PHP 7 Programming Cookbook

By Doug Bierer

About This Book

• This is the most up-to-date book in the market on PHP
• It covers the new features of version 7.x, best practices for server-side programming, and MVC frameworks
• The recipe-based approach will allow you to explore the unique capabilities that PHP offers to web programmers

Who This Book Is For

This book is for software architects, technical managers, developers from intermediate to advanced, or just the curious. You will need to have a basic knowledge of PHP programming, especially OOP.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Packt Publishing
• Release date: Aug 30, 2016
• ISBN: 9781785882548

Book preview

Table of Contents

PHP 7 Programming Cookbook

Credits

Foreword

About the Author

About the Reviewers

www.PacktPub.com

eBooks, discount offers, and more

Why Subscribe?

Preface

What this book covers

What you need for this book

Who this book is for

Sections

Getting ready

How to do it...

How it works...

There's more...

See also

Conventions

Reader feedback

Customer support

Downloading the example code

Errata

Piracy

Questions

1. Building a Foundation

Introduction

PHP 7 installation considerations

How to do it...

Installing directly from source

Installing PHP 7 from pre-compiled binaries

Installing a *AMP package

There's more...

See also

Using the built-in PHP web server

How to do it...

Defining a test MySQL database

How to do it...

Installing PHPUnit

Implementing class autoloading

Getting ready

How to do it...

How it works...

Hoovering a website

How to do it...

How it works...

See also

Building a deep web scanner

How to do it...

How it works...

See also

Creating a PHP 5 to PHP 7 code converter

Getting ready

How to do it...

How it works...

See also

2. Using PHP 7 High Performance Features

Introduction

Understanding the abstract syntax tree

How to do it...

How it works...

See also

Understanding differences in parsing

How to do it...

How it works...

See also

Understanding differences in foreach() handling

How to do it...

How it works...

See also

Improving performance using PHP 7 enhancements

How to do it...

How it works...

There's more...

Iterating through a massive file

How to do it...

How it works...

Uploading a spreadsheet into a database

Getting ready...

How to do it...

How it works...

Recursive directory iterator

How to do it...

How it works...

3. Working with PHP Functional Programming

Introduction

Developing functions

How to do it...

How it works...

Hinting at data types

How to do it...

How it works...

See also

Using return value data typing

How to do it...

How it works...

There's more...

See also

Using iterators

How to do it...

How it works...

Writing your own iterator using generators

How to do it...

How it works...

4. Working with PHP Object-Oriented Programming

Introduction

Developing classes

How to do it...

How it works...

See also...

Extending classes

How to do it...

How it works...

Using static properties and methods

How to do it...

How it works...

See also

Using namespaces

How to do it...

How it works...

Defining visibility

How to do it...

How it works...

See also

Using interfaces

How to do it...

How it works...

Using traits

How to do it...

How it works...

Implementing anonymous classes

How to do it...

How it works...

5. Interacting with a Database

Introduction

Using PDO to connect to a database

How to do it...

How it works...

See also

Building an OOP SQL query builder

How to do it...

How it works...

See also

Handling pagination

How to do it...

How it works...

See also

Defining entities to match database tables

How to do it...

How it works...

See also

Tying entity classes to RDBMS queries

How to do it...

How it works...

There's more...

Embedding secondary lookups into query results

How to do it...

How it works...

Implementing jQuery DataTables PHP lookups

How to do it...

How it works...

There's more...

6. Building Scalable Websites

Introduction

Creating a generic form element generator

How to do it...

How it works...

Creating an HTML radio element generator

How to do it...

How it works...

There's more...

Creating an HTML select element generator

How to do it...

How it works...

Implementing a form factory

How to do it...

How it works...

Chaining $_POST filters

How to do it...

How it works...

There's more...

See also

Chaining $_POST validators

How to do it...

How it works...

Tying validation to a form

How to do it...

How it works...

7. Accessing Web Services

Introduction

Converting between PHP and XML

How to do it...

How it works...

Creating a simple REST client

How to do it...

Creating a streams-based REST client

Defining a cURL-based REST client

How it works...

There's more...

See also

Creating a simple REST server

How to do it...

How it works...

There's more...

Creating a simple SOAP client

How to do it...

How it works...

See also

Creating a simple SOAP server

How to do it...

How it works...

See also

8. Working with Date/Time and International Aspects

Introduction

Using emoticons or emoji in a view script

How to do it...

How it works...

See also

Converting complex characters

How to do it...

How it works...

