When developing APIs from scratch, you can do it in the mode I get behind the PC and start programming or I learn about the standards first and then program in compliance with these standards.

And if we lose sight of these norms, we quickly come back to writing endpoints like /articles/insert that are semantically incorrect (and even stupid). In fact, we'll never GET here.

The purpose of the article below is to list best practices by way of examples.

If there was only one, it would be Rector. Rector is extremely powerful and brilliant and, you know what, it's free!

Rector is a tremendous application to scan and automatically upgrade your codebase to a given version of PHP and this means, too, to inspect how you're coding.

Rector will look at every line of code, every loop, every conditional test, every function, every class in a PHP source code and suggest improvements.

In this role, it will not only detect improvements to my code (like a static analysis tool) but, and this is the biggest advantage for me, it will show me how I can become a better developer.

I REALLY LOVE RECTOR 💕

• Updated 2024-02-23, install Rector automatically
• Updated 2024-02-29, install Error Lens and Code Spell Checker

Let's imagine one of the following situations:

1. You are working with several people on the same PHP project and you notice that one or other person does not comply with your quality criteria when it comes to the layout of the code. You like to use four spaces for indentation, you want the brace that marks the start of a function to be on the line, you don't want to see any more useless spaces at the end of the line, ... and damned! you notice that some people don't care about this.

2. You are working alone on a project and don't want to lose time to configure your VSCode experience. You wish to start very quickly with a lot of tools already installed in VSCode so you can put your focus to the code, not the editor.

The ultimate solution: using a devcontainer in VSCode.

By using a devcontainer, you (and your team colleague) will use a preinstalled environment and everyone will have exactly the same. You'll save yourself a lot of time by not having to configure your system, and you'll be able to start coding straight away, supported by a range of quality analysis tools.

So you've created your own blog using Docker and Docusaurus. By following steps explained in the Running Docusaurus with Docker article, now, you've a blog with the list of articles stored on your machine; in a blog folder.

Let's go further.

If you're writing for Docusaurus, there are a few tips to know.

This article is by no means exhaustive, but for me it's a reminder of the features that are really essential and must not be forgotten.

As you know, this blog is powered by Docusaurus.

I'm writing blog posts in Markdown files (one post = one .md file) and Docusaurus will convert them into HTML pages.

In this first article, we're going to learn how to install Docusaurus... ouch, sorry, not install Docusaurus as we're going to use Docker to simplify our lives.

You are writing Markdown .md files (and you're so right) and you just wish to check (and autofix) some issues like having multiple blank lines, mixing bullet types (- and * in the same document), using a # title followed by ### (i.e. you forget the level ##) and many more.

There is a tool for this: Markdown lint and, a Docker image peterdavehello/markdownlint.

Let's learn how to use it.

LimeSurvey is an open-source survey tool that allows users to create and conduct surveys online. It is a powerful and intuitive tool that can be used by everyone.

Once again, it's easy to play with it and create a sandbox site to take a look on all his features; thanks to Docker.

To do this, we'll use the https://github.com/martialblog/docker-limesurvey Docker image.

Matomo is a GDPR-compliant tracking tool for your website. I've finally decided to install it so that I can get the blog's traffic figures; find out which articles are the most widely read, which topics are of most interest, etc., not just out of curiosity but also to get a better idea of the audience.

I've chosen for the self-hosted solution (because it's free) and like that my traffic figures remains on my own server.

In previous articles, I explained how to fight against spam if you've a cpanel or PlanetHoster's N0C infrastructure.

What if we automated as many things as possible?

In the PlanetHoster's N0C infrastructure article , I showed that you need to write rules for RoundCube to identify sources of spam and remove them. These rules have to be created from the RoundCube interface and, well, ok, that's not optimized at all.

Let's look at how to do as little as possible and still be a hardcore spam fighter.