Php Toolchain

[marco-introini]

Thank you all for your hard work and dedication.
As someone who has been using PHP for 15 years, I am quite familiar with its challenges. However, I believe that improving the initial and boundled toolchain for new developers is crucial for the future of the language. In this respect, languages like Go shine, offering a smoother learning curve and better productivity for beginners.

Thanks again
Marco

[pronskiy]

Indeed, Marco! That's exactly what I talked about in my last talk at Laracon EU https://youtu.be/XE4g1Tl6RQw?si=k_NLuZqmPfyJMdsG&t=643.

We do not have an outlined plan for this yet. I'm wondering what it could look like. Do you have any thoughts or specific ideas?

[marco-introini]

That's a great talk!! Thanks for sharing!

I have opinionated ideas, anyway. I share some of them :)

• composer should be installed by default
• some static analysis tool available with default installation (a sort of phpstan)
• a default style fixer, as laravel pint. This can create a "standard" way of writing code
• a super useful feature in go is the fix command, for upgrading go version in an application
• for newbies is too difficult IMHO to install Nginx, php-fpm and configure everything. Something like frankenphp is really a welcome addon. Again, compared with something like go it's way harder (go run main.go is everything you need to do)

Just my two cents

[Crell]

There is already a "standard" way of writing code: PER-CS: https://www.php-fig.org/per/coding-style/

There's no built-in autoformatter, but php-cs-fixer and similar tools can handle that decently well.

[Crell]

Also, for people just playing around locally PHP has a built-in web server that requires no additional setup. It's absolutely not production-grade, but it works for learning and fiddling about.

[KorvinSzanto]

For what it's worth laravel pint wraps PHP CS Fixer and so has support for PER-CS with pint --preset per

[heiglandreas]

Hey Marco: Are you talking about the toolchain for developing PHP-code (as in .php files) or for developing the C-based code that runs PHP-scripts (as in .c/.h/.cpp or whatever files)?

As for the first one I believe there are a lot of already valid possibilities (WAMP/MAMP, different Docker-images, readily available hosted solutions) available. I can imagine the documentation on how to use those can be improved though!

For the later: Absolutely 👍 from my side!

[pronskiy]

Well, for the first one, compare the on-boarding experience of Go and PHP. For example, PHP 8.3 has been released, and developers have literally no official methods for installing or updating to it, whereas for Go/Rust/Node.js – there's a single official command.

Could you elaborate on the latter? What are the use cases for that?

[marco-introini]

I was speaking about the first one. I know there are a lot of possibilities, but none of them is really simple for a newcomer, nor there is an official way to do some basic things. A lot of solutions, but none of them is the official one

[heiglandreas]

I think the main problem we face is that there is no recommended way of doing things. And there for sure should not be an "official" way IMO as that will devalue all the other valid approaches.

Which is also a reason that I would not provide any userland tooling in any "official" build/package/image/whatever.

PHP can be used strictly typed and very secure. But it can also be used for creating a no typed rough script. Forcing a complex build chain onto users that just start out with the simple scripting seem counterproductive.

On the other hand there is already a lot of information out there regarding ways to set up PHP and tools but that information is with recent "improvements" to search engines harder and harder to find but also if one finds them often outdated. Having one -curated - place that connects these bits and pieces into one list - perhaps with explaining contexts and loguc - can help close that gap.

Regarding a simple update command like in go: When I think back there has never been complaints about people not being able to use tue newest and shiniest version of PHP. But always complaints that things were broken and that people are staying on old versions because they fear the cost of upgrades. And if you check the numbers 9f usage of PHP versions on packagist or similar, the low number of usage of current PHP version is not due to PHP not being avsilable but due to people fearing upgrades.

Working on that is a good idea! The PHP core team is doing great works in minimizing BC breaks. Sometimes they need to happen to evolve. Changing the attitude is IMO much more important. The tools are available.

[heiglandreas]

Oh. And PHP is not backed by Google or any other multibillion dollar company. Most of the work is done by volunteers. In unpaid times.

The PHPFoundation is providing backing but by far not able to spend the amount that other companies are able to provide.

So finding a way to involve more volunteers and to get more funding for more paid work are also challenges that I see

[derickr]

The recommended way of upgrading PHP would be to use "apt update php" or "yum install php" (or whatever redhat flavours use nowadays), or "brew update php". Linux distributions already provide packages, and so does homebrew.

[pronskiy]

@marco-introini, check this prototype https://github.com/pronskiy/phpup, the feedback is very welcome. Note that this is my personal project, and not an official @ThePHPF one.

[marco-introini]

Wowww!!! That's really a great project!
I'd like maybe to add a basic option for executing a base PHP file inside the directory.
Something like "if the first parameter is not in phpup list of commands execute vendor/bin/php passing the argument". I don't know if it makes sense.
In this way, we can be up and running in very few steps:

phpup composer init
<add PHP version in composer.json>
phpup locus
<create my first PHP file>
phpup myFile.php (as an extra: maybe this can execute phpup locus if no PHP binary is found inside the vendor directory)

Better yet, maybe creating a new init command can reduce the effort:
phpup init
can: make composer init, add PHP version in composer.json, execute phpup locus

In this way to create a new project:

phpup init 8.3
<create myFile.php>
phpup myFile.php

That's really magic! Thanks!

[pronskiy]

That makes sense, thanks for the suggestion, Marco. I extracted it here: pronskiy/phpup#1