Getting the locale from browser data

How to do it...

How it works...

See also

Formatting numbers by locale

How to do it...

How it works...

See also

Handling currency by locale

How to do it...

How it works...

See also

Formatting date/time by locale

How to do it...

How it works...

See also

Creating an HTML international calendar generator

How to do it...

Refining internationalized output

How it works...

See also

Building a recurring events generator

How to do it...

How it works...

See also

Handling translation without gettext

How to do it...

How it works...

See also

9. Developing Middleware

Introduction

Authenticating with middleware

How to do it...

How it works...

See also

Using middleware to implement access control

How to do it...

How it works...

See also

Improving performance using the cache

How to do it...

How it works...

There's more...

See also

Implementing routing

How to do it...

How it works...

See also

Making inter-framework system calls

How to do it...

How it works...

Using middleware to cross languages

How to do it...

10. Looking at Advanced Algorithms

Introduction

Using getters and setters

How to do it...

How it works...

Implementing a linked list

How to do it...

How it works...

There's more...

Building a bubble sort

How to do it...

How it works...

Implementing a stack

How to do it...

How it works...

Building a binary search class

How to do it...

How it works...

See also

Implementing a search engine

How to do it...

How it works...

Displaying a multi-dimensional array and accumulating totals

How to do it...

How it works...

11. Implementing Software Design Patterns

Introduction

Creating an array to object hydrator

How to do it...

How it works...

Building an object to array hydrator

How to do it...

How it works...

Implementing a strategy pattern

How to do it...

How it works...

Defining a mapper

How to do it...

How it works...

Implementing object-relational mapping

How to do it...

Technique #1 - pre-loading all child information

Technique #2 - embedding secondary lookups

How it works...

See also

Implementing the Pub/Sub design pattern

How to do it...

How it works...

There's more...

See also

12. Improving Web Security

Introduction

Filtering $_POST data

How to do it...

How it works...

See also

Validating $_POST data

How to do it...

How it works...

See also

Safeguarding the PHP session

How to do it...

How it works...

See also

Securing forms with a token

How to do it...

How it works...

See also

Building a secure password generator

How to do it...

How it works...

See also

Safeguarding forms with a CAPTCHA

How to do it...

Generating a text CAPTCHA

Generating an image CAPTCHA

How it works...

There's more...

See also

Encrypting/decrypting without mcrypt

How to do it...

How it works...

There's more...

See also

13. Best Practices, Testing, and Debugging

Introduction

Using Traits and Interfaces

How to do it...

How it works...

Universal exception handler

How to do it...

How it works...

See also

Universal error handler

How to do it...

How it works...

See also

Writing a simple test

How to do it...

Running simple tests

Testing database Model classes

Using mock classes

Using anonymous classes as mock objects

Using Mock Builder

How it works...

Running simple tests

Testing database model classes

Using mock classes

There's more...

See also...

Writing a test suite

How to do it...

How it works...

See also...

Generating fake test data

How to do it...

How it works...

There's more...

Customizing sessions using session_start parameters

How to do it...

How it works...

See also...

A. Defining PSR-7 Classes

Introduction

Implementing PSR-7 value object classes

Getting ready

How to do it...

How it works...

See also

Developing a PSR-7 Request class

How to do it...

How it works...

See also

Defining a PSR-7 Response class

How to do it...

How it works...

See also

Index

PHP 7 Programming Cookbook

---

PHP 7 Programming Cookbook

Copyright © 2016 Packt Publishing

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews.

Every effort has been made in the preparation of this book to ensure the accuracy of the information presented. However, the information contained in this book is sold without warranty, either express or implied. Neither the author, nor Packt Publishing, and its dealers and distributors will be held liable for any damages caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by this book.

Packt Publishing has endeavored to provide trademark information about all of the companies and products mentioned in this book by the appropriate use of capitals. However, Packt Publishing cannot guarantee the accuracy of this information.

First published: August 2016

Production reference: 1260816

Published by Packt Publishing Ltd.

Livery Place

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Birmingham B3 2PB, UK.

ISBN 978-1-78588-344-6

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Credits

Author

Doug Bierer

Reviewers

Salvatore Pappalardo

Vincenzo Provenza

Commissioning Editor

Kunal Parikh

Acquisition Editor

Kirk D'costa

Content Development Editor

Merint Thomas Mathew

Technical Editor

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Cover Work

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Foreword

With PHP 7, we get a host of new features and improvements, such as abstract syntax tree, throwable errors, scalar type hints, return type declarations, speed improvements, and so much more.

