginx/conf.d/default.conf

Where default.conf looks like this:

server { listen 80 default_server; index index.html; root /srv; error_page 404 /404.html; rewrite /repository https://enjoy.gitstore.app/repositories/read-with-the-author/read-with-the-author redirect;
}

This already works, and when I deploying the resulting image to the server that receives traffic for advwebapparch.com, a request for /repository will indeed redirect a visitor to https://enjoy.gitstore.app/repositories/read-with-the-author/read-with-the-author using a temporary redirect.

Generating the Nginx configuration from a text file

When I’m working on my book, I don’t want to manually update a server configuration file every time I’m adding a URL.
Instead, I’d like to work with a simple text file.
Let’s name this file forwards.txt:

/repository https://enjoy.gitstore.app/repositories/read-with-the-author/read-with-the-author
/blog https://matthiasnoback.nl

And then I want the Docker image build process to add rewrite rules automatically,
So I wrote a little PHP script that does this runs during the build.
Here’s what the Dockerfile looks like.
It uses a multi-stage build:

FROM php:7.4-alpine as php
# This will copy build.php from the build context to the image
COPY . .
# This will generate default.conf based on template.conf
RUN php build.php FROM nginx:stable-alpine
# Copy the default.conf from the php image to the nginx image
COPY --from=php default.conf /etc/nginx/conf.d/default.conf

Here’s what happens inside the PHP script:

function insertRewritesInNginxConf(string $conf): string
{ $rewrites = []; foreach (file('forwards.txt') as $line) { $line = trim($line); if (empty($line)) { continue; } $rewrites[] = ' ' . 'rewrite ' . $line . ' redirect;'; } return str_replace( '%INSERT_URL_REWRITES_HERE%', implode("\n", $rewrites), $conf );
} /* * Generate the Nginx configuration which includes all the actual * redirect instructions */
file_put_contents( 'default.conf', insertRewritesInNginxConf(file_get_contents('template.conf'))
);

We should add a bit of validation for the data from the forwards.txt file so we don’t end up with a broken Nginx configuration, but otherwise, this works just fine.

Generating an html page which can be crawled for broken links

I don’t want to manually check that all the links that are inside the “link registry” still work.
Instead, I’d like to use Oh Dear for that, which does uptime monitoring and checks for broken links as well.

For this purpose I added another function to the PHP script, which, based

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Xdebug is an indispensable tool for every PHP developer. PHP’s favorite real-time debugger, it supports breakpoints, more detailed debug output, and deeper introspection of PHP code to determine just what it’s doing (and what it’s doing wrong). Sadly, it comes at a huge cost in performance, though, making it unsuitable for production.
Not on Platform.sh, though. Xdebug is now available on all Grid environments, secure and without a performance loss.

What Is PII?

Drawing on a recent poll, this blog examines why PHP users have not upgraded from PHP 5.6 to PHP 7.x, and explains why they should.

Platform.sh removes a major pain point for developers: having to invest time in managing servers, virtual machines, or containers. Instead, Platform.sh enables developers to focus 100% of their time on their code. Since the beginning, Platform.sh has provided instant cloning capability, so dev teams can work on perfect copies of their production sites in the cloud for every Git branch.
Now, in partnership with Lando, we’re extending that capability to the desktop.

What is a PHP framework?

A PHP framework provides the core infrastructure for turning an incoming HTTP request into an HTTP response. That’s because PHP is most often used for web development. At a minimum, frameworks manage HTTP negotiation, dependency graphs, templating, and error handling.