• Using PIE in Docker

  Oct 9, 2025 • Share

  As you may know, PECL is now soft-deprecated and PIE is the recommended way to install exenetsions.

  The current PHP docker images do not package PIE executable. Luckily there is an instruction in the doc that says this:

  COPY --from=ghcr.io/php/pie:bin /pie /usr/bin/pie
  RUN pie install asgrim/example-pie-extension
  

  It works but this solution is bad. It will import a 6MB PIE executable as a dead weight. Trying to find a solution to this solution, I stumbled on this blog post: rabbithole.wwwdotorg.org. Luckily RUN --mount can work with external images instead of stages and files instead of directories. This allows us to collapse the installation into a single layer:

  RUN --mount=type=bind,from=ghcr.io/php/pie:bin,source=/pie,target=/usr/local/bin/pie \
      pie install asgrim/example-pie-extension
  

  This will make your final image 6MB ligher.

  Category: PHP • Tags: docker, pecl, pie

• Generating UUIDv7 in PostgreSQL 18

  Oct 2, 2025 • Share

  Another post just turned from a useful algorithm to madskillz. Since PostgreSQL 18 the method is just:

  select uuidv7();
  

  Category: Misc • Tags: postgres, sql, uuid, uuidv7

• Count files by extension

  Jul 11, 2025 • Share

  TL;DR:

  find . -type f | sed 's/.*\///; s/^\.//; /\./! s/$/./; s/.*\.//' | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr
  

  Read more…

  Category: Linux • Tags: find, sed, sort, uniq

• Peso Framework

  Jul 11, 2025 • Share

  Another thing I've been secretly building is the Peso Framework, a tool to query currency conversion rates.

  It started when I was pissed that florianv/exchanger, a tool I was perfectly happy with previously, got a broken release (2.8.2) got abandoned for almost a year now, and still isn't fixed as of this post.

  Peso consists of 3 components:

  • A service (data source)

  • An integration (data consumer)

  • A glue library (peso/core) that contains the Service contract, standard request/response objects, and useful tools to develop services and integrations

  A simple example:

  composer require peso/peso peso/ecb-service php-http/discovery guzzlehttp/guzzle
  

  <?php
  
  use Peso\Peso\CurrencyConverter;
  use Peso\Services\EuropeanCentralBankService;
  
  require __DIR__ . '/vendor/autoload.php';
  
  // caching omitted for simplicity
  $peso = new CurrencyConverter(new EuropeanCentralBankService());
  
  echo $peso->getHistoricalExchangeRate(
      'EUR', // base
      'PHP', // quote
      '2025-06-13', // date (Y-m-d string or DateTime or arokettu/date Date)
  ), PHP_EOL; // '64.706'
  

  Advantages over the Exchanger:

  • Caching moved to the Service side making it more effective

  • No way for a service to mistake a historical exchange rate request with a current exchange rate request

  • Also currency conversion requests for services that support them

  • Ability to add new request types without breaking the backward compatibility

  • Services reside in their own separate packages so the main package is not a huge garbage dump of dead or unsupported services like Cryptonator

  Category: PHP • Tags: currency conversion, peso

• JSON5 Tools

  Jul 11, 2025 • Share

  Presenting a couple of JSON5 tools I built.

  The first one was done a year ago, a docker CLI image to convert JSON5 to JSON: arokettu/json5-to-json.

  $ echo "{ hello: 'world' }" | docker run -i --rm arokettu/json5-to-json
  {"hello":"world"}
  

  A simple tool to convert your configs on the build phase without installing anything into your images.

  The second one is a builder/serializer that is aimed at creating pretty configs in PHP: arokettu/json5-builder.

  While it can just serialize some data into JSON5, the goal is to create nice configs with comments and custom formatting.

  <?php
  
  use Arokettu\Json5\Json5Encoder;
  use Arokettu\Json5\Values\CommentDecorator;
  use Arokettu\Json5\Values\HexInteger;
  
  require __DIR__ . '/../vendor/autoload.php';
  
  $config = new CommentDecorator(
      [
          'bareKeys' => '<- Look, no quotes!',
          'value' => new CommentDecorator(
              new HexInteger(0xFFF),
              commentAfter: 'This is a very important value'
           ),
          'notAvailableInJSON' => [NAN, INF],
          'end' => 'auto trailing comma ->'
      ],
      commentBefore: 'This is my cool JSON5 config!',
  );
  
  echo Json5Encoder::encode($config);
  

  // This is my cool JSON5 config!
  {
      bareKeys: "<- Look, no quotes!",
      value: 0xFFF, // This is a very important value
      notAvailableInJSON: [
          NaN,
          Infinity,
      ],
      end: "auto trailing comma ->",
  }
  

  Category: PHP • Tags: config, docker, json5

• A Case for JSON6

  Apr 19, 2025 • Share

  Just a required follow up for the previous post: JSON5 sucks too, like any other possible format. Just look at this:

