#PHP
Passing the Sandbox Doesn't Mean It Works — 7 False Signals
The automated ordering system I wrote passed every command in a provider's sandbox, but almost everything the sandbox told me differed from reality, from response times and charges to accepted names and items that were created successfully but could not be found. Here are 7 false signals and how to write code that does not fall for them.
Bank Open API QR Payments — From Sandbox to Status Lifecycle
A static PromptPay QR is easy to build yourself, but nothing tells you whether the customer has paid. This article walks through a bank's Open API sandbox, from requesting a token and issuing a dynamic QR to tracking REQUESTED/PAID/CANCELLED/VOIDED states and the requestDt trap that rejects requests even when the entire payload is correct.
Let Clients Pick Photos on a Web Page Without a Login
When the person choosing photos for a website is not comfortable with computers, adding registration and login means the work stops at the login screen. This article covers a photo picker with no authentication at all, but with a server endpoint that checks every value against an allowlist strict enough to leave nothing from arbitrary input, plus limits at every layer and a backup before every write.
Build APM on Windows: Apache + PHP 8.4 + MariaDB Series Index
A 7-part series on compiling Apache 2.4.69, PHP 8.4.27 and MariaDB 11.8.9 from source on Windows 11, so when PHP releases a security patch, I can change the version number in one file and rebuild within a day. This page covers the contents, overview, time, disk space and three-command shortcut.
Build APM on Windows, Part 7: Deploy, Run, and Apply Security Patches
The final part of the series on building Apache + PHP + MariaDB on Windows. Install into C:\APM, start and test it for the first time, open it to the LAN safely, walk through six real bugs (PidFile, MariaDB plugins, the DB port, the ASLR 500, paths with spaces and brackets), and cover the procedure for the next security release.
Build APM on Windows Part 6: PHP 8.4 with redis and imagick
Part 6 of the series on building Apache + PHP + MariaDB on Windows from source walks through 30-php.ps1 step by step, from php-sdk and the full configure command to copying DLLs and testing that JIT, redis and imagick actually work.
Build APM on Windows, Part 5: Compile ImageMagick 7 for PHP imagick
Part 5 of the Build APM on Windows series compiles ImageMagick 7.1.2-34 and around 40 delegate libraries from source with the official toolchain, including the channel mask patch from 64 to 32 that lets imagick build, and why HEIC cannot be written
Build APM on Windows, Part 1: Prepare Tools and Unpack the Build Kit
The first part of a series on building Apache + PHP 8.4 + MariaDB yourself on Windows. Install Visual Studio 2022 Build Tools with the required components, Git, CMake, Ninja and PowerShell 7, configure Defender, unpack the build kit into C:\apm-build, then examine the folders, versions.json and the lib.ps1 and build-all.ps1 scripts line by line.
Two Critical PHP RCE Flaws (php2shell): Patch Today
CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619 are PHP RCE vulnerabilities with a CVSS score of 9.2 and public exploits already available. They affect every machine using PHP to handle web requests. The patched versions are 8.5.12, 8.4.27, 8.3.36, and 8.2.35. This note covers version checks, updates on Debian, RHEL, DirectAdmin, Docker, and Windows, and temporary settings while waiting for patches.
Building a Graph API Page App with Three Required Endpoints
When a backend needs to read and reply to Page messages on its own, the only proper route is to build an app and pass the platform's review. This article covers three endpoints the platform requires but people forget until they fail review, the correct way to verify incoming request signatures, and the steps to exchange a short-lived token for a Page token stored outside the web root.
A 26-Page Bilingual Site: Why .php Broke Every Link
The production page displayed PHP tags as raw text because the web server served .html as static files. Changing all 26 pages to .php broke links across the site. Then, after adding clean URLs, subpages bounced back to .php because the rewrite and 301 setup was only half done. This article includes the full .htaccess, eight cases for $base, and scripts that handle the whole site in one pass.
A Cookie Banner That Loads GTM and GA4 Only After Consent
Most cookie banners look good but block nothing, because GTM and GA4 have already loaded from the first line of the page. This article covers a setup that loads the container only after acceptance, puts GA4 inside GTM to prevent double counting, hides AdSense slots initially, and checks that outgoing requests to those services stay at zero.
A Blank Page with No Errors, All Because I Named a Function top
After deployment, the page was blank, the logs had no errors, and node --check found nothing wrong. But the browser stopped the entire script before the first line ran because a function named top collided with window.top. Here are the names to avoid, the script loading order trap, and the Playwright check every project should have.
