Running a test suite in your CI pipeline is critical but I was recently tasked with getting a test suite running without having the luxury of using database factories or seeders for a variety of reasons. Another approach which I decided to use, was to pre-seed a database with test data and create a custom docker image.

I've been using my self-hosted GitLab instance for my git repos and pipelines for 5 or so years now, but things have changed and I've decided I no longer want to run my self-hosted instance any more. It's purely for hobby/self projects and only accessed by myself, however, one bonus of this is that I also self-host a dockerised GitLab runner that performed all of my CI/CD duties, including the deployment stage, which is the important part.

The HaveIBeenPwned service provided by Troy Hunt contains a whole trove of breach information. It enables you to look up single email address, whole domains and whether a password has been seen in a data breach, for example. It's the latter one that we're interested in for this feature. Let's implement this using the icawebdesign/hibp-php framework-agostic composer package.

Docker for Windows has recently improved by utilising the WSL2 backend rather than Hyper-V. The performance gains with this are big, and seeing as I use Windows as my main dev environment, wanted to utilise this myself so made the swap.

I've made a switch in the last 12 months to use Docker as my local development environment for my PHP applications. One of the greatest modules for PHP IMHO, is Xdebug. Many moons ago, I used to frantically hack in var_dump(...); exit; calls to see what a particular variable, object, array, etc contained.

I have a couple of sites that are sitting behind Basic HTTP Authentication restrictions. They're simple applications that don't need full-blown built-in access control and are served over HTTPS, so Basic HTTP Auth serves just fine as a restriction control.