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arnoldp's avatar

Some advice please ...

I have developed a website from scratch, without any prior web knowledge, using Laravel ... started with 5.0 and have been keeping up to date and have "paused" on 5.5 ... LTS ... Anyway, I have loved every minute of my time working on it and it has now been live for 2 years and I have managed to give my users a very usable/friendly/24-7 secure system "in the cloud" .. I use datatables and modals extensively and the performance is good for what it does ... I recently added some Vue.js to one of my sessions and after all the jquery/javascript/ajax that I have become used to, I now realize that client side based website are the way to go. My Laravel experience has been built up with the help of Dr Google, in my spare time. I am a Unix bod ... my servers run Ubuntu and my DEV is in the cloud and I use Netbeans8.2 IDE on the server and connect via remote desktop ... All works fine, but is time consuming ... I cant get VIM working on Netbeans so am stuck with a mouse based editor ... and get pretty frustrated with not being able to use VIM type editing. My dilemma is that I know what I don't know ... and that is a lot ... I have re-joined laracasts.com and my plan is to slowly start from scratch and get a good understanding of the framework and how to interact with it. I watch Jeffery's videos and am awestruck how easy he makes it look. SO ... the advice I need ... 1. Best Practice for a DEV site? (local/cloud ... Windows/Mac/Linux) 2. What IDE? Other than that, I just need time to unravel all my bad code/habits and adapt and embrace the new, better way of doing things Thanks for a great forum ...

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vlad_kash's avatar

My preference for local development:

To send your local changes to the server I suggest you use the version control system (I use GIT, a guide for GIT: https://githowto.com).

Imho, the best PHP IDE is PhpStorm. It contains a lot of helpful tools for automatization your common actions (for example, easy tool for working with git, remote server, MySQL database etc.).

P.S. For writing clear code I suggest you learn this site: https://refactoring.guru/refactoring. It is a useful resource to improve your code.

arnoldp's avatar

Thanks for your feedback ... I already use a LEMP stack on Ubuntu ... and GIT for all my version control. Will have a look at PhpStorm as well

Dalma's avatar

I'm a very big fan of PhpStorm as it's a great IDE.

D9705996's avatar

@ARNOLDP - Just remember phpstorms isn't free and is about $9 / month after 30 day trial. You might get value for money but for me you can achieve 80% in a free IDE like VSCode and there is a tutorial on setting up for laravel.

https://laracasts.com/series/visual-studio-code-for-php-developers

There are loads of useful [extension](https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/search?term=Laravel&target=VSCode&category=All categories&sortBy=Relevance) too.

arnoldp's avatar

Hi .. Yup ... There is a 1 month free evaluation period, so I am using that and will look at VS-code as well ... So far, PHPStorm looks "lekker" ... (South African work for very nice!!)

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