The question facing PHP developers these days is not Should I use the new features?, but How do I implement these features to build better applications faster?

I remember building applications in PHP 4. It was a simpler time for PHP developers as it could be intermingled with HTML and everything was in one file. Instead of frameworks, we had libraries of functions that got included. Applications were basically just CRUD desktop applications that we figured out how to shovel onto the web.

Application development has changed several times since then. New frameworks, such as AJAX, PHPUnit, composer, and API-First, were introduced.

All of these things, and many others, have influenced how PHP developers build applications. Today, you will be laughed out of a job if you have a paged-based application that mixed HTML and PHP. So, what will you do? How will you build modern PHP applications and APIs? How will you leverage all the new tools that PHP gives you to build faster, better, stronger applications? I am so glad you asked.

My friend Doug Bierer has the answer for you. This isn't YAUT (Yet Another Useless Tome) of information that you will put on a shelf and never use. The book you are holding in your hands is destined to, quickly, be a part of your ducktape library. (Every developer has a ducktape library. It is made up of those books you refer to so often that they are now held together by ducktape.)

Doug takes the time to show you the new features that you need to understand, like so many developer books out there. Where this book is different is that the author takes the time to show you how to solve real-world problems using these new tools. Not only do you learn, but you can immediately solve problems with what you learn.

You don't have to be an expert in PHP to use advanced concepts. However, you do have to learn, understand, and use these advanced concepts if you ever hope to grow as a programmer. This book will help you down your path to becoming a better programmer.

Cal Evans

Nomad PHP

Nerd Herder for the World Wide Herd

About the Author

Doug Bierer has been hooked on computers since his first program, written in Dartmouth BASIC on a DEC PDP-8, in 1971. In his wide-ranging career, this author has been a professional contract programmer since 1978, having written applications in BASIC, PL/I, assembler, FORTH, C, C++, dBase/FoxBase/Clipper, Pascal, Perl, Java, and PHP. He deployed his first website in 1993 while living in San Francisco. He speaks four languages, has traveled extensively, and has lived in the USA, France, the Netherlands, England, Sweden, Scotland, and Thailand. He also spent some years doing Linux system administration and TCP/IP networking. He is also an accomplished musician (he has written over 60 songs) as well as a writer, under the pen name of Douglas Alan.

Doug's own company is unlikelysource.com, which specializes in consulting, PHP programming, website development, and training (primarily for Zend Technologies Ltd and Rogue Wave Software Inc.

His works of fiction published on https://www.lulu.com/ are The End, And Then? and Further Indications. Some of his technical works for O'Reilly Media are Learning PHP and MySQL, Learning PHP Security, Learning MongoDB, and Learning Doctrine.

First and foremost, I would like to dedicate this book to my mother, Betty Bierer, who passed away in May 2016. She encouraged me all my life, and applauded my accomplishments (no matter how bad!). She attended all my music concerts, bought all my CDs, and read all my books (even if she did not understand them). I would also like to thank my long-suffering wife, Siri, who patiently endured the hours it took me to write this book without complaint. (She did, however, make threats if I agreed to take on another one... negotiations are ongoing.) Finally, I would like to thank a number of notables in the PHP community who let me bounce ideas off them or offered inspiration. These include, Matthew Weir O'Phinney, Cal Evans, Daryl Wood, Susie Pollock, Salvatore Pappalardo, Slavey Karadzhov, and Clark Everetts.

About the Reviewers

Salvatore Pappalardo, a tech geek from birth, has been a software engineer since 2002. He loves from scratch development. He's a tech lover, sci-fi reader, movie enthusiast, and a TED talks addict.

Vincenzo Provenza is a web developer with more than 5 years of experience with different technologies and programming languages (mainly PHP and JavaScript). He loves to travel and read.

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Preface

PHP 7 has taken the open source community by storm, breaking records for speed, which is, metaphorically, causing heads to turn. In its most fundamental sense, the core engineering team has effected a major rewrite of the language but has still managed to maintain backward compatibility to a high degree. The impact of these internal changes is outwardly manifested in an almost 200% increase in speed, with significant savings in memory usage. From a development perspective, changes in how commands are parsed along with a uniform variable syntax have introduced new ways to write code which were simply not possible in the earlier versions of PHP. By the same token, any developer who is unaware of how commands are interpreted in PHP 7 can fall into unseen traps, which causes the code to malfunction. Accordingly, the mandate of this book is to illustrate new and exciting ways to write code and to point out any areas of incompatibility with previous versions of PHP. It is also important to note that this book addresses both PHP 7.0 and 7.1.

