Posts about PHP

Peso Framework

Jul 11, 2025 •
Another thing I've been secretly building is the Peso Framework, a tool to query currency conversion rates.

It started when I was pissed that florianv/exchanger, a tool I was perfectly happy with previously, got a broken release (2.8.2) got abandoned for almost a year now, and still isn't fixed as of this post.

Peso consists of 3 components:
- A service (data source)
- An integration (data consumer)
- A glue library (peso/core) that contains the Service contract, standard request/response objects, and useful tools to develop services and integrations
A simple example:
```
composer require peso/peso peso/ecb-service php-http/discovery guzzlehttp/guzzle
```
```
<?php

use Peso\Peso\CurrencyConverter;
use Peso\Services\EuropeanCentralBankService;

require __DIR__ . '/vendor/autoload.php';

// caching omitted for simplicity
$peso = new CurrencyConverter(new EuropeanCentralBankService());

echo $peso->getHistoricalExchangeRate(
    'EUR', // base
    'PHP', // quote
    '2025-06-13', // date (Y-m-d string or DateTime or arokettu/date Date)
), PHP_EOL; // '64.706'
```
Advantages over the Exchanger:
- Caching moved to the Service side making it more effective
- No way for a service to mistake a historical exchange rate request with a current exchange rate request
- Also currency conversion requests for services that support them
- Ability to add new request types without breaking the backward compatibility
- Services reside in their own separate packages so the main package is not a huge garbage dump of dead or unsupported services like Cryptonator
Category: PHP • Tags: currency conversion, peso

JSON5 Tools

Jul 11, 2025 •

Presenting a couple of JSON5 tools I built.

The first one was done a year ago, a docker CLI image to convert JSON5 to JSON: arokettu/json5-to-json.

$ echo "{ hello: 'world' }" | docker run -i --rm arokettu/json5-to-json
{"hello":"world"}

A simple tool to convert your configs on the build phase without installing anything into your images.

The second one is a builder/serializer that is aimed at creating pretty configs in PHP: arokettu/json5-builder.

While it can just serialize some data into JSON5, the goal is to create nice configs with comments and custom formatting.

<?php

use Arokettu\Json5\Json5Encoder;
use Arokettu\Json5\Values\CommentDecorator;
use Arokettu\Json5\Values\HexInteger;

require __DIR__ . '/../vendor/autoload.php';

$config = new CommentDecorator(
    [
        'bareKeys' => '<- Look, no quotes!',
        'value' => new CommentDecorator(
            new HexInteger(0xFFF),
            commentAfter: 'This is a very important value'
         ),
        'notAvailableInJSON' => [NAN, INF],
        'end' => 'auto trailing comma ->'
    ],
    commentBefore: 'This is my cool JSON5 config!',
);

echo Json5Encoder::encode($config);

// This is my cool JSON5 config!
{
    bareKeys: "<- Look, no quotes!",
    value: 0xFFF, // This is a very important value
    notAvailableInJSON: [
        NaN,
        Infinity,
    ],
    end: "auto trailing comma ->",
}

Category: PHP • Tags: config, docker, json5

Do Not Use Exception Class Directly

Nov 18, 2024 •
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 •

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.

Note

The process will change the infohash value so it's not for a casual case. The trackers that process torrent files on their side, like setting the private flag, a process that changes infohashes anyway, would benefit most from using this feature.

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.

Note

Mutability of torrent files does not mean that you can replace data in an existing torrent. Updated torrents will have different infohash values and be considered a different torrent in the network. But often creation of such updates without having any original files downloaded can be very beneficial.

Category: PHP • Tags: libraries, torrent, torrent file
PHP Requirements on Packagist

Oct 29, 2023 •

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 •

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 •

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 •
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 •
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 •
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

« Older posts

Posts about PHP

Peso Framework

JSON5 Tools

Do Not Use Exception Class Directly

Do not throw `Exception`

Do not catch `Exception`

De-hybridize Torrent

PHP Requirements on Packagist

How to Choose a Minimum PHP Requirement

UUID Library (and ULID to UUID migration)

March Packages on Packagist

Moving packages to Arokettu

Installing Composer in Docker the 2020-s Way

Do not throw Exception

Do not catch Exception

Do not throw `Exception`

Do not catch `Exception`