Imagine yourself working on a PHP code base distributed between two or more Git repositories, for example a library and an application part. Ideally, the two repositories should be independent, but sometimes that lofty goal can’t be achieved. And having two repositories open in your editor and doing git commit, git push, composer update all the time becomes tedious. This article shows how to work faster with two dependent PHP code bases.
Suppose you don’t want to install Node.js and npm on your local machine and already run your application in a Docker container. How do you install your dependencies from package.json? For deployment, the most common way is to create your own Docker image, where npm install is part of the Dockerfile. But what do you do on your development machine, where you don’t want to build a new image all the time and use the vanilla node image ?
I attended the Wikimedia Hackathon 2017 in Vienna. This is a summary and review of what I learned there while working on the prototype of the “Advanced Search Form” extension for MediaWiki. The first hurdle for working on the feature was setting up a MediaWiki environment. The recommended way is the Vagrant environment, but I’ve had bad experiences with that in the past and did not want do download tons of stuff over the conference WiFi.
My last PHP update broke Spress, the static site generator I use for this blog. I decided to move my blog generation to a more stable and portable environment - a Docker container. I’ve documented what I did and what I learned with this blog post. This is my first attempt to do something with Docker, please excuse any bad practices. You can find the finished Dockerfile at https://github.com/gbirke/spress-docker. Writing the Dockerfile FROMphp:alpineAs the base image I’m using the alpine variant of the official PHP Docker image to keep the storage space for the image as small as possible.