Category: Laravel

Using psysh in Shared Hosting or Limited User Environments

Posted on by Andrew Minion

When using psysh or Laravel’s php artisan tinker in a limited user’s environment, you may run into this error:

Unable to create PsySH runtime directory. Make sure PHP is able to write to {some directory path} in order to continue.

This is caused by psysh trying to use a path that’s not accessible to the user.

To fix, add a file at ~/.config/psysh/config.php with this content:

<?php
return [
    'runtimeDir' => '~/tmp'
];

Using Laravel artisan tinker and psysh with Xdebug

Posted on by Andrew Minion

I often use Xdebug for troubleshooting and interactively debugging local code as I write it.

Laravel’s artisan command is extremely useful for running code interactively during development. (It’s based on another utility named psysh.)

It can be very useful to set some debug breakpoints and then run code interactively using artisan, but occasionally when I run php artisan tinker, the PHP shell just sits there and doesn’t accept any input until I kill my xdebug listener.

Thanks to this issue, I finally have a solution.

Add this to the psysh config file (~/.config/psysh/config.php on macOS):

<?php
return [
  'usePcntl' => false,
];

VS Code and Laravel Tasks

Posted on by Andrew Minion

Several of my recent projects are Laravel apps that use Horizon to manage the queue and run jobs.

However, I frequently forgot to run php artisan horizon when opening the project, and sometimes spent a bit of time trying to figure out why a job hadn’t run before remembering. 🤦

In addition—and this is a relatively minor annoyance—even when I do remember to start Horizon, sometimes I’d like to see the metrics dashboard showing how many jobs have run in the past few minutes.

Edit: I added npm run dev to help with Tailwind JIT mode and Vite asset building.

Workspace Tasks

Enter VS Code’s Tasks feature. This can automatically start running tasks when a workspace is opened.

To get set up:

  1. If you haven’t yet, go to File > Save Workspace As… and save a workspace config file to somewhere on your hard drive
  2. Open the command palette (command-shift-P) and activate “Tasks: Manage Automatic Tasks in Folder”
  3. Activate “Allow Automatic Tasks”
  4. Open the command palette again and activate “Workspaces: Open Workspace Configuration File”
  5. Add the following to the workspace config file:

Now every time I open the workspace, assets are rebuilt as I modify them; Horizon, Pulse, and the scheduler start running automatically; and stale logs and failed jobs are pruned, keeping my database at a manageable size.