Writing to DirectAdmin Through Panel Forms When the API Only Reads
Notes on letting a back-office app create and edit hosting packages in DirectAdmin when the official CMD_API only provides read operations, requiring POST requests directly to control panel forms, with verification rules that prohibit regex and two layers of kill switches disabled by default.
Ingesting Mail Without Disrupting Someone Else's Mailbox
The mailbox the app fetches from is one people actually use every day — fetching with UNSEEN silently misses mail when the owner reads it on their phone before cron runs. The right approach is UID SEARCH paired with UIDVALIDITY and BODY.PEEK, with deduplication handled on our side.
Let AI Read Documents, but Let Code Do the Math
The controller requires manually entered values to fall between 0 and 100, but the path where AI reads values from documents and feeds them in only checks whether they are numeric. A single negative value inflated the result to 5.25 times what it should have been without an error — a lesson in treating AI output as untrusted input, just like values entered by people.
The App Uses UTC, People Use Thai Time — 7 Hours Off, No Errors
Scheduled for three in the afternoon, published at ten at night. No errors, nothing wrong in the logs, because the app stores UTC while the person entering the time thinks in Thai time. This article traces the issue from an env setting that has no effect to the single line that writes Thai wall-clock time into a column everyone reads as UTC.
Secrets Set to 600, but 0644 Logs Go Offsite Every Night
The .env is encrypted and permissions are locked down on every secret file, but customer data still leaks off the machine every night through something nobody classifies as confidential: logs that every account on the machine can read, bundled into backups uploaded to object storage. Here is how I stop it at the source by logging only result codes.
Web vs. Worker — mkdir 0700 Disables Inherited ACL Permissions
One app runs as two users, with php-fpm handling web requests and a separate account running the queue. Even with default ACLs fully configured, they still cannot write to each other's directories. The cause is mkdir with mode 0700, which sets a mask that wipes out the effective ACL permissions, plus a deletion trap that requires permissions on the directory, not the file.
tinker Sends Mail but the Web Can't — proc_open Disabled in FPM
Sending mail from tinker works perfectly, but submitting the actual form sends nothing, and the mail log has no entries — because CLI and PHP-FPM are not the same PHP environment. Includes a working SMTP AUTH configuration for DirectAdmin hosting and the From rule you must get right.
Site Not Updating After Deploy — Clear All Five Cache Layers
The files are uploaded, but the site still shows the old version, even after Ctrl+F5 — because five cache layers sit between the files on disk and what people see, and each needs a different clearing method. This article covers the sequence I use regularly, along with the trap that leaves the site stuck on 500 after clearing the view cache.
route:cache Turns Every GET into 405 — The Sub-path Trap
Deployment finished, I ran optimize as the guides suggested, and every page returned 405 Method Not Allowed even though route:list confirmed the routes were correct — a route cache that breaks only on certain servers, how to isolate it in 30 seconds, and three other issues I found while deploying an app under a sub-path.
php -l Passes, Web Pages Return 500 — A Compile Gate Before Commit
Templates broke twice in one month even though every php -l check passed, because php -l does not understand Blade syntax. This article covers the six-stage gate I put before commit — compiling the views and then linting the compiled files, plus a script that sweeps every GET route through the Kernel.
Always Claim the State Before Sending Anything Out
A "read the state, then send" guard looks safe until a worker gets killed after sending but before writing to the database, and a retry sends the same thing to the customer twice. This article covers the full set of duplicate prevention measures I use, from atomic claims to retry_after and failed() handlers that must never overwrite a successful state.
One Codebase, Two Roles: Hosted Web, Worker at Home
The whole system used to run on one machine behind a home internet connection. When that machine went down, the team could not use anything. I split it into two roles using the same codebase — the web runs on an always-on host, while heavy work stays on the home machine, which pulls jobs itself, with an atomic job-claim table and an 18-step cutover plan with a rollback path.
Too Many Alerts Mean No Alerts: Tuning a Bot People Will Read
In one day, 28 events became 56 messages, and 57 percent of all events were repeat alerts every 30 minutes. This article covers recipient tiers, merging overlapping cycles, state that survives restarts, and why you must not add keepalive to a chat app session.
A Single-Page PHP and SQLite Document Vault That Keeps Originals
A document photo storage app for government submissions, using photos taken on site with a phone. Each upload produces three files—the display image, the original, and saved crop settings—so adjustments can be made later without losing quality, with automatic migration from JSON to SQLite and web server restrictions on folders containing personal data.
