PHP in Gitpod

Gitpod supports PHP right out of the box, but more advanced features such as debugging can be configured, so here is how to do it!

There is also an awesome community project that utilizes ddev with Gitpod and makes things much easier. Be sure to check it out first from below!

https://ddev.github.io/ddev-gitpod-launcher/

With it, you can run XDebug out of the box, change PHP versions on the fly, and much more!

Example Repositories

Repository Description Try it
symfony-demo A PHP/Symfony reference application following best practices Open in Gitpod
magento2gitpod Magento 2 optimized setup for Gitpod: Nginx, MySQL, PHP 7.2, PHP-FPM and more Open in Gitpod
koel A personal music streaming server that works Open in Gitpod
drupal Drupal 9 with MySQL, suitable for site building and contrib module development Open in Gitpod
phpmyadmin A phpMyAdmin example with Node.js, a REST API and MySQL for data persistence Open in Gitpod

Switching PHP versions

Gitpod installs PHP from Ondřej Surý’s PPA in here. The default version should be set to PHP8.

But let’s say you want to switch to PHP7.4, follow along! At first, add a .gitpod.Dockerfile file on your repo with the following content in it:

language icon language: 
dockerfile
# You can find the new timestamped tags here: https://hub.docker.com/r/gitpod/workspace-full/tags
FROM gitpod/workspace-full:2022-05-08-14-31-53

# Change your version here
RUN sudo update-alternatives --set php $(which php7.4)

Secondly, reference the above Dockerfile in your .gitpod.yml configuration file, like so:

language icon language: 
yml
image:
    file: .gitpod.Dockerfile

Now you can See it in action on a new workspace

Debugging PHP in Gitpod

PHP debugging example

The PHP Debug extension allows debugging PHP applications from within Gitpod.

To get this extension for your project, you must do two things:

First, you must create a .gitpod.Dockerfile for your repository:

language icon language: 
dockerfile
FROM gitpod/workspace-full:2022-05-08-14-31-53

RUN sudo install-packages php-xdebug

Second, reference the above Dockerfile in a .gitpod.yml file, and then also install the extension, like so:

language icon language: 
yml
image:
    file: .gitpod.Dockerfile

vscode:
    extensions:
        - felixfbecker.php-debug

Now you can See it in action on a new workspace

Later, you can head over to Run and Debug on the left hand side and have fun debugging PHP! You can also create a launch.json file.

Finally, here is a full example repository containing the complete Gitpod PHP debug configuration described above. You can try it by clicking here:

Open in Gitpod

PECL Package Manager

Gitpod’s default workspace image also comes with the PECL package manager pre-installed. To install packages with it, you must use sudo pecl install <EXTENSION> in your repository’s .gitpod.Dockerfile, e.g. like so:

language icon language: 
dockerfile
FROM gitpod/workspace-full

RUN sudo pecl channel-update pecl.php.net && \
    sudo pecl install <EXTENSION>

where <EXTENSION> is the PHP extension you want to install, e.g. xdebug.

Setting GitHub token to Composer

Some composer plugins like symfony/flex does direct API call against GitHub to fetch additional information. These unauthenticated requests will be rate-limited and may fail your task steps. To fix this behavior we can use the default credential-helper to obtain a GitHub Token and configure composer properly

language icon language: 
bash
composer config --global github-oauth.github.com $(printf '%s\n' host=github.com | gp credential-helper get | sort | head -2 | tail -1 | sed 's;password=;;')

Further Reading

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