The following is a list of plugins I have installed to help with Laravel Development, I will add to them as I go, I will also remove the ones i don’t think were worth it from the list as well

Plugin	What for	Publisher
PHP IntelliSense	Advanced Autocompletion and Refactoring support for PHP	Felix Becker
PHP Namespace Resolver	Import and expand php namespaces	Mehedi Hassan
laravel-blade	Laravel blade syntax highlighting	Christian Howe
Laravel Blade Snippets	Laravel blade snippets and syntax highlight support	Winnie Lin
Laravel goto view	Quick jump to view	codingyu
Better Align	Align code without selecting them first	wwm

This is probably very easy to use on windows, but i could not find a windows machine,

A quick solution that was not very clear at first was as follows, before you do this, make sure you have unmounted the SD card !

apt-get install exfat-utils

And then run the command

sudo exfatfsck /dev/mmcblk0p1

Got a few of the following error, and answered yes to all

ERROR: unknown entry type 0xc1.
Fix (Y/N)? y

And that was that

Like the name implies, this is a cheat sheet to quickly find the command you need, they are ordered by the frequency a command is used, or at least what i think is going to be needed more frequently, I have also grouped them by function

The container name in the examples is mycontainer, it is just a name that you will need to replace with your own container name, the container ID here is always 12345abcdef

Command	Arguments	What it does
============>	Containers – list
docker container ls		Display running containers
docker container ls -a	a: also show containers that are not running	Display all containers, running or not
docker ps	Show running containers	PS is the same as LS but older
============>	Containers – Run
docker run --name mycontainer -i -t imagename	1- The name of the container to run (mycontainer) 2- The i flag indicating you’d like to open an interactive SSH session to the container. The i flag does not close the SSH session even if the container is not attached. 3- The t flag allocates a pseudo-TTY which much be used to run commands interactively. 4- The base image to create the container from (imagename).	Runs the container, and leaves you on a shell prompt that executes commands on that container (As if you have ssh-ed into it)
docker run --name mycontainer -d imagename	-d for running the container in the background
docker stop my_container		Stop the running container
docker exec -it mycontainer /bin/bash	-it flag allows you to run a container in interactive mode	If this doesn’t work, you may not have bash installed, you can try the next command Gives you access to the shell, much like opening an SSH session to the container
docker exec -it username/mycontainer /bin/sh
ctrl+p followed by ctrl+q		Detach from container

Sometimes, accessing a container throght the command line may not be enough, there is a chance you want to access it for file transfer for example, in that case, you want port 22 exposed, and you want to be connected to it like you would connect to a virtual machine

On windows, you might have been using text editors that search or search&replace within files in a folder, one such tool i have used in windows is “source edit” by Joacim Andersson (Brixoft Software). that text editor does not seem to be maintained any longer as the developer seems to have moved into making games, but there are certainly many other editors that allow you to do the same thing.

On the other hand, on Linux, I don’t need to do that, the basic tools that come with the operating system allow for that, multi gigabyte files can be searched and have certain text replaced at the speed it takes to read them (Without having to open them for editing)

So, let us assume we have a folder with many text files (Including css or js or html or php files for example), to search that folder, we can combine

grep -Ril "text-to-find-here" /path/to/file/

-R (-r) look for files recursively
-l show file names, not the contents that were found
-i ….

Another tool which is better suited for looking in code is ack (ack-grep) which i will come back to cover in this article, and a newer tool that i have never used is

Now, replacing a string inside a file is simple, there is a cool tool called sed

sed -i '/TEXTTOFIND/ s//TEXTTOREPLACEWITH/g' verylargefile.txt

yarn to JavaScript, is what composer is to PHP, a dependency manager, meant to replace npm, but still works with npm

package.json is the file that dictated the dependencies for npm

So, a small comparison of yarn commands (executed in the terminal in the project’s directory which produces a build directory within that directory), the build directory is what you serve the world, in other words, it is what you put in your website’s root directory !

Task	npm	yarn
Create the build directory	npm run build	yarn run build
Update all packages	npm install	yarn (synonyms to yarn install)

If you are like me, running only your own projects on a server, you might want to skip authentication

the changes I generally make to the file /etc/redis/redis.conf are

1- At the very beginning, limit the RAM redis can use with the line

maxmemory 2gb

2- Change the supervisor to systemd by modifying the line

supervised no

to

supervised systemd

Now, to test the new config, from the command line, run the following commands

systemctl restart redis-server
redis-cli
ping
config get maxmemory
quit

You have just configured redis and tested your new settings.

To tell tabs apart fast, you can give every terminal tab a name, just execute the following line inside that terminal window

echo -ne "\033]0;SOME TITLE HERE\007"

I am doing this on the default gnome terminal in Debian 11 (Bullseye), older methods no longer work

You will have to execute this every time in every SSH window to a remote machine, I am looking into a way to making the name permanent !

