December 3, 2024 — One of the things that I do every year is to update my eBook called PHP 8 in a Nutshell. It’s a book that I’ve been writing for the past few years for every new release related to PHP 8 and its minor releases.

October 3, 2024 — If you’re coming from the JavaScript world or even if you’ve worked with modern JavaScript briefly, you might know the importance of npm and its package ecosystem.

June 6, 2024 — Povilas Korop recently shared an interesting (yet important) tip regarding sane use of Composer if you’re used to working with Composer on your server.

May 20, 2024 — PHP 8.4 is still under development and has a bunch of new features and improvements under its belt so far. New features keep on appearing and one of them recently surfaced is the addition of new array methods.

May 10, 2024 — Scraping data on the web is a tiresome process when you do things manually. For instance, if you happen to do it using PHP, you need to do the following steps.

April 17, 2024 — Accessing or setting the value of a class property is comman task in object oriented programming. There are a few ways to do this in PHP. Let’s discuss them first.

January 23, 2024 — Sometimes, you may wish to return multi-line JavaScript code from PHP along with some variables. For instance, a JavaScript object.

January 8, 2024 — PHP 8.3 has already been released a few months back and it’s time to look at what’s coming in PHP 8.4.

December 29, 2023 — With the advent of frameworks like Laravel, Symfony, CakePHP, etc., PHP has become a very powerful language for building web applications. These frameworks have greatly improved the developer experience in the PHP ecosystem.

December 20, 2023 — Generative AI is all the rage these days. Many big players (OpenAI, Meta, Microsoft) have already launched their own AI models that can generate images, text, and even code. So, it’s only natural that Google has also joined the bandwagon and launched its own AI model called Gemini recently.

December 17, 2023 — There are times when you want to convert HTML to PDF. For instance, if you’re building a web application that allows users to generate PDFs of their invoices, you might want to convert the HTML of the invoice to PDF. Or if you’re building a blog, you might want to convert your blog posts to PDFs.

November 27, 2023 — If you’re working with PHP, you might have come across a situation where you need to check the type of the string. For instance, you might want to check if the string is a number, alphabetic, alphanumeric, or a binary string.

November 18, 2023 — Sometimes you may want to skip a PHPUnit test conditionally. For instance, you may want to skip a test if the PHP version is less than 7.4 or if a certain extension is not installed on the system.

October 27, 2023 — Wouldn’t it be nice if you could run PHP in the browser and that too without installing anything on your machine? Well, a technology called WebAssembly lets you do just that.

October 4, 2023 — I was reading this Reddit thread the other day where people were discussing the fate of frameworks other than Laravel and Symfony.

September 21, 2023 — With the evolution of PHP to its modern version, the one operator that has been used thoroughly across various places is the ellipsis operator (...).

September 11, 2023 — Uploading images to your website is a common task. But, it’s also important to make sure that the images are optimized for the web. This includes resizing, cropping, compressing the images, and so on.

September 9, 2023 — Git hooks are scripts that run automatically every time a particular event occurs in a Git repository. They let you customize Git’s internal behavior and trigger customizable actions at key points in the development life cycle.

September 6, 2023 — Null is a special data type in PHP that represents a variable with no value. A variable is considered to be null if:

September 5, 2023 — The #[\Override] attribute is a new attribute that will be introduced in PHP 8.3. It will be used to mark a method as overriding a parent method.

August 19, 2023 — Extending my previous article on the introduction to Fibers, in this article, we’re going to see a practical example of using Fibers in PHP which might help you understand the concept better.

June 28, 2023 — The great thing about statically typed languages, like Java, C#, Go, Swift, etc. is that they can be analysed by the compiler itself. This means, if you’re using a statically typed language, you can catch a lot of errors at compile-time itself.

March 20, 2023 — Anonymous classes in PHP let you create a class on the fly without having to define a new class. They are especially useful when you want to create a class that is only used once.

March 17, 2023 — So, Caleb Porzio recently shared a little memoize function in PHP. What the function does is pretty straightforward.

January 26, 2023 — If you’re a seasoned PHP developer, you must have come across the need to merge two or more arrays in PHP. And the bona fide way to do this is by using the array_merge() function.

