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TIPS, INSIGHTS AND THE LATEST FROM THE EXPERTS BEHIND CAKEPHP

Working with a company that embraces open source

I've done my fair share of working for closed and "open" companies. I've recently (in July 2011) clocked over two years working here at the Cake Development Corporation, and while attending the Open Source Developers Conference (2011) in Canberra, I have had some time to reflect on my experiences with the company, and my feelings regarding my work here.

Traditionally I have found that companies that claim to be pro-FOSS or open source companies are those that are making a profit, through the use of open source technologies. This is awesome. I love that the proliferation of open source software continues to grow and be adopted by traditionally closed, and proprietary software users. This produces better quality software for all of us.

While CakeDC produces a large quantity of client projects that are closed source, what we do have control over is the common reusable components that we use to build and produce web applications for our clients. These are developed and refined over a number of years, and have been a pillar in our success as a company. To be able to draw on years of experience through various developers and quickly build high quality, high performance websites continues to draw attention, referrals and interest from businesses and the community alike.

A decision made back in mid 2010, initially proposed by Larry Masters, our President, was to open source all of our plugins. This decision stirred a lot of discussion internally, and there were mixed opinions. While we each individually contribute to open source, speak about it at conferences, engage the community and promote open source, the concept of releasing all our internal code for public consumption for me was a little daunting. The decision was made, and we spent some time cleaning up code, making sure everything was documented and in a good state to release. You can now find all of our plugins and projects on the CakeDC Github Account.

The initial load of dealing with issues and support questions, emails and contact from the public was somewhat overwhelming. We deal with issues and features very well internally, but as the process is different to open source projects we contribute to, this produced a somewhat less productive period of time for us while we adjusted our work structure and organisation to accommodate our new open source projects. We now action issues, support requests and other contact from users in a timely manner, and are receiving new and useful commits to the repositories consistently from the community. Overall the experience has been a learning one, and a very positive one.

CakeDC support the staff and community in other ways. We are constantly sending staff to conferences both to speak and to attend. This allows us to talk more broadly about CakePHP, PHP in general, and other projects we use and are involved with. It also allows those attending the events from CakeDC a great opportunity to network, and learn from some of the more interesting and innovative minds of our time. This is something that we have come to do through the support of CakePHP, and through our newfound knowledge and experience in working with communities and projects openly.

Working with a company like CakeDC, embracing open source and supporting a community like CakePHP is extremely rewarding and equally challenging; and a job without challenges is not what that I would want to be involved in for any long period of time.

After speaking with many people working on awesome, interesting projects that are closed, or "not ready" to open source, I really count myself lucky to be working for a company that has embraced open source, contributed to the community, and demonstrates a dedication to supporting those projects and communities.

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A quick CakePHP Local environment with DDEV

In the realm of web development, a seamless local environment is the bedrock for efficient and stress-free coding. Enter DDEV, a powerful tool that simplifies the setup process and empowers developers to dive into their projects with ease. In this blog post, we'll embark on a journey to demystify the process of setting up a local development environment using DDEV. Whether you're a seasoned developer or just starting in the world of web development, optimizing your local environment can significantly enhance your workflow.

Pre Conditions :

Install Docker https://docs.docker.com/get-docker/ and install DDEV https://ddev.readthedocs.io/en/stable/

Step 1: Create a new CakePHP project skeleton 

composer create-project cakephp/app myproject A new folder "myproject" will be created with a CakePHP project skeleton inside. Go to this new directory and proceed with the following instructions.

Step 2: Initial ddev setup

Run ddev config
This will do the initial ddev setup, press enter for all questions.  Run ddev auth ssh
This will add ssh key authentication to the ddev-ssh-auth container

Step 3: Adjust the settings

Inside "myproject" a new .ddev folder will be created, open config.yaml  and adjust there: php version, database and the database url environment.  For PHP:
php_version: "8.1"

For the database: database: type: mysql version: "8.0" For the environment variable: web_environment: - DATABASE_URL=mysql://db:db@db/db

Step 4: Start ddev

ddev start  This will spin up the project.

Step 5: Open your application

ddev launch This will open your project in a browser.   Once you have the application up and running, some useful commands you could run are:
  • ddev composer to execure composer
  • ddev mysql to get into the database
  • ddev ssh takes you into the web container.
In this link https://ddev.readthedocs.io/en/latest/users/usage/cli/ you can see more useful commands.   Hope you enjoy playing with DDEV!

