Testing emails in Laravel

Software testing is a key aspect of writing an high-quality code, and helps ensure that any future changes don’t unexpectedly break anything.  Automation increases the repeatability of this task and is easily applied to Laravel.

Many modern web apps use email to send welcome information or notifications to users based upon certain events.  Even with a well setup test environment, you will want to stop possible hundreds or thousands of test emails being sent.  And there is an easy solution.

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memcached for PHP sessions tutorial

Sessions are a simple mechanism for web technologies like PHP to create a unique ID for each visitor which can then be used to persist data between page requests. Upon their first visit, a cookie is dropped in the user’s browser with the generated ID which the server then uses to store data about this session until the cookie expires or is deleted.

This post explorer the use of memcached as the PHP session handler, and explains the pro’s and con’s of its use compared to the default.

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PHP fpm process manager options explained

PHP FPM (FastCGI Process Manager) is a popular technology for processing php directives, particularly when used in conjunction with NGINX although it can be used with Apache.   

In a common deployment scenario, the webserver is configured as a reverse-proxy with fpm providing the heavy lifting by processing the php code.  Some of the most significant benefits of this approach are the ability to scale both up and out as your site or application grows.

Although every Linux distribution will work ‘out of the box’, there are a number of parameters which can be tuned to enhance performance.

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