PHP CLI for Docker Wrapper for VSCode

This provides a PHP CLI wrapper for VS Code to run its language engine on a remote ssh server when PHP is not available natively in the host server.

Installation

Until released, the following needs to be added to the project's composer.json:

    "repositories": [
        {
            "type": "vcs",
            "url": "https://github.com/consilience/php-docker-cli.git"
        }
    ],
    "minimum-stability": "dev"

Then the packaged is installed using:

composer require consilience/php-docker-cli --dev

From the host server, i.e. from outside the container running PHP, but where the code is located, PHP commands can be run through docker at:

vendor/bin/php-cli

For example:

$ vendor/bin/php-cli -v
PHP 7.4.13 (cli) (built: Dec 17 2020 09:02:29) ( NTS )
Copyright (c) The PHP Group
Zend Engine v3.4.0, Copyright (c) Zend Technologies

When setting up the VSCode editor, the php-cli script is used as the PHP executable. The PHP environment has access to the same filesystem as your home directory.

For example, the PHP code validator would be told where to find the PHP executable with this setting against your remote ssh settings file:

{
    "php.validate.executablePath": "vendor/bin/php-cli"
}

Similarly, Intellesense uses this setting:

{
    "php.executablePath": "vendor/bin/php-cli"
}

Each application you are working on gets its own PHP CLI script, so later they could all be running different versions of PHP as appropriate for each project.

The above paths are relative to your project workspace, which is assumed to by the root of your project where teh vendor directory is located. Tweak the paths as appropriate if you have a different setup.

TODO

These are very early days, and this package is created to meet our specific use-case. However, we would like to make it more flexible over time, and configurable.

The restrictions and assumptions that apply at the moment are:

• The latest alpine-7 PHP container is good enough and runs the version of PHP needed for the project. The ability to configure the PHP version would be handy.
• No special PHP extensions are required; this is just for VSCode to be able to validate and parse the project source code and run a PHP language server.
• All the source code is under $HOME. The $HOME path will be available as a volume within the container with the same root directory, so /home/me/my-code in the host server will also be /home/me/my-code within the PHP container.
• Docker is available and running.

Our use-case is VSCode connecting to a remote server with the source code located under the user's home directory. The code was running in a Micro Kubernetes cluster, and no PHP exectutable was available in the host server. VSCode must be able to run PHP on the host server, so does so through the CLI command that this package provides within the project.

By putting this into a package, it is quick and easy to require across multiple projects without a lot of manual setup.

Further instructions on how and where to set up VSCode are on the TODO list.