Printing Dozens of Government Forms from HTML with Correct Margins
A government submission document system where users click Print in their browsers and every sheet must fit within its margins, from measuring the actual printable area in millimeters and repeating headers and footers without position fixed, to four image frame types for different documents and automated overflow checks with Playwright instead of inspecting every sheet.
Auditing prod with real customer data without leaving a single row
The system owner asked me to test the entire system on the live server holding customer data without leaving even a single junk row behind. My approach was to bootstrap Laravel myself and call controllers directly inside a transaction that I rolled back, with a COUNT of every table before and after as evidence.
Moving Computation from PHP to the Browser: 12 Seconds to 12 ms
A single page ran tens of thousands of subqueries and took 12 seconds to load. I fixed it by precomputing a summary table, sending a single 107 KB dataset, and moving the formulas to the browser, bringing computation down to 12 milliseconds, with a parity test that requires JS results to match PHP on every row.
Encrypt Secrets in .env and Decrypt Them When Config Loads
How to store passwords and API keys as ciphertext in Laravel's .env and have config decrypt them on load, using a single helper that detects encrypted values, plus the APP_KEY mismatch across environments that can bring everything down if you get it wrong.
Laravel Queues on Shared Hosting — Don't Share Redis with Cache
If you're enabling queues for Laravel on shared hosting and planning to separate the queue from cache with different REDIS_DB numbers, that won't help. maxmemory and eviction apply to the whole instance, not individual DBs. This article explains why I chose the database driver instead, with complete systemd units to replace Supervisor.
Laravel Behind a Proxy Sees 127.0.0.1 — Silent Form, No Error
A contact form on DirectAdmin says the sender is not human, sends no mail, and leaves every log silent — the cause is Laravel behind nginx-to-apache seeing $request->ip() as 127.0.0.1, failing the bot check and returning before the mail is sent, with an explanation of why TrustProxies must not use '*'
WAF Returns 406 for Thai Text in POST: Fixing It Without Root
ModSecurity on the host returns 406 for certain Thai sentences in the POST body, preventing forms from saving — but as a hosting tenant, I cannot change the rules myself. This article shows how to isolate the offending text through black-box testing, then work around it with JS encoding on submit + middleware decoding in Laravel.
Bulk Import Legacy .xls Files into Laravel with PhpSpreadsheet
Legacy .xls files with Thai headers encoded in tis-620 have unreadable column names, large files make PhpSpreadsheet exhaust memory and crash, and files users merge themselves contain duplicate rows — use column positions instead of names, add a read filter, and deduplicate with a natural key.
Factory to Cloud Behind NAT: Push Snapshots and a Command Queue
The production machine sits in a LAN behind NAT with no public IP, but the owner wants to view data on a cloud website and make edits from a phone that reach the internal machine — possible without opening ports or setting up a VPN, using push snapshots + an edit command queue + idempotent acks
Migrating vBulletin 4.2.5 to Flarum: Lessons from 200,000 Posts
Migrating an old vBulletin 4.2.5 forum with over seven thousand members, over twenty thousand threads, and over two hundred thousand posts to Flarum — notes on pitfalls that cost real time, from guest userid 0 breaking FK constraints across an entire batch, nested md5 hashes for old passwords, and converting BBCode to s9e XML, to attachments stored on disk instead of in the DB and why I had to scp scripts instead of using heredoc
~30 Seconds Turns Tiny: Flarum's Litedown Subscript Trap
Write "~30 seconds" in a Flarum post and 30 turns into a tiny subscript — because Flarum's Litedown interprets ~ as a subscript opener. Thai users who use ~ to mean "approximately" run into this regularly. This article explains the cause, workarounds, and database fixes for content stored as s9e XML rather than raw markdown.
Auditing a Deployed Laravel Site — 3 Layers in Priority Order
After deploying Laravel to production, check security in 3 layers — probe externally for exposed endpoints, check files/permissions on the server, then grep for vulnerabilities in the code. This article provides commands and P0-P2 priorities for deciding what to fix first.
Legacy Apps Break After Migration — MariaDB Strict Mode Errors
After moving a website from an old server to a new one, the registration form breaks even though the code has not changed — the cause is STRICT_TRANS_TABLES in the sql_mode of newer MariaDB versions, with fixes at 3 levels, from conf.d to per-app SET SESSION