PHP

Version

This new version of needlify is based on a Symfony 6 architecture. Since this version, it is necessary to have a PHP version higher or equal to 8.0.2.

This new version offers many new features that are very useful for the development of Needlify.

If you want to install PHP on a windows machine, you can refer to this article.

If you wish, you can install a suitable version of PHP on your local machine, or you can use the Docker images that are available at the root of the project so that the development environment is the same for everyone.

If you want to use Docker for development, I invite you to refer to the Docker documentation.

In this way, we limit the inconsistencies due to possible variations of version of the tools used.

Extensions

Non-native extensions

If you want to contribute, you will have to create, modify and run tests and code coverage tests. Unfortunately, PHP does not include an extension to perform code coverage tests natively. If you are using a local version of PHP, you will have to install the PCOV extension.

To install this extension, you just have to go to the site listing the PECL extensions. Then, you can select the version of PCOV that suits you (take the latest version). Then you will just have to choose the version of the extension that corresponds to your version of PHP.

For example, if you have the version 8.1.2 of PHP in thread safe (TS), you will have to go first in the folder corresponding to the last version (1.0.11 currently) then download the zip corresponding to the version php_pcov-1.0.11-8.1-ts-vs16-x64.zip.

Again, if you use the Docker image, everything is already configured, so you won't have to worry about installing this extension.

Native extensions

As indicated in symfony 6 documentation, this architecture requires the installation and activation of several extensions : ctype, iconv, PCRE, session, simpleXML, and tokenizer.

By default, these extensions are installed for PHP versions higher than 8.0 but take the time to check that they are enabled in your php.ini file.