Problem

Managed Redis instances are expensive. But Redis is amazing, I use it for handling cache, sessions and queues.
When speaking to the AWS team about ways of cutting our bills down they recommended moving to DynamoDB and SQS, my initial question was:

“How do I run the same stuff locally when developing so im not incurring costs?”

Their answer was:

“Just run it against a real instance?” - ¯_(ツ)_/¯

I’m really, really big on being able to run things locally. So I set out on working out how I could do the above.

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I’ve pretty much switched to using docker for everything when doing local development now.

My set up involves using a docker-compose.yml file for the core application dependencies that can be run in production and a docker-compose.override.yml file for development. This override file is mostly a load of “support” containers that get used in development, things like php, artisan, npm as well as things like mysql and redis that would be handled elsewhere in production.

Since switching to this development model I’ve just accepted not getting around to getting BrowserSync working· This weekend whilst battling some other issues my fingers got tired of pressing ctrl+r every few seconds so I figured I’d give myself a win by trying to tackle this.

The Laravel mix docs have a brief section on BrowserSync but theres not enough to get BrowserSync working for our config.

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In 2019 I wrote about how I get around static IP restrictions when working in different places.
The world is very different now and whilst I’m not travelling anymore I still use sshuttle regularly to make my traffic look like its coming from a given location.

Recently I started switching some of my projects to run on docker locally (annoyingly this was before Laravel Sail was announced). However one of the challenges with sshuttle + docker in the way I’d originally got things set up is your networking gets messed up and consequently nothing really works for the project - not ideal.

Thats not the end of the story though, there’s an easy fix here - exclude the docker subnets from sshuttle.

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Introduction

Recently at work we started using PHP7.2 for all of our new projects. We’d previously been using the TetraWeb docker images for our Gitlab CI needs, however they only (at the time of writing) have a docker images for versions up to PHP7.1.

I tasked one of the junior members of my team with upgrading one of our projects and came back to our repositories commit history looking like this:

Gitlab commit history

Kind of ugly and not so useful when scanning our commit history.

In this article I want to show how we can test our Gitlab CI config locally whilst we’re working out how to set it up properly before we push it to Gitlab as well as keep our commit history cleaner in the process.

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Author's picture

Talv Bansal

Full Stack Developer, Part Time Photographer


Head of Software Engineering


Remote