January 10, 2023 — In this post, I’ll show you how to upgrade your PHP code to use PHP 8.2 features using Rector. I have written articles about how to upgrade to PHP 8 and PHP 8.1 previously.

December 20, 2022 — There are times when you may want to extract every array keys to variables of the same name. For example, you have an array like so.

December 18, 2022 — PHP 8.3 is the next major release of the PHP programming language. It is scheduled to be released sometime in 2023.

December 4, 2022 — PHP 7 introduced a lot of new features to the language. One of them is the ability to declare the type of a function argument and the type of value that a function returns. This is called type declaration.

November 27, 2022 — The release of PHP’s latest version, PHP 8.2, is just around the corner. On December 8, 2022 to be precise.

November 18, 2022 — Constants are a great way to define values that are not going to change. They are also a great way to define values that are going to be used in multiple places.

October 18, 2022 — The latest and greatest version of PHP, PHP 8.2 is going to be released soon and it’s going to bring a lot of new features and improvements. In this post, I’ll talk about one of the new features in PHP 8.2 which is the true type.

October 9, 2022 — Today, if we want to validate a JSON string in PHP, we can use the json_decode() function. Here’s how it works.

September 10, 2022 — Converting images from one format to another programmatically is sort of a common task. For example, you may want to convert all your PNG images to WebP format to save bandwidth and improve the performance of your application.

August 31, 2022 — PHP is one of those languages that are easy to learn and easy to use. But sometimes it surprises you with weird quirks that you would only imagine in your dreams.

August 21, 2022 — If you have worked with CSS, you may have come across this function called clamp() that clamps a value between an upper and lower bound.

August 11, 2022 — Oftentimes, you may find it useful to check whether which among all the packages requires/depends upon a certain PHP version.

July 25, 2022 — Sometimes, when working on a feature that is tightly coupled with a certain version of the language, it’s important to check which version you’re running on your server.

May 16, 2022 — Array unpacking is a sleek way of assigning the value of array elements to variables in one shot like so.

April 29, 2022 — When readonly properties were introduced in PHP 8.1, it has provided a legitimate way of making class properties truly “readonly”.

April 24, 2022 — The latest version of PHP, PHP 8.1, has been around for quite some time and it comes packed with some great new features and enhancements.

April 15, 2022 — When you’re working with dates in Laravel, chances are high that you might have done it with this library called Carbon.

March 16, 2022 — Recently, I came across a very handy tip by Nuno Maduro where you can refactor some of the conditionals in your code to callables to make your code more elegant and readable.

February 28, 2022 — Converting some values to boolean is a common task while building applications. Now, these values can be anything.

February 16, 2022 — When you’re building a user-facing application, one of the most common scenarios is to let the user decide their respective time zone.

February 10, 2022 — Numbers are tricky. Numbers are tricky because they have been used as a metric for a lot of things. Currency, scale, weather, science to name a few. And since numbers are associated with several different things, it’s important to represent them in a way humans can understand.

November 28, 2021 — When working with types in any language there is a couple of scenarios that can occur.

November 23, 2021 — The release of PHP’s latest version 8.1 is around the corner and there’s never a better time to upgrade your codebase to PHP’s latest and greated version yet!

October 14, 2021 — The newest release of PHP, v8.1, is around the corner and it will introduce a whole lot of new features, from the read only properties to the native enums. It’s pretty exciting!

September 13, 2021 — Have you ever stumbled upon a situation in which you need an instance of a class to create its object but with one condition and that is there is no constructor declared for that class?

September 11, 2021 — With the introduction of PHP 8, the language now allows us to declare the class properties right into the constructor parameters. This is called constructor property promotion.

September 9, 2021 — There are a lot of different ways in PHP using which you can validate if the given value is “blank” or not. The method to validate depends upon the type of value that we’re targetting.

July 8, 2021 — Working with arrays, there might come a time when you want to check if the array in question is a list or not. So, how does an array qualifies as a “list”?

July 7, 2021 — PHP, as a language, is ever-changing and ever-evolving. It’s not a language it was 10 years ago. This is all because the PHP’s core team which has been constantly improving minor things that might not look significant at first glance but when fixed/implemented, can dramatically improve the overall developer experience.

