Maintnance

General about package upgrades

This project is hosted on a shared hosting service. That means no root access on the server and we cannot control what software are installed or running. At this time we have to deal with php, apache and mysql for the database.

Docker containers in this repository have been created to simplify development process and to somewhat replicate the hosting environment. Early in the development process the development involved ssh-ing into the server, editing source files with vim and guessing why noting is working when accessing the web pages through the internet. Logs were not available and site usually broke when admin would upgrade software on the server that ended up introducing breaking changes.

Project is fairly old and earliest database entries was from early 2000. There was no vcs in place before this one therefore determining the age of this project is fairly hard. This repository is an attempt to simplify the development process and be one step ahead rather than one step behind. If you have contributed to this project earlier contact us and we will add you to as an author.

new maintainers

If you're a new maintainer this section is for you. The most important skill to master is mysql and PHP. Watch through Gio's PHP series on php. Those videos cover pretty much everything you need to know about PHP. mysql and databases are not covered in that series but there comes up some simple syntax along the way. I would recommend looking into topics like what a relational database is to at least get started with it. Use phpmyadmin. It's a graphical user interface for managing database that might come in handy when starting out.

Also subscribe to news from hosting provider about planned maintenance. That and more is covered in the internal docs on slab.

PHP

PHP has some huge issues but PHP developers are slowly fixing them for the better with each new release. Check the server what version that are running and use that version in the containers. Patches can be applied freely but minor and major versions must match. Make sure that all deprecation warnings have been resolved by reading migration guides from PHP.

To use a certain version of PHP in the project set config->platform->php to be the PHP version as the same as on production server. That way you'll never accidentally use a new feature in development and push to production before production server has had a change to update its packages.

    "config": {
        "platform": {
            "php": "8.1.2"
        }
    },

You'll also have to specify minimum PHP version that is needed in the project depending on what features you use:

    "require": {
        "php": "^8.1.2",
        ...
    },

Set the same version in config->platform->php and in require->php to allow developers to use updated functionality.

Mysql

TODO

apache

TODO

Containers and docker

Upgrade to latest. There is no need to check the server for that. Nota that some developers use different different platform architectures like arm and x86 so don't use a docker image that is restrictive on that.