What this book covers

Chapter 1, Building a Foundation, helps you get started with the initial setup and configuration of your PHP 7 development environment. We will also present a few hard-hitting initial recipes, which show off new features of PHP 7.

Chapter 2, Using PHP 7 High Performance Features, takes a deep dive into the new features of the language. You will be introduced to the concepts of the abstract syntax tree and uniform variable syntax, among others, and you will learn how these can affect day-to-day programming. This is followed by recipes that take advantage of PHP 7 performance improvements, including significant new changes in the foreach() loop handling.

Chapter 3, Working with PHP Functional Programming, emphasizes how PHP has always had the capability of working with programmer-defined libraries of functions rather than classes, and PHP 7 is no exception. In this chapter, we will take a closer look at improvements in the handling of functions, including the ability to provide type hints involving basic data types, such as integer, float, Boolean, and string for both input and output. We will also provide extensive coverage of iterators from the Standard PHP Library, as well as how to write your own iterators by taking advantage of improved handling of generators.

Chapter 4, Working with PHP Object-Oriented Programming, explores the basics of PHP object-oriented programming. Quickly getting beyond the basics, you will learn how to use PHP namespaces and traits. Architectural considerations will be covered, including how to best use interfaces. Finally, an exciting new PHP 7 feature, anonymous classes, will be discussed along with practical examples of its use.

Chapter 5, Interacting with a Database, explores the ability to have your application read from and write to a database, which is a critical part of any modern website. What is widely misunderstood, however, is the proper use of the PHP Data Objects (PDO) extension. This chapter will present thorough coverage of PDO, which in turn will allow your applications to interact with most major databases, including MySQL, Oracle, PostgreSQL, IBM DB2, and Microsoft SQL Server, without having to learn any other set of commands. In addition, we will cover advanced techniques, such as working with Domain Model Entities, performing embedded secondary lookups, and implementing jQuery DataTable lookups using PHP 7.

Chapter 6, Building Scalable Websites, delves into one of the classic problems faced by PHP developers building interactive websites—hardcoding HTML forms and later having to perform maintenance. A neat and efficient object-oriented approach is presented in this chapter, which, with a minimal amount of code, lets you generate entire HTML forms that can easily be changed in the initial configuration. Another equally vexing problem is how to filter and validate data posted from a form. In this chapter, you will learn how to develop an easily configurable filtering and validation factory, which can then be applied to any incoming post data.

Chapter 7, Accessing Web Services, covers something that is becoming more and more important to web development—the ability to publish or consume web services. This chapter covers the two key approaches: SOAP and REST. You will learn how to implement SOAP and REST servers and clients. Further more, the recipes presented use the Adapter design pattern, which allows a considerable degree of customization, meaning that you are not locked into a specific design paradigm.

Chapter 8, Working with Date/Time and International Aspects, helps you cope with the fierce competition owing to the growth of the World Wide Web (WWW), leading to more and more customers looking to expand their business into international markets. This chapter will get you up to speed on all aspects of internationalization, including the use of emoticons, complex characters, and translation. Further more, you will be shown how to acquire and handle regional information, including language settings, number and currency formatting, as well as date and time. Additionally, we will cover recipes that show you how to create internationalized calendars, which can handle recurring events.

Chapter 9, Developing Middleware, deals with the hottest topic in the open source community right now—middleware. As the name implies, middleware is software that can be snapped into place, which adds value to an existing application without having to alter the source code of that application. In this chapter, you will be shown a series of recipes, implemented as PSR-7-compliant middleware (see Appendix, Defining PSR-7 Classes, for more details), which perform authentication, access control, caching, and routing.

Chapter 10, Looking at Advanced Algorithms, helps you understand that, as a developer, given the tremendous number of programmers and companies competing for the same business, it is extremely important that you gain mastery of key advanced algorithms. In this chapter, using PHP 7, you will learn the theory and application of getters and setters, linked lists, bubble sorts, stacks, and binary search. In addition, this chapter examines how to use these techniques to implement a search engine, and how to handle multi-dimensional arrays.

Chapter 11, Implementing Software Design Patterns, works on an important aspect of object-oriented programming, that is, an understanding of key software design patterns. Without this knowledge, when applying for a new position or attempting to attract new customers, you, as a developer, will be at a severe disadvantage. This chapter covers several critically important patterns including Hydration, Strategy, Mapper, Object Relational Mapping, and Pub/Sub.

