Quick and Dirty PHP 7.0 set up on Ubuntu 14.04 with APCu

This is how I got PHP 7 and APCu running on one of the entry-level Digital Ocean droplets:

PHP 7

sudo apt-get install python-software-properties
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ondrej/php-7.0
apt-get update && apt-get purge php5-fpm && apt-get --purge autoremove && apt-get install php7.0-fpm php7.0-mysql php7.0-gd php7.0-dev

If you need additional php7.0 packages, check the list:

sudo apt-cache search php7

In my enabled nginx site configs (I'm sure there's a place to put this globally, but I only had a couple of sites, so I didn't bother researching that for now):

Replace:

fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php5-fpm.sock; 

With:

fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php/php7.0-fpm.sock;

APCu

git clone https://github.com/krakjoe/apcu

Follow the instructions for building APCu in the INSTALL file

In addition to the updates to php.ini described in the INSTALL file, update the 'extensions_dir' directive:

extension_dir = "/usr/lib/php/20151012/"

Do the same for both the FPM and CLI versions of php.ini

Restart PHP-FPM and Nginx:

sudo service php7.0-fpm restart
sudo service nginx restart

That did it for me. With APCu installed, I can continue to use APC as the driver for session and cache in my Laravel 5 apps when Memcache, Redis, etc. are overkill.

Laravel Custom Logging

Building on this Laracast thread, I've been playing around with customizing logging in Laravel to take advantage of some of the Monolog processors. Cool stuff.

Site re-built using Laravel 5.1-dev

This site is even more a work-in-progress than usual as I've just re-built it using Laravel 5.1-dev. 

Using the Laravel Homestead "serve" command with Oh-My-Zsh

So I run an  "extras" script  after installing Laravel's Homestead that installs LDAP, Oracle Drivers, and Oh-My-Zsh among other things. But afterwards, I cannot run the "serve" command in the homestead VM to add new Nginx sites. I've finally figured out that the serve command is actually a bash shell alias function thingy inside .bash_aliases, so it's being ignored once I switch to Oh-My-Zsh.

Simply copying the serve function to .zshrc doesn't work due to some apparent syntax differences with bash and zsh. After digging around a bit, I've slightly modified the function to work now with zsh inside .zshrc:

Hopefully this helps someone else, or maybe someone has a better solution altogether.

Using Laravel's Artisan with Git for Deployment.

There are many ways to handle web application deployment. Decisions on what method to use depends a lot on what type of hosting environment you are using, as well as the size, scope, and critical nature of the application. 

I handle the deployment of several applications with my own artisan "push" command that utilizes Laravel's SSH remote facade. The command is below, but first there's a little setup necessary: