PHP Dev Tools (for CodinGame or elsewhere)

Using a code repository (git, GitHub)

Why git?

Using just the CG IDE in your browser is convenient: it takes care of saving your code, you can even access all your earlier submissions via the Results / History menu. However, you should not rely solely on this. Have a local collection of all your code you have written!

Moreover, having just a bunch of files in some folders on your hard drive quickly becomes unmanagable, so use a source code management tool (also known as a version control system). While there are (were?) other tools as well, git became the de-facto monopoly in this field.

Benefits:

• Many CG puzzles require similar algorithm or concepts to solve. You can reuse some code - but only if you could find it. This is much easier if you have everything together, with full text search, etc.
• The code you write is yours. Whatever happens to CodinGame or your CG account, you shall never loose your code.
• Sometimes we screw up things and need to revert the latest changes. With git it is very easy to turn back the wheel of time to any point, when you commited code into the repository. You never need to worry about overwriting or modifying something, just because you might regret it later. I commit my code to the repo at the end of every coding session. Sometimes even during a session, before I start some major code change or refactoring.

Why GitHub?

While having a local version control system in place is fine, if you loose your filesystem, you are still screwed.

GitHub is the largest free code hosting platform in the cloud. (But not the only one, so feel free to use GitLab, BitBucket, etc instead.)

Benefits:

• Syncing up your local repository with GitHub provides an instant cloud backup for your code.
• You can access your code easily from multiple devices. You can still maintain a 'single source of truth', instead of relying on file dates, with a risk of accidentaly overwriting the most recent version with an older file.
• On a code hosting site there is much focus on ease of collaboration, code and knowledge sharing, and teamwork. However, CodinGame's Code of Conduct prohibits to share your solution codes publicly, as this would ruin the challenge for others. So just be nice and don't do that: always keep your 'CG solutions' github repositories private.

Installing git

There are plenty of detailed git tutorials on the web, so I will remain brief here.

• Depending on your OS, git might come already preinstalled. Try it out with git --version.
• Download it from the git website and install. Make sure that your git installation's cmd folder is added to your PATH.
• While it comes with a client GUI, we won't need it. (Especially as in the next chapter we will move to the VS Code IDE, which has excellent git and GitHub support.)
• Do some basic one-time setup:

git config --global user.name "Your Name"
git config --global user.email yourmailaddress@yourdomainname.com
git config --global init.defaultBranch main

Signing up at GitHub

Registration on GitHub is quite straightforward and you are good to go. Besides the Free plan, they also have a paid Pro service, but we won't need it. GitHub also provides a command line tool (gh), but its usage is optional and not really essential for us.

Setting up a code repository for your CG solutions

Usually one should make a separate git repo for every project, keeping only the project-related files together. However, you can have hundreds of CG solutions (1 file each), making separate repo for these would be an overkill. I have a single repo for all my php CG solutions (700+ files), plus another repo for all the other languages (26 languages with typically ~40 simple solutions each, so 1000+ files). With such high number of files, keeping things organised is a must.

For example, I use separate directories per CG game type and per difficulty, with a strict naming convention for filenames:

• Create a directory and initialize your local repo:

mkdir reponame
cd reponame
git init

• Sign in to your GitHub account and create a new repository there. Preferably choose the same name for the repo as the local directory name you have chosen above.
• For CG puzzles and bot codes: make sure you set your repository to be 'private'.
• Now connect your local repo with the github repo you just created:
  • At first time you need to provide your github credentials. Later you don't need to type in passwords or access tokens if using the same machine. (Check the doc page for more details)

git remote add origin "https://github.com/your-github-profile-name/reponame.git"
git pull origin main
git status

• To make sure that everything is OK, let's create a php source file in the repo directory.
• Commit it to the local repository and sync it with GitHub. You must always provide a commit message.

git add -A
git commit -m "initial commit"
git push origin main
git status

• Now if you visit your account on GitHub, the new php file should appear under the repository you created.
  • Your repository is also accessible via a direct link in the format of https://github.com/your-github-profile-name/reponame (As the repo is private, the link works only for you, so you might need to log in.)

Excluding some files from your repo

There can be files that you don't want to commit into your repository, especially if they are changing frequently.

Examples:

• In the previous chapter we redirected the output of our local php run into a output_01.txt file.
• We will introduce some dev tools in later chapters, which will create cache files to speed up subsequent runs.

You can add a .gitignore file to your repo directory, listing all the patterns to exclude.

For example, this is my .gitignore file for my 'CG solutions' repo:

/.temp/
/.tools/phpstan/
/.tools/.php-cs-fixer.cache
/.tools/.phpcs.cache
/.tools/*.txt
/vendor/
/**/output*.txt

Useful links

• Git
• Pro Git, a free book: at least the first few chapters are definitely worth reading.
• GitHub

Coming next

As we have our code repository, now it is time to write some code at last. Let's see how a modern IDE can help us!