Performance Tuning your Laravel & PHP Applications

Slides from the December Laravel TO talk are now up on Speaker Deck! Thanks to everyone who came out on this very cold night!

Installing TinyFugue on Mac with Python Bindings

For 99% of players who don't require Python bindings, you can save yourself a lot of headache by installing tf via brew:
brew install tiny-fugue
For the rest of us, please sit tight. ;)

After upgrading to Mac OS X High Sierra, my compiled TinyFugue stopped working. Referring once again to Ron Dippold’s excellent resource on TinyFugue scripting, I found the link to the pre-compiled binaries was broken.

Following Ron’s instructions, I was able to get as far as the make command before the build failed, with errors about incompatible architectures:

Undefined symbols for architecture x86_64:
  "_pcre_info", referenced from:
      _complete_macro in macro.o
      _tf_reg_compile_fl in pattern.o
ld: symbol(s) not found for architecture x86_64
clang: error: linker command failed with exit code 1 (use -v to see invocation)
make[1]: *** [tf] Error 1
make: *** [files] Error 2

Unfortunately, TinyFugue was calling a legacy API method pcre_info which has since been removed.

Long story short, here are the steps I took to get TinyFugue installed on the latest Mac OS (10.13.1 High Sierra at the time of this writing):

Before you begin, it's a good idea to ensure the necessary development tools are installed. You can confirm this by running:
sudo xcode-select --install

• Download the latest ZIP source for TinyFugue on Sourceforge (we’re using TinyFugue version 5.0 beta 8 for this example)
• Extract the TinyFugue files (or double-click on the archive) :

   ➜  unzip -a tf-50b8.zip
   ➜  rm tf-50b8/help/html2tf
  

  As per Ron’s instructions, we needed to remove the pre-built html2tf library.

• Download Ron’s original patch file and save to the tf-50b8 directory
• Apply Ron’s patches:

    ➜  cd tf-50b8
    # try a dry-run first to see if the patch succeeds
    ➜  patch -p 1 -u -N --dry-run < tf-python-patch 
    ➜  patch -p 1 -u -N < tf-python-patch
  

• Download the second patch file and save to the tf-50b8 directory. Apply the second set of patches:

    # try a dry-run first to see if the patch succeeds
    ➜  patch -p 1 -u -N --dry-run < tf-pcre-patch 
    ➜  patch -p 1 -u -N < tf-pcre-patch
  

• With the patches applied, you can now proceed to configuring and building the binary.

    ➜  ./configure
    ➜  make
    ➜  make install
  

• Once the install completes, the tf binary should now be available on your path.

If there’s a request for it, I can look into creating a homebrew package with the patches already applied.

Effective Testing for PHP Applications

Slides from the November Laravel TO talk are now up on Speaker Deck!