Author: Simon R Jones

I wrote a blog post over at Studio 24 on running a digital agency over the past year in a pandemic.

It’s been an interesting year, to say the least. My post covers how we’ve supported staff, the impact on mental health, our flagship project for W3C, moving to a new studio, how we donated office equipment, and what the future holds.

Read more at One year on.

I’ve used MAMP Pro with my team for local development for many years. It’s a convenient tool, but it’s often slow (especially the CLI) and often hangs or crashes. I’ve been looking around for alternatives for quite some time, so after it was recommended by Zuzana thought I’d take a look at Laravel’s local dev environment Valet.

Installing Valet

Valet installs a lightweight set of tools to run websites on your Mac via Homebrew. This feels like a good approach to me. I’m not sure we really need the complexity of virtual machines, the code we write tends to work fine on a Mac. Having tools locally installed via Homebrew is fast and convenient.

I started by updating Homebrew to make sure my local packages are up to date:

brew update

Then installed Valet globally via Composer, and installed it:

composer global require laravel/valet
valet install

MySQL

Next I need to install MySQL since this will no longer be available via MAMP:

brew install mysql@5.7
brew services start mysql@5.7

This has installed MySQL, I now want to secure the local root password (by default it is empty):

/usr/local/Cellar/mysql@5.7/5.7.25/bin/mysql_secure_installation

(please note the path to mysql_secure_installation may change depending on your version of MySQL).

Next, I want to connect to the database to install a copy of my own blog WordPress database for local testing. We use the excellent SequelPro for managing MySQL.

It’s easy enough to connect to localhost using the details:

• MySQL Host: 127.0.01
• Username: root
• Password: (the secure password I set above)

This worked fine, I created a new database for my local test site and imported a recent SQL backup.

Serving a site

The default method to serve sites in Valet is to use valet park to serve all sub-folders in ~/Sites as websites via URLs in the format folder-name.test

For example, http://wordpress.test/ would serve a website with the document root of ~/Sites/wordpress

This isn’t really how we work, most projects have a “web” sub-folder inside a project to allow for files outside of the document root. So for setting up local sites I’ll need to use the valet link command to set each site up manually.

To create a link from ~/Sites/simonrjones.net/web for the host simonrjones.test it’s simple enough:

cd ~/Sites/simonrjones.net/web
valet link simonrjones

I can verify the sites setup in Valet via:

valet links

The final step is to ensure WordPress knows about this new local test URL, otherwise WordPress has a habit of redirecting to what it thinks is the correct blog URL.

I use the multi-environment config on my personal blog so this is easily achieved by changing the ‘domain’ value for the ‘development’ environment in the file wp-config.env.php

 'development' => [
        'domain' => 'simonrjones.test',

I can test this now via the URL http://simonrjones.test/ – which worked first time!

Testing with a more complex setup

Next, I tried this with one of our client’s WordPress multi-site installs, which is a little more complex. The site is hosted at WP Engine so it uses the standard wp-config.php setup (not multi-environment config).

CD’ing into the project folder and running valet link is enough to make the site run from a local *.test URL. However, trying to access the site doesn’t work and WordPress multi-site redirects the request to what it thinks is the correct URL.

I have WP CLI installed, so I tried to use this to update old site URLs to the new *.test ones, but I couldn’t see a way to reliably do this for multi-sites. So I went back to straightforward SQL!

UPDATE wp_options SET option_value='http://clientdomain.test' WHERE option_name='siteurl' OR option_name='home';

UPDATE wp_site SET domain='clientdomain.test' WHERE id=1;

UPDATE wp_sitemeta SET meta_value='http://clientdomain.test/' WHERE meta_key='siteurl';

UPDATE wp_blogs SET domain='clientdomain.test' WHERE blog_id=1;
UPDATE wp_blogs SET domain='site1.clientdomain.test' WHERE blog_id=2;
UPDATE wp_blogs SET domain='site2.clientdomain.test' WHERE blog_id=3;
UPDATE wp_blogs SET domain='site3.clientdomain.test' WHERE blog_id=4;
UPDATE wp_blogs SET domain='site4.clientdomain.test' WHERE blog_id=5;

UPDATE wp_2_options SET option_value='http://site1.clientdomain.test' WHERE option_name='siteurl' OR option_name='home';
UPDATE wp_3_options SET option_value='http://site2.clientdomain.test' WHERE option_name='siteurl' OR option_name='home';
UPDATE wp_4_options SET option_value='http://site3.clientdomain.test' WHERE option_name='siteurl' OR option_name='home';
UPDATE wp_5_options SET option_value='http://site4.clientdomain.test' WHERE option_name='siteurl' OR option_name='home';

In addition I had to set the wp-config.php setting to the default site URL

define('DOMAIN_CURRENT_SITE', 'clientdomain.test');

Finally, I had to setup additional URLs to serve the multi-site URLs in Valet:

valet link site1.clientdomain.test
valet link site2.clientdomain.test
valet link site3.clientdomain.test
valet link site4.clientdomain.test

The above appeared to serve the multi-site install from the different URLs. However, when I attempted to login to WordPress I was presented with a white screen of death.