June 18, 2021 — When you’re working with numbers in your code, they sometimes become hard to comprehend. For instance, in cases where numbers are too large in terms of length. Take the following for example.

May 12, 2021 — When working with functions, there might come the scenario where you’re unsure as to how many arguments a function would have. Basically, a function can have an unlimited number of arguments that you don’t define in the function signature.

April 17, 2021 — Little-known features are the best when you find them unknowingly. One such feature I came across recently is of the PHP’s popular array_map function.

March 17, 2021 — Oftentimes you would want to retrieve the user’s timezone to perform a certain task. And how would you retrieve it? One way to do it in PHP is by retrieving the timezone set on the user’s system.

March 9, 2021 — There has been a scarcity of discussion in PHP land when it comes to asynchronous PHP. Maybe, PHP developers don’t seem to be interested in the very idea of it.

February 10, 2021 — PHP’s documentation is a goldmine of little but helpful things which is when explored can help improve your code. But this kind of thing tends to get overlooked easily.

February 7, 2021 — Enums or enumerations or enumerator types are those little data structures that can be used to define a set of named values. More like constants. For instance, a contract status which can be “permanent”, “temp”, or “apprentice”. Or a order status that can be “ordered”, “dispatched”, “shipped” etc.

January 28, 2021 — The spread operator in PHP is getting more awesome in PHP 8.1! So, to give you a primer, with the release of PHP 7.4, it got possible to merge multiple arrays by unpacking arrays into another array using the spread operator.

January 12, 2021 — Although the official PHP website’s documentation has a dedicated section on “Overloading”, it’s not truly called overloading by any means.

January 3, 2021 — Before PHP 8, whenever you wanted to get the type of a variable, you could use the native gettype function. Check the examples below.

December 23, 2020 — Up until now, when you want to throw exceptions from your code, you would use the throw keyword to throw the exception which can be caught by the catch block like so.

December 21, 2020 — There might be some situations where you would want to crawl a third-party website and perform some actions right from your PHP codebase. For instance, submitting forms, logging into your account, clicking links, etc. to add some degree of automation in your workflow.

December 5, 2020 — If you’re working with PHP for a while, there might be a good chance that you’d be in need to fetch the class of an object. This could be mostly for debugging purposes.

November 23, 2020 — As the official release date (26th November 2020) of PHP’s latest and greatest version PHP 8 is approaching, let’s take a look at every new feature and improvement that the PHP team has managed to fit in this version.

November 3, 2020 — If you’re working with the latest frameworks, it’s not very difficult to set up environment variables for your app.

November 1, 2020 — The newest version of PHP, the PHP 8.0, is coming later this year (November 26, 2020) and it will come packed with many new features such as constructor property promotion, match expressions, nullsafe operator, attributes and a lot others.

October 30, 2020 — Of many great new features that PHP 8 has introduced, one of the most confusing that I found were called “Attributes”, until today. Attributes in PHP 8 got revised many times before gets settled to the current implementation that we will see in a bit.

October 26, 2020 — I’ve said it earlier and I’m saying it today as well that Composer is the backbone of modern development in the PHP landscape. It has been so much easier to pull in open-source packages into your projects which weren’t possible in the pre-Composer era.

October 16, 2020 — If you’ve ever worked on enterprise-level web applications, there’s a good chance that you would have in need to convert documents from one format to another such as converting an HTML document to PDF.

September 28, 2020 — PHP 8 is around the corner and it is coming packed with a lot of new features. But there’s something exciting cooking in PHP 8.1 already.

September 22, 2020 — The standard way of including files in modern PHP development is using namespaces and autoloading of classes using Composer.

September 17, 2020 — In modern web applications, one of the pain points everyone faces at some point is spam submissions to forms by automated bots.

August 12, 2020 — Recently, I’ve been working on a Laravel app and one of my friends wanted to see it in action who’s sitting seven ocean apart. But, I didn’t have an actual server to host it and to make it accessible for my friend. And so, I was looking for a tool/API which can expose my local website instance to the internet.