At this stage, this posst is a stub, I am simply compiling information here then I will come back to edit this

Under linux, the Laravel extensions that i like up to now are

• Laravel Blade Snippets (For blade templates)
• PHP namespace resolver (So that we don’t need to look for what namespaces provide for the classes we are using)
• PHP Intelephense (PHP Autocomplete/intellisense ref finder, etc…)

This part of the tutorial is a hands on setup to have Laravel working on nginx under Linux. this is not the only way to run Laravel, for all the options, see here

NOTE: Most if not all of the popular development tools are available for Linux and Windows, so If this setup is for development, you might want to install Debian Linux with the Gnome GUI so that you can install the development tools used in the next part of this tutorial, if you are going to be developing on a different machine or this is for production, then you shouldn’t.

STEP 1: Install Debian 11 (Bullseye) on a computer.

STEP 2: Install the basic Laravel environment with the following commands, Laravel 9 requires PHP 8, which at the time of writing is not available in Debian 11 repositories, so we will need to add the repositories from the guy who manages PHP for Debian anyway

sudo apt-get install ca-certificates apt-transport-https software-properties-common gnupg unzip curl
echo "deb https://packages.sury.org/php/ $(lsb_release -sc) main" | tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/sury-php.list
wget -qO - https://packages.sury.org/php/apt.gpg | apt-key add -
apt-get update

Now, to the actual installation of the environment

apt install php8.1-fpm nginx
apt install php8.1-{dev,common,xml,tokenizer,zip,mysql,curl,mbstring,mysql,opcache,gd,intl,xsl,bcmath,imap,soap,readline,sqlite3,gmp}
apt install redis-server
apt-get install php8.1-redis
apt install mariadb-server mariadb-client

Now you need to secure redis !

Now remember to secure your mariaDB (MySQL) installation with the following command

mysql_secure_installation

Next, we need composer, the PHP dependency manager, to get it execute the following

curl -sS https://getcomposer.org/installer | php
mv composer.phar /usr/local/bin/composer
chmod +x /usr/local/bin/composer
composer --version

The last line above should show you what version of composer you have just installed

Now, remember to never run composer as root, but rather as a regular user, from this point on I am assuming you are running the terminal as a regular user.

I understand that Debian puts the web root in /var/www/html, but i usually like to create a separate directory called /var/vhosts and put all my web projects in it

mkdir /var/vhosts

Now, we need to create a sample project for our learning and training experience

cd /var/vhosts
composer create-project laravel/laravel laraveltestapp
chmod -R 0777 /var/vhosts/laravelapp/storage

Next, We would need to setup nginx to serve this website (“Would like to” actually, because there are alternatives, but I’m keeping it simple), here is an almost standard template for nginx, modify the host name and project name to match your project and preferences.

NGINX vhost config file (In my case /etc/nginx/sites-available/laraveltestapp)

server {
    listen 80;
    listen [::]:80;
    server_name ltest.net www.ltest.net;
    root /var/vhosts/laraveltestapp/public;

    add_header X-Frame-Options "SAMEORIGIN";
    add_header X-XSS-Protection "1; mode=block";
    add_header X-Content-Type-Options "nosniff";

    index index.html index.htm index.php;

    charset utf-8;

    location / {
        try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?$query_string;
    }

    location = /favicon.ico { access_log off; log_not_found off; }
    location = /robots.txt  { access_log off; log_not_found off; }

    error_page 404 /index.php;

    location ~ \.php$ {
        fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php/php8.1-fpm.sock;
#	fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php-fpm.sock;
        fastcgi_index index.php;
        fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $realpath_root$fastcgi_script_name;
        include fastcgi_params;
    }

    location ~ /\.(?!well-known).* {
        deny all;
    }
}

Surely for this to work, you will need to add the following two lines to the end of the /etc/hosts file

127.0.0.1 ltest.net
127.0.0.1 www.ltest.net

As soon as we have the file above, we need to create a symbolic link for it in the sites enabled directory

cd /etc/nginx/sites-enabled
ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/laraveltestapp

Suddenly, it works through nginx, you should see the welcome page (View) here

Now, to the development environment, how to setup your development environment can be found here

On linux, when i needed to edit a video I usually go to Kdenlive, I used to think it is THE linux alternative to Adobe Premier Pro, until yesterday, when a friend recommended I try out OpenShot

I am a Gnome user, Kdenlive was designed for KDE, I have always run it in gnome (Unity) and it worked fine, but today, I am feeling adventurous and up for trying OpenShot, openshot too is pyQt which is a bummer, but hey, this is not why we doing this

Reminder
KDE is based on Qt and Gnome is based on GTK. both applications here are meant for KDE, and I don’t really want to install KDE on my machine

This post here is where I will leave my impressions so hang tight.