I tried valet log and viewed the Nginx error log. Nothing. I refreshed the page a few times and WordPress came up. Navigating around most WordPress admin pages seemed to work, but I got the occassional slow page load or white page. On the front-end pages in sub-folders often seemed to not work on the first request. This is a little disoncerting. This may be caused by the complex WordPress setup, one of the installed plugins, or simply the fact it’s using Nginx and we’ve built these sites to work on Apache. It’s something I’ll have to look into.

Next steps

Valet certainly seems to be a useful tool and one that is very quick to setup. Things I’d like to look at next..

• Review the secure HTTPS option in Valet
• Take a look at Valet+, though it looks a little out of date compared with Valet.
• Can we customise the webserver used so it more closely matches our production environment (we use Apache instead of Nginx FastCGI)?
• Is there a WP CLI plugin to help change multi-site URLs? If not, we should write one!

If we can use a lightweight dev setup such as Valet it would be nice. Though as with everything in tech, it’s clearly not completely plain sailing! MAMP Pro is certainly easier to use and setup, though it’s the speed (web requests and CLI) which I’m starting to want improved more than MAMP appears able to offer.

Environments in Symfony

We use Symfony a lot at Studio 24 for building modern web applications. Our normal setup is to have a local development environment, a staging environment for clients to test code, and a production live site.

By default Symfony supports the following environments:

• dev – (development) intended for development purposes, can be used locally or on a hosting environment to test your application
• test – (automated tests) intended for use when running automated tests (e.g. phpunit)
• prod – (production) intended for the live web application

Ideally we would have a third web environment to represent staging, which is what we use to preview functionality before go-live. So that’s what I set out to do.

Adding a custom environment

I want to call my new environment stage to represent staging, since Symfony already uses shortened versions for other environments.

It turns out you can just add any old environment name and Symfony recognises this. So setting the new environment locally is really only a matter of updating your local environment settings file .env.local (you can also set this via actual server environment variables).

# Website environment
APP_ENV=stage

Environment configuration

Symfony loads environment variables from .env files. It uses the .env file for default values, then loads the .env.{environment} file for environment-specific settings. Finally, it loads the .env.local file for sensitive variables (e.g. API keys or database credentials – this file should not be committed to version control).

To help keep track of my staging environment variables I created a file at .env.stage to store these.

Package configuration

Different packages use YAML config files in the config/packages folder. I created the folder config/packages/stage/ which is used to store package configuration for the stage environment. It’s possible to inherit values from another environment via the imports key, which is really handy. Here I’m importing the prod settings for the stage environment.

# config/packages/stage/monolog.yaml
imports:
    - { resource: '../prod/' }

Composer packages

One gotcha is your PHP code may depend on a library that is loaded by Composer locally in your dev environment (via require-dev), but does not load on stage or prod.

When I first tested the above code, it crashed since Monolog was not found (this is used for logging). It turns out Monolog was loaded in my local dev environment via symfony/debug-pack which is setup to only install on require-dev in my composer file.

This simple composer require command quickly fixed it!

composer require symfony/monolog-bundle

Debug mode

Debug is enabled by default for dev and test environments, and disabled for prod and any new environments.

Normally I’d recommend not displaying debug mode for a staging site, since it is supposed to be an environment to preview the site and should work in the same was as production.

However, you can enable debug and the Symfony debug bar for your new stage environment. First set APP_DEBUG in your .env.local file:

APP_DEBUG=true

Next, ensure the debug bundles are enabled. Edit config/bundles.php and ensure the WebProfilerBundle and DebugBundle are both enabled for the new stage environment.

    Symfony\Bundle\WebProfilerBundle\WebProfilerBundle::class => ['dev' => true, 'test' => true, 'stage' => true],
   
    Symfony\Bundle\DebugBundle\DebugBundle::class => ['dev' => true, 'test' => true, 'stage' => true]

Finally, create the following config files:

# config/packages/stage/debug.yaml
imports:
    - { resource: '../dev/' }

# config/packages/stage/web_profiler.yaml
imports:
    - { resource: '../dev/' }

# config/routes/stage/web_profiler.yaml
web_profiler_wdt:
    resource: '@WebProfilerBundle/Resources/config/routing/wdt.xml'
    prefix: /_wdt

web_profiler_profiler:
    resource: '@WebProfilerBundle/Resources/config/routing/profiler.xml'
    prefix: /_profiler

Summary

That’s it! It turns out it’s very easy to setup new environments for Symfony 4, most of the work is in enabling any bundles you require and ensuring the right config files are setup for your new environment.