gratis_php_assessment

Gratis PHP Assessment

What is this?

The assessment asked me to use XAMPP. However:

I wanted to play with Phalcon since you mentioned using it in the interview.
I use a Mac for development and I wanted to see if Docker would help standardize the environment.

Backend

Therefore, I built a Docker container with XAMPP, PHP 8.2, and Phalcon 5.6.0. The backend PHP packages are managed using composer. I'm utilizing Phalcon's built-in ORM for database access and their custom migration system. I'm not a huge fan of their migration system, so I might recommend the Phinx migration system instead, as that is what the example Vokuro app uses. It seems a little more robust.

Frontend

The frontend is a hybrid single page application with Phalcon MVC backend, utilizing NPM + React + Babel + Webpack.

What do I mean by hybrid? Well, the single page application is compiled to public/bundle.js. However, there can be multiple single page applications within the bundle. They are "routed" or "mounted" to the DOM in src/client/index.js.

More than one bundle can be created in webpack.config.js, in case the developer wants to avoid namespace conflicts between frontend applications.

NPM provides convenient package management for frontend modules, including security vulnerability information. It could easily be augmented with frontend unit tests (Jest + React Testing Library) and even Typescript.

Limitations

One noteable limitation of this current environment is the lack of frontend hot loading for React components. The whole bundle needs to be recompiled in order to view changes (see npm run build below). This is a significant barrier to developer productivity and must be addressed before this environment can be seriously considered. When I used hapi.js as a backend I used nodemon and a hapijs webpack plugin for hot reloading. I'm sure there is a relatively straight forward way to implement something similar here, but I didn't have time to research possible solutions.

Advantages

The docker images (app and mysql) take up about 2 Gb on my system and takes about 10 minutes to build from scratch. Being a docker system, this example should theoretically run on any system on which docker desktop can be installed. For example: Windows, Linux, Mac, or even AWS ECS. Multiple docker containers could be spun up at the same time in a production environment and placed behind a load balancer in order to facilitate scalability. Redis can be used as a session manager in this case.

Getting started

Install docker-desktop https://www.docker.com/products/docker-desktop/
Make sure docker-desktop is running in the background.
Make sure you don't already have an instance of MySQL running on port 3306. If you do, shut it down. It may not matter if you follow this guide verbatim, but this step is just in case you want to connect to mysql using a different tool.

Clone repo and change directory into it

git clone https://github.com/createthis/gratis_php_assessment.git
cd gratis_php_assessment

In a terminal:

cp .env.example .env # copy dotenv example file
docker-compose up -d

Open a new terminal tab, then open a terminal in the docker container and install backend dependencies via composer:
```
docker exec -it app /bin/bash
composer install
```
Then, install frontend dependencies via npm:
```
npm install
```
Now we need to build our frontend js using babel and webpack:
```
npm run build
```
Next, run database migrations, creating the users table and seeding it with our one test user:
```
vendor/bin/phalcon-migrations run
```
Keep in mind that all of these commands should be run in the docker container, not in your local terminal.
In another terminal tab, start following the docker logs so you can see apache logs:
```
docker logs app --follow
```
Visit http://localhost:8080/ in browser
The login credentials for testing are:
- Email: spongebob@example.com
- Password: IAmSpongeBobsPassword

Utility How To

List docker containers

docker ps -a

Entering the docker container to execute code manually

docker exec -it app /bin/bash

Rebuild docker image or view image build logs

If you make a Dockerfile change and want to build and view the build logs you can use:

docker-compose build --progress plain

Or to force a rebuild of everything:

docker-compose build --no-cache --progress plain

Inspect MySQL from the CLI tool

pw is root

docker exec -it mysql /bin/bash
mysql -u root -p -h localhost phalcon_app

Now you can run normal mysql cli commands. For example:

show tables;
select * from users;
describe users;