How to use phalcon-devtools to accelerate Phalcon development

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

Phalcon is a rather unusual framework in that it loads phalcon.so into PHP itself, meaning the core of the framework doesn't exist as a PHP file.
This form is the reason why it's one of the fastest frameworks, but for someone accustomed to open source, the lack of a physical form initially made it seem difficult to get used to.

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.
I've summarized the installation method in a previous blog post, so please check that out.

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 the execution environment information for phalcon.
The results when I ran it on my system were 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

This command creates a new project.
When creating a new system, you'll 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 the database design for the application you're about to create is complete and the tables have been built in the database, you can quickly create models for all existing tables by typing the "phalcon all-models" command without any arguments.
It's basically 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

Running "phalcon migration generate" without arguments will use version number-based version control.
Using the --descr option with generate will switch to timestamp-based version control.

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, if you create migration A using 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 already applied, you will get the message "Info: Version 1.0.0 was already applied," which suggests that the system internally verifies that migration A and migration B are identical.

 

phalcon scaffold command

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

Additionally, screens with search, create, and update functions will be created.
Since each function itself is implemented on the controller, if you are creating a page that only performs simple CRUD operations, it is overwhelmingly faster to modify what has been created with scaffold.

 

phalcon webtools commands

This module integrates into your project a layout using Twitter Bootstrap, allowing you to easily use Phalcon commands in your browser.
It can be disabled later, so you can enable it during development and disable it upon release.

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

 

Included items

There is a directory called "ide" directly under the phalcon-devtools directory.
It mainly contains tools to make it easier to implement Phalcon in an IDE.

 

This is a script for creating 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 the file and running it, a directory named after the Phalcon version will be created, and stubs for the current Phalcon environment will be generated.
However, since the latest version of the stubs is included, you don't really need to run it yourself.

 

Among them is a command-line tool that allows you to execute the phalcon command from the PhpStorm console.
It's basically a phalcon.sh script that doesn't perform an installation check, but it might be convenient to register.

 

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

 

Template Modification

I understand that the phalcon command can automatically generate projects, models, and controllers, but when creating several projects, you'll likely encounter the same parts that need to be modified each time.
The Phalcon command uses templates when automatically generating various things, so you can be freed from such tedious work by rewriting the templates!
Templates are used for projects, modules, and scaffolds, and the parts enclosed in "@@" are replaced, so it's a good idea to modify 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