 

   

 

 

CakeFest 2023 Recap

CakeFest 2023 once again brought together developers from around the world for a weekend of baking (code), insightful talks, and community building. This year's event, featuring speakers from eight different countries and attendees joining both in person and via live streaming, was a refreshing convergence of passion and technology.

International Flavor:

One of the highlights of CakeFest 2023 was its international reach. Speakers from the United States, Canada, the Netherlands, Austria, Germany, Brazil, and Spain graced the virtual and physical stages, sharing experiences in the world of CakePHP and software development. This lineup added a diverse perspective to the event's discussions.  

A Weekend of Learning and Networking:

CakeFest attendees enjoyed a weekend filled with learning opportunities, covering things from beginner workshops to cutting-edge software development trends, to the future of CakePHP. Workshops, panels, and presentations provided valuable insights and knowledge of the framework. We hope that everyone had the chance to expand their skills, connect with other developers, and forge new professional relationships. When CakeFest wasn't in session, the core/CakePHP team and attendees spent a lot of time getting to know each other… Groups went to lunch and dinner every day of the event. This is probably my favorite part of the physical conferences.    

Baking and Code:

Day 1 consisted of 2 full workshops from Jorge González and lead core developer Mark Story. The third workshop presented by Kevin Pfeifer was included in day 2’s hybrid model. Followed by talks from: John Killcommons (keynote) of Zulucare/Zulucloud, Rafael Queiroz (Github actions for beginners and applied to CakePHP basic projects), Celso Fontes (PGE Digital, a successful CakePHP project in Rio de Janeiro's Attorney), and Andres Campanario (Integration of inertiajs on CakePHP to bake CRUD SPA).    Day 3’s speakers included: Remy Bertot (keynote) of Passbolt, Mark Scherer  (How to use your IDE effectively for CakePHP), Alejandro Ibarra (Unveiling the Ultimate Showdown: A Comparative Analysis of Local Development Tools), Stefan Koopmanschap (Domain-Driven Design: The Basics), Umer Salman (Agile Deployment of CakePHP Web Applications in a Hybrid Kubernetes Cluster), and Wim Godden (Websockets as the glue to interactivity).    It was a weekend worth remembering for sure. The unique blend of networking and code at CakeFest allowed attendees to see just how far CakePHP has come, and will go, plus some pretty cool things built with the framework.     

The Cake Ceremony:

No CakeFest would be complete without the much-anticipated cake ceremony. We hope that those attending virtually were able to enjoy some with us. In LA, we carried on the tradition of allowing Mark Story to be the “cutter of the cake”. Now that I think about it, he never asks to cut the cake, but it’s a honor nonetheless. 

   

Conclusion:

CakeFest 2023 was a celebration of passion, knowledge, and creativity. With its global reach, experienced speaker lineup, and faithful community, we believe that the event left attendees inspired and eager to continue their works using Cake. We also learned about all of the cool places that CakePHP is being utilized, from the attorney general's office in Brazil, all the way to nasa using some CakePHP in space (more or less). We also heard from some of our CakePHP core developers - specifically their thoughts on CakePHP 5 and what’s to come. You can see a lot of photos on Facebook and Twitter and the edited presentation videos will be posted to YouTube soon. We are working on getting slides uploaded into the CakeFest site as we speak (or type).    Someone said to me that there's a little bit of magic in every slice of cake and every line of code… I think that pretty well sums up our great weekend at CakeFest.

How to push Docker image to Container Registry and create App on...

The title speaks for itself, let’s jump right in! As a preliminary step, we start from a user registered in DigitalOcean with a validated account. Use the doctl tool for the entire communication process with DigitalOcean.

Step 1: Install doctl

$ cd ~
$ wget https://github.com/digitalocean/doctl/releases/download/v1.71.0/doctl-1.71.0-linux-amd64.tar.gz
$ tar xvf doctl-1.71.0-linux-amd64.tar.gz
$ sudo mv doctl /usr/local/bin
 

Step 2: Create an API token

  Go to https://cloud.digitalocean.com/account/api/tokens Generate new token for read and write and save apart the value of token generated <TOKEN NAME>: personaltoken 
<TOKEN VALUE>: 6e981fc2a674dbb7a610b9b85d0c8b00

Step 3: Use the API token to grant account access to doctl

$ doctl auth init --context personaltoken
Validating token... OK
Prompt for <TOKEN VALUE>, then enter it and press return 
 

Step 4: Validate that doctl is working

$ doctl auth init  Validating token... OK
  Prompt for <TOKEN VALUE>, then enter it and press return  Validate by obtaining the account information
$ doctl account get Email      Droplet Limit    Email Verified    UUID         Status [email protected]    10     true     5415bbf8-d501-4096-9b75-ab781c017948    active
 

Step 5: Create a Container Registry with doctl

<MY-REGISTRY-NAME> : container-nyc-795 <REGION> : nyc3
$ doctl registry create container-nyc-795 --region nyc3 Name       Endpoint        Region slug container-nyc-795    registry.digitalocean.com/container-nyc-795    nyc3

Important: the region of the Container registry and Kubernetes cluster MUST be the same Keep in mind that container names must be unique, must be lowercase, and only accepts alphanumeric characters and hyphens.  