Chapter 12, Improving Web Security, addresses issues arising from the pervasive nature of the Internet today. We see cyber attacks being launched with greater and greater frequency, often with devastating financial and personal loss. In this chapter, we will present solid practical recipes that, if implemented, will give your websites an exponential boost in terms of safety and security. Topics covered include filtering and validation, session protection, secure form submission, secure password generation, and the use of CAPTCHAs. In addition, a recipe is presented that will show you how to encrypt and decrypt data without using the PHP mcrypt extension, which is deprecated in PHP 7.1 (and will ultimately be removed from the language).

Chapter 13, Best Practices, Testing, and Debugging, covers best practices and debugging of your code to produce well written code that works. In this chapter, you will also learn how to set up and create unit tests, handle unexpected errors and exceptions, and generate test data. Several new PHP 7 features are presented, including how PHP 7 can throw errors. It is important to note that best practices are identified throughout the book, not just in this chapter!

Appendix, Defining PSR-7 Classes, addresses recently accepted PHP Standards Recommendation 7, which defines interfaces used in conjunction with middleware. In this appendix, you will be shown solid implementations of PSR-7 classes that include value objects, such as URI, body, and file upload, as well as request and response objects.

What you need for this book

All you need to successfully implement the recipes presented in this book will be a computer, 100MB of extra disk space, and a text or code editor (not a word processor!). The first chapter will cover how to set up a PHP 7 development environment. Having a web server is optional as PHP 7 includes a development web server. An Internet connection is not required, but it might be useful to download code (such as the set of PSR-7 interfaces), and review PHP 7.x documentation.

Who this book is for

This book is for software architects, technical managers, developers from intermediate to advanced, or just the curious. You will need to have a basic knowledge of PHP programming, especially OOP.

Sections

In this book, you will find several headings that appear frequently (Getting ready, How to do it, How it works, There's more, and See also).

To give clear instructions on how to complete a recipe, we use these sections as follows:

Getting ready

This section tells you what to expect in the recipe, and describes how to set up any software or any preliminary settings required for the recipe.

How to do it...

This section contains the steps required to follow the recipe.

How it works...

This section usually consists of a detailed explanation of what happened in the previous section.

There's more...

This section consists of additional information about the recipe in order to make the reader more knowledgeable about the recipe.

See also

This section provides helpful links to other useful information for the recipe.

Conventions

In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: Finally, take the class LotsProps defined in the third bullet point and place it in a separate file, chap_10_oop_using_getters_and_setters_magic_call.php.

A block of code is set as follows:

protected static function loadFile($file)

{

    if (file_exists($file)) {

        require_once $file;

        return TRUE;

    }

    return FALSE;

}

When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:

$params = [

  'db'  => __DIR__ . '/../data/db/php7cookbook.db.sqlite'

];

$dsn  = sprintf(

'sqlite:' . $params['db']);

Any command-line input or output is written as follows:

cd /path/to/recipes php -S localhost:8080

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: When the Purchases button is clicked, initial purchase info appears.

Note

Warnings or important notes appear in a box like this.

Tip

Tips and tricks appear like this.

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Chapter 1. Building a Foundation

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

PHP 7 installation considerations

Using the built-in PHP web server

Defining a test MySQL database

Installing PHPUnit

Implementing class autoloading

Hoovering a website

Building a deep web scanner

Creating a PHP 5 to PHP 7 code converter

Introduction

This chapter is designed as a quick start that will get you up and running on PHP 7 so that you can start implementing the recipes right away. The underlying assumption for this book is that you already have a good knowledge of PHP and programming. Although this book will not go into detail about the actual installation of PHP, given that PHP 7 is relatively new, we will do our best to point out the quirks and gotchas you might encounter during a PHP 7 installation.

PHP 7 installation considerations

There are three primary means of acquiring PHP 7:

Downloading and installing directly from the source code

Installing pre-compiled binaries

Installing a *AMP package (that is, XAMPP, WAMP, LAMP, MAMP, and so on)

How to do it...

The three methods are listed in order of difficulty. However, the first approach, although tedious, will give you the most finite control over extensions and options.

Installing directly from source

In order to utilize this approach, you will need to have a C compiler available. If you are running Windows, MinGW is a free compiler that has proven popular. It is based on the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) compiler provided by the GNU project. Non-free compilers include the classic Turbo C compiler from Borland, and, of course, the compiler that is preferred by Windows developers is Visual Studio. The latter, however, is designed mainly for C++ development, so when you compile PHP, you will need to specify C mode.

