In this episode of Running in Production, Mubashar Iqbal talks about building a site to find podcast episodes with Laravel and PHP. It’s hosted on DigitalOcean using Forge and has been up and running since mid 2019.

Mubs talks about using a bit of Vue as needed, not upgrading to the latest Laravel immediately, interesting problems around parsing RSS feeds, how Forge lets him easily host his site, understanding the nuances of your app’s domain and more.

Topics Include

4:50 – Motivation for using Laravel and PHP over a bunch of other choices
8:20 – It’s using Laravel 6 with VueJS on the front-end for some parts
11:30 – The app will get updated to the TALL stack but not quite yet
13:04 – It’s a monolithic app in 1 git repo
16:07 – It’s mostly using Blade templates with Vue thrown in where needed
19:12 – MySQL is powering the database which is managed by RDS
21:09 – Reading in RSS feeds in background jobs and processing Open Graph images
26:07 – You need to get approved by Mubs before you can submit episodes
28:35 – Redis is powering the background jobs
33:11 – nginx / Let’s Encrypt and it’s hosted on DigitalOcean using Forge
39:06 – The deployment process from development to production
45:49 – There’s about 3k lines of PHP code and a few hundred lines of JS
47:16 – Secrets are managed through an env file that you put on your server
48:41 – Database backups happen every day and everything else is backed up too
51:38 – Sentry is in charge of exception handling and Uptime Robot for site monitoring
55:26 – Best tips? Understand the nuances of the app you’re building
56:30 – Web tech is moving fast, will HTML over the wire be main stream soon?
59:06 – Mubs has his own site at https://mubs.me and he’s on Twitter too

Links

📄 References

https://transistor.fm/
https://twitter.com/taylorotwell (creator of Laravel)
https://twitter.com/calebporzio/ (creator of Livewire)
https://twitter.com/jeffrey_way (creator of Mix / Laracasts)
https://forge.laravel.com/
https://podcastindex.org/

⚙️ Tech Stack

🛠 Libraries Used

https://github.com/spatie/browsershot

Support the Show

This episode does not have a sponsor and this podcast is a labor of love. If you want to support the show, the best way to do it is to purchase one of my courses or suggest one to a friend.

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