Step 6: Login to authenticate docker with your registry

$ doctl registry login
Logging Docker in to registry.digitalocean.com
 

Step 7: Create kubernetes cluster

$ doctl kubernetes cluster create cluster-static-example --region nyc3 Notice: Cluster is provisioning, waiting for cluster to be running ................................................................... Notice: Cluster created, fetching credentials Notice: Adding cluster credentials to kubeconfig file found in "/home/andres/.kube/config" Notice: Setting current-context to do-nyc3-cluster-static-example ID                                      Name                      Region    Version        Auto Upgrade    Status     Node Pools d24f180b-6007-4dbc-a2fe-3952801570aa    cluster-static-example    nyc3      1.22.7-do.0    false           running    cluster-static-example-default-pool
Important: the region of the Container registry and Kubernetes cluster MUST be the same here as well.  This operation isn’t a fast process.  

Step 8: Integrate kubernetes cluster in Container register

$ doctl kubernetes cluster registry add cluster-static-example
 

Step 9: Get token certificate and connect to cluster

$ doctl kubernetes cluster kubeconfig save cluster-static-example Notice: Adding cluster credentials to kubeconfig file found in "/home/andres/.kube/config" Notice: Setting current-context to do-nyc3-cluster-static-example
To validate this, use the kubectl tool to get context. If is not installed, get the last version you find - for example in googleapis
$ wget https://storage.googleapis.com/kubernetes-release/release/v1.23.5/bin/linux/amd64/kubectl
$ chmod +x kubectl
$ sudo mv kubectl /usr/local/bin/
Check with
$ kubectl config current-context
do-nyc3-cluster-static-example
Here, you see: bash prompt do-ny3-cluster-sttic-example. That is the context you created in Step 7
 

Step 10: Generate docker image, tag and push to DigitalOcean

We assume that the user already has docker installed
$ mkdir myapp
$ mkdir myapp/html
$ nano myapp/Dockerfile
  Inside Dockerfile put   
FROM nginx:latest
COPY ./html/hello.html /usr/share/nginx/html/hello.htm
l
  We create simple Dockerfile with NGINX Server and copy the file hello.html in the default html of nginx  
$ nano myapp/html/hello.html
  Inside hello.html put  
<!DOCTYPE html> <html>  <head>    <title>Hello World!</title>  </head>  <body>    <p>This is an example of a simple HTML page served from the Nginx container.</p>  </body> </html>
Then build a docker image file tag with repository and push with docker
 
$ cd myapp
$ docker build -t registry.digitalocean.com/container-nyc-795/static-app .
Sending build context to Docker daemon  3.584kB Step 1/2 : FROM nginx:latest latest: Pulling from library/nginx c229119241af: Pull complete 2215908dc0a2: Pull complete 08c3cb2073f1: Pull complete 18f38162c0ce: Pull complete 10e2168f148a: Pull complete c4ffe9532b5f: Pull complete Digest: sha256:2275af0f20d71b293916f1958f8497f987b8d8fd8113df54635f2a5915002bf1 Status: Downloaded newer image for nginx:latest  ---> 12766a6745ee Step 2/2 : COPY ./html/hello.html /usr/share/nginx/html/hello.html  ---> 2b9be913c377 Successfully built 2b9be913c377 Successfully tagged registry.digitalocean.com/container-nyc-795/static-app:latest   $ docker images REPOSITORY                                               TAG       IMAGE ID       CREATED         SIZE registry.digitalocean.com/container-nyc-795/static-app   latest    2b9be913c377   2 minutes ago   142MB   $ docker push registry.digitalocean.com/container-nyc-795/static-app Using default tag: latest The push refers to repository [registry.digitalocean.com/container-nyc-795/static-app] ac03ae036a53: Pushed ea4bc0cd4a93: Pushed fac199a5a1a5: Pushed 5c77d760e1f4: Pushed 33cf1b723f65: Pushed ea207a4854e7: Pushed 608f3a074261: Pushed latest: digest: sha256:22615ad4c324ca5dc13fe2c3e1d2d801bd166165e3809f96ed6a96a2b2ca2748 size: 1777


