Tag: php

How to display the git version on your site

Here is a quick guide on how to automatically update the build version of your site directly from git.
This approach leverages the “hook” functionality to get the build hash after a commit.

Versioning files is a must for any developer and git version control system is one of the de facto choices for that job. It’s my personal favorite as well. You can learn more about git here.

Go into your projects .git folder, then hooks. You should see a list of sample hooks already there.
Create a new one called “post-commit” (note there is no file extension).

Add the following content:

#!/bin/sh
#
# Get the Git Revision and write make available to the application
# This will write the short commit hash to the version-commit.php file.
#
version=$(git rev-parse --short HEAD)
echo "" > version-commit.php

Once you “include” the version-commit.php file the VERSION_COMMIT constant will now be available to display anywhere in your site. For example:

require_once(version-commit.php);
$versionMajor = '1.0';
$version = $versionMajor.'.'.VERSION_COMMIT;
echo $version;

Now you are probably thinking that this would cause the project to show new changes because of version-commit.php file change.

For that we need to update “.gitignore” file in the project root folder:

# Don't version the version file
version-commit.php

One thing to note is that the version-commit.php file will not exist for a cloned (checked out) repository until a new change is committed, since that file is not committed with the code to avoid an endless loop of change/commit cycle.

I am yet to find a clean and simple way around that but this problem is a small price to pay for some useful automation.

Retrofitting PHP code to use namespaces

Using namespaces in PHP can be bit more work than it appears and in some cases will require some mass search/replace to be performed.   There is one particular scenario where that process becomes unnecessarily tedious and i will show you how to make it less so.

Quick Intro to Namespaces

Without namespaces every one of your classes must use a unique name.  Using namespaces is a no-brainer for someone from a Java background where they are called packages and you pretty much can’t code without them.  But in php world you can write entire applications without ever touching the subject. Namespaces provide a way to group Classes into logical groups or modules.

Here are two PersonalBio classes without using namespaces. Since the class names have to be unique the naming gets messy.

Same class definitions using namespaces would look like this

Using namespaces allows the class names to be more generic and short. It also prevents conflicts with other libraries and built in classes.
A good example of this would be a class called Directory. Since Directory is a built-in php class you cannot have your own without specifying a namespace:

This will not work due to a conflict with an existing php class:

Same class is ok within a namespace:

The Retrofit Process
The easiest way to retrofit the existing code is to use en editor such as Notepad++ and perform regular expression replacements.
For instance, when referencing classes that don't have a namespace from a class with a namespace you will be faced with a problem of having to prefix all those references with a backslash.  There is currently no other easy reliable way to do this:

Use the following search and replace patterns:
Search:
(\bFirstClassWithoutNamespace\b|\bSecondClassWithoutNamespace\b)
Replace With:
\\$1
The "\b" determines the word boundary and the "|" allows you to replace multiple classes at a time.  This comes in very handy when there are dozens.
This is the result:



<?php 
namespace MyApp;
class Test {
$instance1 = new \FirstClassWithoutNamespace();
$instance2 = new \SecondClassWithoutNamespace();
}
You can do similar replacements for classes using namespaces:


Search:
(\bFirstClass\b|\bSecondClass\b)
Replace With:
\\SomeOtherNamespace\\$1
And the result: