• Do Not Use Exception Class Directly

  Nov 18, 2024 • Share

  It is a bad practice to use the Exception class directly in PHP. That means 2 points:

  • Do not throw Exception directly

  • Do not catch Exception directly

  Subclassing Exception is not a direct use in this context.

  Do not throw Exception

  There are a lot of specific Exception descendants in PHP. See documentation for the full list. It's not necessary to use and remember all of them, many have unclear use cases, but at very least you should separate your exceptions into RuntimeException and LogicException. As the doc says, LogicException means code misuse. Throw LogicException in cases when the upstream must be fixed because it uses your code incorrectly. Throw RuntimeException in cases that are not predictable by the upstream, like service failures or invalid user input.

  In case you use exceptions for flow control, you need your own custom exceptions anyway. In this case you can extend the base Exception, extending Exception directly is not a sin, especially if your exceptions are not error conditions.

  Do not catch Exception

  Assuming you follow the previous point, there is no need to catch Exception's.

  1. If you don't guard against a specific situation, catch all RuntimeException's. LogicException's should go to your logger.

  2. In a global error handler that writes your logs, you need to catch Errors too, so you need to go even further and catch Throwable.

  3. If you use exceptions for flow control (please don't haha) you already catching your own exceptions, and if you follow the previous point, they are already separated from actual error conditions and won't be caught mistakenly by a wrong level.

  Notable exceptions to the rule:

  • You use PHP below 7.0 and don't have Throwable. Well, it's 2024 already so this is another call for you to upgrade. Otherwise assume point 2 allows you to catch a base Exception.

  • You use a library that throws plain Exception instances. Well, bad for you, but maybe it's a good idea to report this thing as a problem.

  Category: PHP • Tags: good practices, opinion

• De-hybridize Torrent

  Nov 10, 2023 • Share

  A feature that may be desired for some anti-V2 trackers. While I would like to see the torrent community going the other way around, some trackers choose not to allow version 2 torrents and sometimes even hybrids.

  The torrent file library now allows cleaning unnecessary or undesired metadata versions from a torrent file.

  The intended use and the primary future scope is actually the other way around: the ability to remove version 1 metadata to make use of easy mutability of version 2 torrents to add or remove files in existing torrent structures.

  Category: PHP • Tags: libraries, torrent, torrent file

• PHP Requirements on Packagist

  Oct 29, 2023 • Share

  A followup for the previous post: the minimum required PHP versions in packages on the Packagist.

  Read more…

  Category: PHP • Tags: libraries, packagist

• How to Choose a Minimum PHP Requirement

  Oct 29, 2023 • Share

  As a library developer I often face a problem what should be a minimum PHP requirement. Here are some of my principles.

  Read more…

  Category: PHP • Tags: libraries, packagist

• UUID Library (and ULID to UUID migration)

  Jul 14, 2023 • Share

  I created a UUID and ULID library with Doctrine support. Well, who didn't :D

  The main scenario for myself was a possible migration for a project from ULIDs to UUIDs since UUIDs got a little bit of support in MySQL 8.

  Example code:

  <?php
  
  use Arokettu\Uuid\UuidParser;
  
  // Just a random ULID
  $ulid = UuidParser::fromBase32('01H44RDYXJPFCF895N3BBXCZRC');
  var_dump($ulid->isUuidV7Compatible()); // false
  // UnexpectedValueException: This ULID cannot be converted to UUID v7 losslessly
  // $uuid = $ulid->toUuidV7();
  $uuid = $ulid->toUuidV7(lossy: true);
  // note digit 13 becoming '7' and digit 17 moving into [89ab] range
  var_dump($uuid->toString());    // 01890986-fbb2-73d8-b424-b51ad7d67f0c
  var_dump($ulid->toRfc4122());   // 01890986-fbb2-b3d8-f424-b51ad7d67f0c
  var_dump($uuid->toBase32());    // 01H44RDYXJEFCB895N3BBXCZRC
  var_dump($ulid->toString());    // 01H44RDYXJPFCF895N3BBXCZRC
  

  Category: PHP • Tags: ulid, uuid

• March Packages on Packagist

  Mar 31, 2023 • Share

  I'm continuing to publish useless nih junk on the Packagist:

  • arokettu/arithmetic-parser: A very configurable arithmetic parser and calculator. You can define your own set of functions and operators. You can even disable multiplication if you want to!

  • arokettu/clock: A set of PSR-20 clock implementations. Everyone has these implemented so why not me? :D

  • arokettu/system-clock: All these PSR-20 clock packages usually contain a ton of clocks for testing purposes but most of the production code needs only new DateTimeImmutable('now') so I extracted SystemClock to a separate package that has only SystemClock.php and composer.json for the smallest possible package (if you don't count uglifying it js-like)

  • arokettu/kilo-mega: This one was actually released on February but I've forgot to write about it. It's a simple formatter for metric prefixes.

    <?php
    echo format_metric(1000, suffix: 'W'); // 1.0 kW
    echo format_bytes(1234); // 1.2 KiB
    

  Also a new significant release:

  • arokettu/torrent-file: Torrent file class got file listing classes for v1 and v2 metadata in 5.0 release.

  Category: PHP • Tags: bittorrent, clock, libraries, math, packagist, psr

• Moving packages to Arokettu

  Jan 15, 2023 • Share

  Just finished moving my old composer packages from sandfoxme/* to arokettu/*.

  Full list:

  • composer-viz (old, new): the only one I moved a year ago

  • bencode (old, new)

  • monsterid (old, new)

  • phpstorm-metadata-export (old, new)

  • private-access (old, new)

  • torrent-file (old, new)

  I tried to make the migration process as smooth as possible. I'm sorry for the inconvenience it might have caused.

  Category: PHP • Tags: libraries, packagist

• Installing Composer in Docker the 2020-s Way

  Jan 11, 2023 • Share

  While the original way is still valid, in Docker it's now easier to copy the Composer executable from its Docker image.

  COPY --from=composer:latest /usr/bin/composer /usr/local/bin/composer
  

  or for PHP < 7.2.5

  COPY --from=composer:2.2 /usr/bin/composer /usr/local/bin/composer
  

  Please note that without the installer, dependencies won't be checked, so you also need to install git and/or zip, and preferably optional dependencies like mbstring too.

  Found accidentally on the Stack Overflow. There is also another interesting and underliked method for the case when you don't want to keep the composer executable and cache files in your image.

  Category: PHP • Tags: composer, docker

• OpenSpout

  Dec 22, 2022 • Share

  I have recently found myself in a situation when 3 out of 4 libraries that I used to work with Excel files were abandoned:

  • akeneo-labs/spreadsheet-parser (streaming reader) had no commits in 4 years

  • mk-j/php_xlsxwriter (streaming writer) had no commits in 2 years

  • box/spout (streaming reader/writer) is formally abandoned

  Luckily there exists a community fork of Spout called OpenSpout and it can replace them all. It seems pretty popular with 1 mln downloads and 229 stars but it's still less popular than the original and I managed to find it only by navigating the forks of Spout so I think it just needs more exposure.

  Category: PHP • Tags: excel, spreadsheet

• PHP 8.2 and my achievement

  Dec 10, 2022 • Share

  A small step for the community may still be a huge leap for specific people, like Pierrick Charron and Sergey Panteleev who became this version release managers. I would like to congratulate them with a successful release.

  This moon-in-reverse scale leap also happened to me: I got my first MR accepted to the PHP itself. It's the second C-based project that I contributed professionally, and the only huge one. The first one was my systemd-journal lib wrapper.

  Category: PHP • Tags: php 8.2

« Older posts