  {
      certificate: "\
  -----BEGIN PRIVATE KEY-----\n\
  MIIBVQIBADANBgkqhkiG9w0BAQEFAASCAT8wggE7AgEAAkEAt6wGEsfdarMo9KET\n\
  sNv9gpBWkGfhIq3/Jhr14+3d8TXprmTk/XWReo5DA3+SbB7ebF3xUtN/4K5lUkcG\n\
  1AbdywIDAQABAkBuMbfnFqAhvuFoeydMKYAcECrPMnOhEdENdIlnuTM53kBf18f/\n\
  KaWRWv8ViuZ31GpArY8cBzj0YG30vE49Il8ZAiEA7PpotzcpjNcMKnwEBm3q0c6H\n\
  3RRZD6i32Q/vXcQBeB0CIQDGaj4BJ/fuqiHvKzetfjhpOD+sYr3VDgEyjTcojhzZ\n\
  BwIgTBRYafmbrUuc7EbERAwlxxW3KJLPxOc1nsou3rt+fUECIQCjBGUfJAyDDUtG\n\
  KpbbN0n3wRwncRUQuCnps7Zu3pv6/wIhAIIcKty7O0T7auctlpMSdyw6vp0w818x\n\
  namFjg3cbBs4\n\
  -----END PRIVATE KEY-----\n"
  }
  

  Read more…

  Category: Misc • Tags: configuration, json, json5, json6

• Is JSON5 a better JSON?

  Apr 16, 2025 • Share

  Yes it is, at least when it comes to configuration files.

  As I said earlier, JSON is a good serialization language but a terrible config language. JSON5 builds on its strong sides: it's backwards compatible with JSON and is still a subset of JavaScript and it is still relatively easy to parse. Then it adds all the good stuff like unquoted keys, trailing commas, and a must-have thing for any config, comments. For me it has only two real downsides, both really minor. First is, as most config-oriented languages, it's tricky for automated modification, a feature it shares with TOML and YAML. The second one is JSON6, while ES6 syntax sugar is nice, it's just a 15th competing standard, and the worst, competing with itself.

  Category: Misc • Tags: configuration, json, json5

• Do Not Use Exception Class Directly

  Nov 18, 2024 • Share

  It is a bad practice to use the Exception class directly in PHP. That means 2 points:

  • Do not throw Exception directly

  • Do not catch Exception directly

  Subclassing Exception is not a direct use in this context.

  Do not throw Exception

  There are a lot of specific Exception descendants in PHP. See documentation for the full list. It's not necessary to use and remember all of them, many have unclear use cases, but at very least you should separate your exceptions into RuntimeException and LogicException. As the doc says, LogicException means code misuse. Throw LogicException in cases when the upstream must be fixed because it uses your code incorrectly. Throw RuntimeException in cases that are not predictable by the upstream, like service failures or invalid user input.

  In case you use exceptions for flow control, you need your own custom exceptions anyway. In this case you can extend the base Exception, extending Exception directly is not a sin, especially if your exceptions are not error conditions.

  Do not catch Exception

  Assuming you follow the previous point, there is no need to catch Exception's.

  1. If you don't guard against a specific situation, catch all RuntimeException's. LogicException's should go to your logger.

  2. In a global error handler that writes your logs, you need to catch Errors too, so you need to go even further and catch Throwable.

  3. If you use exceptions for flow control (please don't haha) you already catching your own exceptions, and if you follow the previous point, they are already separated from actual error conditions and won't be caught mistakenly by a wrong level.

  Notable exceptions to the rule:

  • You use PHP below 7.0 and don't have Throwable. Well, it's 2024 already so this is another call for you to upgrade. Otherwise assume point 2 allows you to catch a base Exception.

  • You use a library that throws plain Exception instances. Well, bad for you, but maybe it's a good idea to report this thing as a problem.

  Category: PHP • Tags: good practices, opinion

• Ignoring SSL Errors in Chrome

  May 7, 2024 • Share

  Very useful when you are developing anything WebAuthn related.

  google-chrome --ignore-certificate-errors --user-data-dir=$HOME/tmp/chrome-dev
  

  --ignore-certificate-errors will disable any SSL warnings like self-signed certs.

  --user-data-dir will isolate this unsafe Chrome instance from your regular browsing.

  Category: Misc • Tags: chrome, ssl

• Generating UUIDv7 in PostgreSQL

  Jan 20, 2024 • Share

  But what about Postgres? We can do it too. Hopefully generators for new UUID versions will be added to uuid-ossp but it is not yet the case.

  The easiest way for now is to use pgcrypto, so let's start with that:

  create extension pgcrypto;
  

  Now port the solution from the MySQL post:

  select
      lpad(to_hex((extract(epoch from now()) * 1000)::bigint), '12', '0') ||
      '7' || -- version
      substr(encode(gen_random_bytes(2), 'hex'), 2) ||
      to_hex((floor(random() * 4) + 8)::int) || -- variant bits
      substr(encode(gen_random_bytes(8), 'hex'), 2)
      as uuid;
  

  Like with MariaDB, Postgres doesn't care about dashes on insertion, so this value can be directly applied to a field with the uuid type.

  And again, to make it a formatted value, use a type cast:

  select
      (lpad(to_hex((extract(epoch from now()) * 1000)::bigint), '12', '0') ||
      '7' ||
      substr(encode(gen_random_bytes(2), 'hex'), 2) ||
      to_hex((floor(random() * 4) + 8)::int) ||
      substr(encode(gen_random_bytes(8), 'hex'), 2))::uuid
      as uuid;
  

  And to have a bytea value, use decode:

  select
      decode(
          lpad(to_hex((extract(epoch from now()) * 1000)::bigint), '12', '0') ||
          '7' ||
          substr(encode(gen_random_bytes(2), 'hex'), 2) ||
          to_hex((floor(random() * 4) + 8)::int) ||
          substr(encode(gen_random_bytes(8), 'hex'), 2),
          'hex'
      ) as uuid;
  

  Category: Misc • Tags: postgres, sql, uuid, uuidv7

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