Category: Development

Posted on

Slight delay to phase two

I had planned to start developing the Costs to Expect service during the summer, as always, there be a slight delay. We decided that rather than steam ahead with new development, it made sense to deal with some of the technical debt.

Looking at the planner, I’ve got somewhere between two and four weeks of development to complete depending on how much debt we decide to pay back.

As it stands today, our release plans are as below;

Costs to Expect API

  • v1.21.0 – Similar to the latest release, prep work and refactoring.
  • v1.22.0 – PATCH support for categories, subcategories, resource types and resources.
  • v1.23.0 – Summaries for categories, subcategories, resource types and resources
  • v1.24.0 – Add support for permitted users.

Costs to Expect website

  • v1.10.0 – General housekeeping and prep.
  • v1.11.0 – Authentication

Phase two of the Costs to Expect service should begin after the above is complete. Phase two is a migration project; the functionality that exists in the web-app needs to be migrated to the website. My Wife will then be able to use the website full time, and the web-app can be taken offline.

Posted on

PHPStorm, Docker and Xdebug

I use Docker for development; on the whole, I love it; however, getting a couple of things set up proved a little challenging, namely debugging from PHPStorm with Xdebug.

Eventually, I will update my Docker quick start project on GitHub, however for now, here are some basic instructions.

We need a couple of arguments in our .env file;

 WITH_XDEBUG=true
 PHP_IDE_CONFIG=serverName=[name-of-server-in-IDE]
 XDEBUG_CONFIG=remote_host=host.docker.internal

Next, we update the Dockerfile

ARG WITH_XDEBUG=false

RUN if [ $WITH_XDEBUG = "true" ] ; then \
     pecl install xdebug; \
     docker-php-ext-enable xdebug; \
     echo "error_reporting = E_ALL" >> /usr/local/etc/php/conf.d/docker-php-ext-xdebug.ini; \
     echo "display_startup_errors = On" >> /usr/local/etc/php/conf.d/docker-php-ext-xdebug.ini; \
     echo "display_errors = On" >> /usr/local/etc/php/conf.d/docker-php-ext-xdebug.ini; \
     echo "xdebug.remote_enable=1" >> /usr/local/etc/php/conf.d/docker-php-ext-xdebug.ini; \
 fi ;

Finally, on the Docker side, we need to update our docker-compose file.

 services:
   yourservice:
     build:
       args:
         - WITH_XDEBUG=${WITH_XDEBUG}
     env_file: .env

Set up your server, making sure to choose your debugger, Xdebug in this case. Settings -> Languages & Frameworks -> PHP -> Servers. The name of the server should match the name you set in the .env file.

Set the debug port and enable “can accept external connections”, PHPStorm, settings -> Languages & Frameworks -> PHP -> Debug, the port defaults to 9000.

Add a run/debug configuration (Run -> Edit configurations), select your server and optionally set an IDE key. To ensure everything is set correctly, you can use the validate option to check your configuration.

Start listening, add a breakpoint and away you go, you can now debug an app running in Docker.