Step 11: Create app

Create file example-static-app.yaml and insert: alerts:                                 
- rule: DEPLOYMENT_FAILED               
- rule: DOMAIN_FAILED                   
name: example-static-app                
region: nyc                             
services:                               
- http_port: 80                         
  image:                                
    registry_type: DOCR                 
    repository: static-app              
    tag: latest                         
  instance_count: 2                     
  instance_size_slug: professional-xs   
  name: static-service                  
  routes:                               
  - path: /                             
  source_dir: /             
              Validate file with
$  doctl apps spec validate example-static-app.yaml
Create app
$ doctl apps create --spec example-static-app.yaml
Notice: App created
ID        Spec Name             Default Ingress    Active Deployment ID    In Progress Deployment ID    Created At     Updated At
55a7cb68-65b7-4ff1-b6af-388cdb1df507    example-static-app   2022-03-30 09:34:01.288257225 +0000 UTC    2022-03-30 09:34:01.288257225 +0000 UTC
If you access https://cloud.digitalocean.com/apps And in the live url + /hello.html you can see:

Step 12: Deploy app

If you modify the code of your app, you need to generate a new image with docker and push  (see step 10). Then you don’t need to create a new app, you need to deploy the image in the already created app, with the id executing the command to deploy in bash.
$  doctl apps create-deployment 55a7cb68-65b7-4ff1-b6af-388cdb1df507

 

How to generate deploy of Docker image to Container Registry on DigitalOcean Platform Apps

Once you have created the application (and if you have the code in gitlab), you can create a direct deployment of your code in the DigitalOcean container and deploy on top of your application.

Step 1: Define variables

First two variables are defined in gitlab. You can find these inside project in the left menu - enter in Settings > CI/CD > Variables $DIGITALOCEAN_API_KEY = token generated in DigitalOcean dashboard $APP_ID = previously generated application identifier   More can be defined as the name of the repository. The value of these variables will be injected into the file that we will create below in the Step 3  

 

Step 2: Register runner in gitlab

In your project in the left menu, go to Settings > CI/CD > Runners Create a specific runner for the project in the URL with registration token. Register GitLab Runner from the command line. It is important to use docker and privileged
# Download the binary for your system
sudo curl -L --output /usr/local/bin/gitlab-runner https://gitlab-runner-downloads.s3.amazonaws.com/latest/binaries/gitlab-runner-linux-amd64

# Give it permission to execute
sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/gitlab-runner

# Register runner
sudo gitlab-runner register -n --url https://git.cakedc.com --registration-token GR1348941gx7sgV3pZFQgRqg5qUR_ --executor docker --description "My Docker Runner" --docker-image "docker:19.03.12" --docker-privileged --docker-volumes "/certs/client"
 

Step 3: Create file gitlab-ci.yml 

The gitlab-ci.yml file takes care of

  • Authentication and identification using doctl in DigitalOcean
  • Generating and sending the docker image to the DigitalOcean container
  • Deploying the container image to an existing app
Create the file gitlab-ci.yml in the root of your project as
image: docker:20-dind

variables:
  DOCKER_HOST: tcp://docker:2375
  DOCKER_DRIVER: overlay2
  DOCKER_TLS_CERTDIR: ""
  REPOSITORY_URL: registry.digitalocean.com/container-nyc-795/static-app
  CONTAINER_NAME: static-app

services:
  - name: docker:20-dind
    alias: docker
    command: ["--tls=false"]

before_script:
  - apk update
  - apk upgrade
  - apk add doctl --repository=http://dl-cdn.alpinelinux.org/alpine/edge/community
  - docker info

build:
  stage: build
  script:
    - doctl auth init --access-token $DIGITALOCEAN_API_KEY
    - doctl account get     
    - echo $DIGITALOCEAN_API_KEY | docker login -u $DIGITALOCEAN_API_KEY --password-stdin registry.digitalocean.com
    - docker build -t $REPOSITORY_URL:latest .
    - docker push $REPOSITORY_URL
    - doctl apps create-deployment $APP_ID
Now, every time you do a git push in your project, the runner will automatically inject the variables defined previously in the gitlab-ci.yml file. Then, it will generate a docker image with docker (docker-in-docker) to create an image of your project, send it to the digitalocean repository and deploy it in the app configured.   That’s it!  

We Bake with CakePHP