Day 3: Setup HomeBrew & Learning PHP

What is HomeBrew?

Homebrew is a powerful package manager for macOS that simplifies the installation of software and utilities. Whether you’re a developer, sysadmin, or a casual user looking to enhance your system, Homebrew offers a straightforward way to manage dependencies and applications. Here’s a quick guide to get you started with installing and using Homebrew on your Mac.

How to install homebrew?

Head over to https://brew.sh/ and copy the following cmd

/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"

Open the local terminal and run it.
You then need to manually export the path for it to work

export PATH=/opt/homebrew/bin:/opt/homebrew/sbin:$PATH

Once done, You can use it to install other packages

Installing Composer using brew

open up the terminal and run the following cmd

brew install composer

once promoted, press “y” and continue
Now you need may need to add vendor files to $path

Setup IDE & Vscode

Go through rtcamp guide for vscode setup. using the link
Or you can quickly setup vs code using the following profile. link
You can go to vscode, click on settings wheel and go to profiles
Click on import and import using the provided link.

What is PHP?

PHP is a server scripting language, and a powerful tool for making dynamic and interactive Web pages.

PHP is an acronym for “PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor”
PHP is a widely-used, open source scripting language
PHP scripts are executed on the server
PHP is free to download and use

Why PHP?

It is powerful enough to be at the core of the biggest blogging system on the web (WordPress)!
It is deep enough to run large social networks!
It is also easy enough to be a beginner’s first server side language!

What is a PHP File?

PHP files can contain text, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and PHP code
PHP code is executed on the server, and the result is returned to the browser as plain HTML
PHP files have extension “.php“

How it works? Example

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
    <meta charset="UTF-8">
    <title>PHP Example</title>
</head>
<body>

<h1>PHP Example Page</h1>

<?php
// PHP code block
$greeting = "Hello, PHP!";
echo "<p>$greeting</p>";
?>

<p>This is a static paragraph.</p>

<script>
// JavaScript code embedded in PHP file
console.log("This is JavaScript!");
</script>

</body>
</html>

Mid-Day Questions

1. Explain briefly about the Include vs Require vs Include once vs Require Once in PHP.

Include: It is mostly used to include another non-essential file such as header, footer or a notification card. If not found then it will continue executing rest of script.

Require: It is used to include essential components of site and In case any of required files are missing then it will throw an fatal error and stop execution of script
Ex:

index.php // requires that routes file is present

<?php
$document_root = $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'];
 require($document_root. "/../src/routes.php")
 ?>

routes.php // can include various files like this

<?php
include("home.php")
?>

Include_once: It is used to add a file a single time, if file is already present then it will not include it again.

Ex:

<?php
include("home.php");
include_once('home.php'); // will not be loaded again
?>

but if we switch order then it be loaded twice as when first statement ran, it was not present

<?php
include_once('home.php'); // loads home
include("home.php"); // again loads home

?>

Similarly, require_once: is used to load file a single time, and if not found it will throw fatal error and stop execution of script.

<?php
require("home.php");
require_once('home.php'); // will not be loaded again
?>

2. What is the difference between $GLOBALS, $_SERVER, $_REQUEST, $_GET and $_POST.

These variables are called superglobals in php.

Here is key definition for each :

$GLOBALS: are variables that can be accessed from any scope or functions. They can be used inside function by using global keyword or by using the $GLOBALS syntax.

Ex:
$data = “rtCamp”;
function findCamp() {
return global $data;
}
echo findCamp();

$_SERVER: are variables that hold information about server headers, paths, and script locations.

Ex:
echo $_SERVER['PHP_SELF'];

$_REQUEST: basically it is an array that contains data from other superglobals ($_GET, $_POST , $_COOKIES), It used to collect data.

$_POST: It is used to read the variables we received via html POST Request

Ex:

<form method=“POST” action=“login.php”
    <input name=“name” type=“text” />
    <button type=“submit” > Submit </button>
</form>

then in login.php
we can
<?php
    $echo $_POST[‘name’];
?>

$_GET: It is used to access data such as Query string,

Ex: From URL.com/query=“rtCamp”

3. Where should we use the $_SERVER and $GLOBALS, and can we override them?

$_SERVER can be used to read the user agent and to see which browser a user is using

$_Global is used to store the variables that are used across scopes, usually its prefered to not use global variables.

Yes, both $_SERVER & $_Global variables can be override by us.

Ex:

    $_Global[x] = "newValue" // sets new value

   <?php
    echo "Home";
    echo $_SERVER["HTTP_USER_AGENT"]; // outputs "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/126.0.0.0 Safari/537.36"
    $_SERVER["HTTP_USER_AGENT"] = "NEW";
    echo $_SERVER["HTTP_USER_AGENT"] //outputs "NEW"
    ?>

4. How to read XML files in PHP?

SimpleXML is a PHP extension that can be used to read data from xml file and manipulate them.

<?php
// $file = fopen('/Users/leaveitblank/Local Sites/leaveitblank/app/src/test.xml', 'r');
   
 $xml= simplexml_load_file("/Users/leaveitblank/Local Sites/leaveitblank/app/src/test.xml")  or die("Error:cannot find or create object");
    echo $xml->novel[0]->title . "<br>";
    echo $xml->novel[1]->title;
?>

5. Let’s suppose I have a template HTML (such as an email template) and I want to put its content inside a PHP file, is it possible? Which functions can be used to achieve the same?

yes, just like require , include works for php file, it also works for html files.

Ex.
    create an html file my.html
        <html>
            <body>
                <h1>Hello from html</h1>
            </body>
        </html>
    then import it like this
    <?php
        include_once('home.php');
        include("my.html");
    ?>

Thank you for reading through the post… More will be added.