August 11, 2020 — In PHP, the visibility of a property, a method, or a constant can be defined by prefixing the declaration using keywords public, protected or private. Here is how these modifiers work.

July 23, 2020 — If you’re familiar with JavaScript, you might have worked with or at least heard about Promises at some point of time.

July 10, 2020 — Update: Named parameters have been accepted to be included in PHP 8. A 2/3 majority in voting from members was required and it got the required votes! Here’s the RFC that got accepted.

July 3, 2020 — The switch statement in PHP is great when you want check condition on the same expression without incorporating many if statements altogether.

June 22, 2020 — Up until now, or precisely before PHP 8, whenever you were unsure about which type to use for the propperty or return type, you’d leave it without assigning any type. And if you’re using an IDE such as PhpStorm, the docBlock would mark those properties as mixed type like so.

June 16, 2020 — Refactoring is important in programming things. It is a process of restructuring existing computer code—changing the factoring—without changing its external behavior. It makes code more readable, structured and easy to process.

June 13, 2020 — Who would’ve thought that PHP would have to wait till its version 8 or rather 25 years after its inception, to get a truly native and understandable function to check if a string is contained in another string?!

June 10, 2020 — The usual way of handling the exception is by requiring the catch block to catch the exception (thrown from the try block) to a variable like so.

June 9, 2020 — Wouldn’t it be nice if you don’t have to declare the class property over and over again just to use it across the class? Currently, you’d do it by first declaring it…

June 4, 2020 — Have you ever wanted a feature where you would only want to call a method or fetch a property on the result of an expression if it is not null? So, for instance, check the following code.

June 1, 2020 — With PHP 5, the core team had introduced type declarations (also known as type-hinting) that allow functions to require that parameters are of a certain type at call time. If the given value is of the incorrect type, then an error is generated: in PHP 5, this will be a recoverable fatal error, while PHP 7 will throw a TypeError exception.

May 12, 2020 — If you’ve ever worked with JavaScript, you might be well aware of this feature. So basically, from PHP 7.4, you would be able to unpack arrays into another array using spread operator [...].

May 8, 2020 — If you’ve worked with modern frameworks such as Laravel, you might have seen this keyword ::class be used extensively throughout the application.

May 4, 2020 — When PHP 7.0 released, it has added many nice things in PHP’s toolbelt of utilities. One of the things among this was Null coalescing assignment operator (??).

May 4, 2020 — If you look at PHP’s core helper functions, they aren’t very intuitive to use and are pretty inconsistent at times. For instance, the array_map function is used to apply the callback to the elements of the given arrays. Here’s how its definition looks like.

April 17, 2020 — I recently stumbled upon this ghost feature of PHP using which you can actually use streams in order to post data using a HTTP POST request.

April 15, 2020 — Sometimes all you need is to define and call function at the same time and only once throughout the scope. Such functions are called as Immediately Invoke Function Expression (IIFE) also known as Self-Executing Anonymous Function.

April 1, 2020 — Exceptions are really useful when you want to handle some situations which can not be handled gracefully otherwise. So, using exceptions, you can handle certain sceanrios by showing a nice error message. Take the following example for instance.

March 30, 2020 — When PHP 7.4 released, it came with a whole lot of features/improvements that makes the language more interesting to work with. The one such feature that I want to talk about is arrow functions. For a primer, arrow functions are not new. In fact, If you’ve been working with the latest JavaScript (EcmaScript 6), you might’ve worked with arrow functions already.

March 27, 2020 — Have you ever felt the class properties that you’re using in the constructor are essentially repeated multiple times? i.e At the declaration, in the constructor parameters and while doing assignment in the constructor. For instance, take the following example.

March 3, 2020 — Sometimes, it’s handy if we have an ability to create property and method names from another properties just like what we have in JavaScript. In another words, a property or method name which can be set and used dynamically. For instance, a normal property can be set with a statement in PHP like so.

March 2, 2020 — Constructors are a really important part of the class-based object oriented programming. Through constuctors, a newly created objects initialize properties automatically before it is usable. In PHP, a constructor is a method named __construct(), which the keyword new automatically calls after creating the object. Constructors can also accept arguments, in which case, when the new statement is written, you also need to send the constructor arguments for the parameters.

