How to use phalcon-devtools to accelerate Phalcon development

Hello,
I'm Mandai, the Wild Team member of the development team.

Phalcon is a rather unusual framework in that the core of the framework does not exist as a PHP file, but is instead loaded and used by PHP itself.
This structure is what makes it the fastest framework, but as someone familiar with open source, I found it difficult to get started at first because it has no substance.

The phalcon-devtools that we will introduce this time provides phalcon with commands similar to bake in CakePHP and oil in FuelPHP

Installing phalcon-devtools

Installing phalcon-devtools is very easy.
Please see the previous blog post for instructions on how to install phalcon-devtools.

The version of devtools tested this time is Phalcon DevTools (3.0.4)

 

What you can do with phalcon commands

With the phalcon command, you can do various things by setting the following string as the first argument

• info (alias of: i)
• commands (alias of: list, enumerate)
• controller (alias of: create-controller)
• module (alias of: create-module)
• model (alias of: create-model)
• all-models (alias of: create-all-models)
• project (alias of: create-project)
• scaffold (alias of: create-scaffold)
• migration (alias of: create-migration)
• webtools (alias of: create-webtools)

Let's take a look at each one!

 

phalcon info command

This command displays information about the phalcon runtime environment.
When I ran it, the result was as follows:

Environment:: OS: Linux localhost.localdomain 3.10.0-514.6.1.el7.x86_64 #1 SMP Wed Jan 18 13:06:36 UTC 2017 x86_64 PHP Version: 7.0.15 PHP SAPI: cli PHP Bin: /usr/bin/php PHP Extension Dir: /usr/lib64/php/modules PHP Bin Dir: /usr/bin Loaded PHP config: /etc/php.ini Versions:: Phalcon DevTools Version: 3.0.4 Phalcon Version: 3.0.3 AdminLTE Version: 2.3.6

 

phalcon project command

Create a new project.
If you are creating a new system, you should start with this command.

If --type=modules is selected, a module configuration of front + cli will be created by default

If you run commands other than the phalcon project outside the phalcon project (more precisely, in the path after being rewritten with --directory), the following error will occur

Error: This command should be invoked inside a Phalcon project directory.

To aid in this determination, projects created with the "phalcon project" command contain a directory called ".phalcon."

 

phalcon module command

This command does not have a base directory path or other settings like the phalcon project, so it must be run within the phalcon project directory

 

phalcon controller command

Even if you run this command directly under the project directory, an error occurs saying "Error: This command should be invoked inside a Phalcon project directory.", so it seems that the --output option is essential

 

phalcon model command

This command contains functions related to various models.
Before executing this command, you must complete the DB access settings in config/config.php.

If you create a model for a table that has a field with a hyphen, the creation will work, but you will get an error because PHP rules state that hyphens cannot be used in class property names

PHP Parse error: syntax error, unexpected '-', expecting ',' or ';' in /path/to/project/app/models/users.php on line 34

Be careful when designing your database

 

phalcon all-models command

If you have already designed the database for your application and the tables have been created in the database, you can run the "phalcon all-models" command without any arguments to quickly create models for all existing tables. This
is essentially the same as the "phalcon model" command.

Once this is done, it may be a good idea to recreate any models that require individual configuration using the "phalcon model" command with the --force option

 

phalcon migration command

This is a command that can handle DB migration

Even if the number of columns is reduced due to a version downgrade, the table is not recreated but the columns are deleted using ALTER TABLE, so it is unlikely that the table will become empty

If you run "phalcon migration generate" without any arguments, it will use version number based versioning.
If you use the --descr option with generate, it will switch to timestamp based versioning.

What makes it confusing is that you can mix both types of migrations

After trying various things, it seems that it is best to perform normal migrations using version number management, and when you want to create a special migration file for a specific timing, perform the migration with the --descr option

For example, create migration A created with version 1.0.0, and then create migration B with the same content but with the --descr option.
Even if you run migration B while migration A is applied, you will get the message "Info: Version 1.0.0 was already applied", so it seems that migration A and migration B are internally confirmed to be the same.

 

phalcon scaffold command

Running this command will create the model/view/controller all at once

We will also create screens with search, new creation, and update functions.
Each function is created with its own implementation in the controller, so if you are creating a page that only performs simple CRUD, it will be much faster to implement it by modifying what was created in the scaffold.

 

phalcon webtools commands

This module is laid out with Twitter Bootstrap and allows you to easily use Phalcon commands in the browser.
It can be disabled later, so you can make it available during development and disable it when releasing.

Phalcon commands have many functions, so it's great to be able to easily configure them using the GUI

 

Included items

Directly under the phalcon-devtools directory is a directory called ide, which
contains tools that make it easier to implement Phalcon in an IDE.

 

This is a script to create a stub.
Replace the CPHALCON_DIR constant at the beginning of the program with the path where Phalcon.so is installed.

// Example define('CPHALCON_DIR' , '/usr/lib64/php/modules/');

After rewriting, when you run it, it will create a directory named after the Phalcon version and generate stubs for the current Phalcon environment.
However, the latest version of stubs is included, so there is little need to run it yourself.

 

It contains a command line tool for running phalcon commands from the phpstorm console.
It is called phalcon.sh and does not check the installation, but it may be useful to register it.

 

This contains stubs for functions implemented in the latest version of Phalcon.
If you are using the latest version, it is easier to use this instead of running gen-stubs.php.

 

Template Modification

We now know that the phalcon command can automatically generate projects, models, and controllers, but if you create several projects, you'll probably find yourself making the same changes every time.
The Phalcon command uses templates for various automatic generation tasks, so if you rewrite the templates, you'll be freed from such tedious work!
Templates are used for projects, modules, and scaffolds, and the parts surrounded by "@@" are replaced, so it's a good idea to keep modifying the base parts to make them easier to use.

Once you have installed phalcon-devtools, you can copy the template to ~/Documents using the following command:

lang=bash cp -a $PTOOLSPATH/templates ~/Documents

 

That's all