When working on an Apple Mac, the best solution is to install the Apple Developer Tools. You can use the Xcode IDE to compile PHP 7, or run gcc from a terminal window. In a Linux environment, from a terminal window, run gcc.

When compiling from a terminal window or command line, the normal procedure is as follows:

configure

make

make test

make install

For information on configuration options (that is, when running configure), use the help option:

configure --help

Errors you might encounter during the configuration stage are mentioned in the following table:

Installing PHP 7 from pre-compiled binaries

As the title implies, pre-compiled binaries are a set of binary files that somebody else has kindly compiled from PHP 7 source code and has made available.

In the case of Windows, go to http://windows.php.net/. You will find a good set of tips in the left column that pertain to which version to choose, thread safe versus non-read safe, and so forth. You can then click on Downloads and look for the ZIP file that applies to your environment. Once the ZIP file has been downloaded, extract the files into the folder of your choice, add php.exe to your path, and configure PHP 7 using the php.ini file.

To install the pre-compiled binaries on a Mac OS X system, it is best to involve a package management system. The ones recommended for PHP include the following:

MacPorts

Liip

Fink

Homebrew

In the case of Linux, the packaging system used depends on which Linux distribution you are using. The following table, organized by Linux distribution, summarizes where to look for the PHP 7 package.

Installing a *AMP package

AMP refers to Apache, MySQL, and PHP (also Perl and Python). The * refers to Linux, Windows, Mac, and so on (that is, LAMP, WAMP, and MAMP). This approach is often the easiest, but gives you less control over the initial PHP installation. On the other hand, you can always modify the php.ini file and install additional extensions to customize your installation as needed. The following table summarizes a number of popular *AMP packages:

In the preceding table, we've enlisted the *AMP packages where * is replaced by W for Windows, M for Mac OS X, and L for Linux.

There's more...

When you install a pre-compiled binary from a package, only core extensions are installed. Non-core PHP extensions must be installed separately.

It's worth noting that PHP 7 installation on cloud computing platforms will often follow the installation procedure outlined for pre-compiled binaries. Find out if your cloud environment uses Linux, Mac, or Windows virtual machines, and then follow the appropriate procedure as mentioned in this recipe.

It's possible that PHP 7 hasn't yet reached your favorite repository for pre-compiled binaries. You can always install from source, or consider installing one of the *AMP packages (see the next section). An alternative for Linux-based systems is to use the Personal Package Archive (PPA) approach. Because PPAs have not undergone a rigorous screening process, however, security could be a concern. A good discussion on security considerations for PPAs is found at http://askubuntu.com/questions/35629/are-ppas-safe-to-add-to-my-system-and-what-are-some-red-flags-to-watch-out-fo.

See also

General installation considerations, as well as instructions for each of the three major OS platforms (Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux), can be found at http://php.net/manual/en/install.general.php.

The website for MinGW is http://www.mingw.org/.

Instructions on how to compile a C program using Visual Studio can be found at https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb384838.

Another possible way to test PHP 7 is by using a virtual machine. Here are a couple of tools with their links, which might prove useful:

Vagrant: https://github.com/rlerdorf/php7dev (php7dev is a Debian 8 Vagrant image that is preconfigured for testing PHP apps and developing extensions across many versions of PHP)

Docker: https://hub.docker.com/r/coderstephen/php7/ (it contains a PHP7 Docker container)

Using the built-in PHP web server

Aside from unit testing and running PHP directly from the command line, the obvious way to test your applications is to use a web server. For long-term projects, it would be beneficial to develop a virtual host definition for a web server that most closely mirrors the one used by your customer. Creating such definitions for the various web servers (that is, Apache, NGINX, and so on) is beyond the scope of this book. Another quick and easy-to-use alternative (which we have room to discuss here) is to use the built-in PHP 7 web server.

How to do it...

To activate the PHP web server, first change to the directory that will serve as the base for your code.

You then need to supply the hostname or IP address and, optionally, a port. Here is an example you can use to run the recipes supplied with this book:

cd /path/to/recipes

php -S localhost:8080

You will see output on your screen that looks something like this:

As the built-in web server continues to service requests, you will also see access information, HTTP status codes, and request information.

If you need to set the web server document root to a directory other than the current one, you can use the -t flag. The flag must then be followed by a valid directory path. The built-in web server will treat this directory as if it were the web document root, which is useful for security reasons. For security reasons, some frameworks, such as Zend Framework, require that the web document root is different from