February 20, 2020 — PHP has introduced an operator called “spaceship opearator” (<=>) with the release of PHP7. What this spaceship operator do is compare two expressions i.e. its two operands, let’s say $a and $b, and returns -1, 0 or 1 when $a is respectively less than, equal to, or greater than $b.

February 18, 2020 — The usual and might be the most used way of cleaning the object is to use the good old __destruct() magic method in PHP. The magic method proves to be good in most of the cases. But there might be some scenario where even the __destruct() method will fail. For instance, a scenario where your PHP script exceeds the maximum execution time, and terminates thusly. And a fatal error would occur called Maximum execution time of 20 seconds exceeded in - on line XX.

February 10, 2020 — Traits in PHP is a way of re-using the code. Basically, Traits are assistive copy-paste mechanism provided by the language itself. Using Traits, developers can reduce the limitations of single inheritence based languages such as PHP. I have written a dedicated article about it if you want to check it out.

January 31, 2020 — Exception handling is an essential part of the software development workflow. It is used to handle the runtime errors so that the normal flow of the application can be maintained.

January 26, 2020 — There’s this little trick in PHP that I got to know about today. The trick basically is, you can loop through all the class properties having the “public” visibility just by iterating over the class object using loop construct such as foreach.

January 24, 2020 — Working on an application which received user signups and let’s suppose it’s built on top of PHP, you want to validate that the email the user enters is valid. Sure, you’ll check that the email entered is a “syntactically” valid one by using one of these methods.

January 15, 2020 — Sometimes, it’s convenient when you could get to access class objects as arrays. For instance, the time when one of the class properties is of type array and you want to manipulate it just like you’d do with an array without exposing it during object creation. I’ve included a real world example of where this could be useful, at the end of the article. So, read on!

December 18, 2019 — Working with PHP, it would be pretty obvious you’d be worried about the performance of your application. And because of this anxiety, you start to optimize trivial things such as replacing double quotes(“) to single quotes(‘), use echo instead of print_r, or using static methods in order to gain those little performance gains during the initial few days of your application development itself. Optimizing these thigs is good and all.

December 16, 2019 — In this short article, I’m going to explain what method chaining is and how it can prove to be useful as an object oriented design pattern.

December 7, 2019 — PHP 7.4 is finally released a few days ago. It’s a fourth feature update to the PHP 7 series and it comes with a very interesting set of features which I’m going to talk about in this article. Some of are very long overdue such as unpacking arrays, typed properties and so forth. However, these all comes with some sort of caveats. Let’s talk about all of the new features in details.

December 5, 2019 — Jetbrain’s PhpStorm is my goto IDE when it comes to the PHP developement. Be it Laravel, Symphony or Magento. It’s like a gold standard. The kind of intelligent features it offers is unmatchable and almost irrplaceable by any IDE of this level.

November 26, 2019 — In this article, I'll talk about Dependency Injection and Dependency Injection Container and why one should use DI Containers.

November 20, 2019 — In this article, I've discussed regarding Nullable types that are introduced in PHP 7.1 and its usefulness.

November 12, 2019 — Today, I got to know about a very clean looking and intuitive way of unsetting/deleting a cookie from client's browser using PHP. No "setting the expiry time in past" bullshit.

October 30, 2019 — In this article, I’m going to discuss about the union types which are going to come in future versions of PHP through this RFC. To understand why and how are union types important in PHP, let’s first understand what are union types.

September 29, 2019 — PHP is funny sometimes. There are many things in PHP which behaves differently instead of the way you think might work. I recently stumbled upon one such thing while working on one of my projects.

September 2, 2019 — Passwords are an integral part of today’s authentication based web applications. In fact, Passwords have been used since ancient times. Sentries would challenge those wishing to enter an area to supply a password or watchword, and would only allow a person or group to pass if they knew the password. In modern web application passwords are used in combination with usernames to authenticate users. So, basically, we’d need to fields in order to store username and password for each user both of which are supplied by user at the time of signing up to the web application.

August 22, 2019 — In object-oriented programming, there are two ways using which classes can achieve polymorphic behavior: “Inheritance” & “Composition”.

August 13, 2019 — Some of the PHP’s core functions are designed in such a way that they do not handle exceptions in a better way. Instead, they just return false if there’s any error. This makes developers to handle those error themselves. Take the example below.

August 7, 2019 — The inheritence tree in PHP quickly gets dirty if you’re using mix of static and non-static methods into your classes and the inheritence is deeply nested.

July 31, 2019 — Have you ever stuck in a situation where the code that you’ve wrote uses foreach to iterate over a set of data into an array and which ultimately caused you to exceed a memory? Well, I’ve been to. Many times.

July 25, 2019 — Recently, I stumbled upon a scenario where I had to extend a class. I'm going to explain what issue I had faced and what's the role of using the grandparent instance of the class to overcome that issue in this article.

June 10, 2019 — In PHP, Invokables refer to any class that may be instantiated without any constructor arguments. In other words, one should be able to create an instance solely be calling new $className(). To implement an invokable class, one needs to use __invoke() magic method of PHP. Before we understand how invokable exactly works, let’s take a look why invokable classes even exists in PHP.

May 2, 2019 — With the introduction of scalar type declaration and return type declaration in PHP 7.0, the language’s type system got improved at some extent. Although it’s great to have some layer of strictness, it’s still missing the support to declare typed properties. But from PHP 7.4, it seems, it’s going to change because according to this accepted RFC, PHP 7.4 will be getting support for first-class property type declarations.

March 29, 2019 — A sometime ago I tried my hands on implementing some of the PHP’s native functions in native JavaScript. The result is quite interesting list of JavaScript functions you’ve never asked about.

February 22, 2019 — Today, while working with a project which happens to be bulit on top of Magento 2, I needed to find a way to get the list all the admin users as an array.

February 9, 2019 — While developing applications(not necessarily with Laravel), you come across the situation where you need to implement certain functionality. In such cases you shouldn’t want to reinvent the wheel if the functionality is been implemented by someone as a package, accepted well by the community and is ready to be consumed. It’s a no-brainer. I use to follow the same approach and today in this article, I’m going to list out some of my favorite Laravel packages which have made my experience with development in Laravel delicious.

January 17, 2019 — PHP has evolved greatly as a language over the years. From a simple functional scripting language which initially started by Rasmus Lerdorf as his hobby project to supporting object oriented programming features PHP has come a long way.

January 9, 2019 — When working on a project, there comes a time when you need to automate certain tasks. In such cases, it is better to use a CLI tool which can be run from the command prompt because using a web APIs for certain tasks is cumbersome.

December 21, 2018 — There comes times when you wouldn’t want your end users staring at white screens or that intimidating loaders for a long time. For instance when user registers to your site, you must have configured your website to send a welcome email or a confirmation email upon registering. So, that operation should be snappy and for that purpose you’d actually want to reduce the amount of time your app takes while sending the email to the user. Laravel Queues comes to the recue for achieving such kind of time consuming tasks.

December 8, 2018 — PHP development team has just released PHP 7.3 with general availability. This release brings general improvements along with some new features. Even though this is a stable release, the team hasn’t provided concrete migration guide if you want to migrate from the older PHP versions. Maybe they will release those on a later date.

October 30, 2018 — Folks who are familiar with the JavaScript’s ES6 may very well aware of the destructuring feature which allows us to extract data from arrays, objects, maps and sets. For instance, Using ES6 way, we can assign the top level variables of the objects to local variables using destructuring like below:

September 5, 2018 — Composer is the goto method of adding dependencies in modern PHP application. You search for a library for a concerned functionality and you’ll probably find the one in the large database of the Pacakgist. But there comes a time where you’d want to use a library which is private and should be only available to you. Well, the good news is, you can achieve this using this trick.

August 23, 2017 — Accessors and mutators allow you to format Eloquent attribute values when you retrieve or set them on model instances. I’ll explain how you can you use them into your app.

August 17, 2017 — Today, while working with one of my projects(which is built on top Laravel) I bumped into the situation where I needed to get associated model’s data for one of the models. So here, I had two approaches in Laravel to accomplish this which are basically called Eager Loading: