Intro to Web design using HTML, CSS and PHP - 1 of 3

This tutorial covers the basics of using HTML and PHP to interact with a user, collect data into an HTML form, capture the data, then submit to an existing database. 

Primarily we cover HTML <form></form>, PHP mysqli, PHP echo, and the basic formatting of an HTML table. 

I designed this to be very simple on purpose to act as a base. In the next two or three videos I hope to explore more about formatting and creating a more useful flow of user data and a shopping cart to open orders. In many ways these fields are just building on what is already shown in this video, but help to demonstrate how powerful the mysqli integration is with HTML, CSS, and PHP for create dynamic websites. 

Of course there are a multitude of other features and optimizations that can be done and included. I hope this can be a good foundation for new users or those interested to take the first steps - like I am - into web and software design.

I also wanted to reference The Joy of PHP by Alan Forbes again as his book taught me what little I know of PHP. The examples I'm showing are just pieces of code and know-how that his more in-depth book details, and I found it really helpful and easy to apply.

Finally, I can't emphasize enough, the current site is NOT secure. We built our LAMP stacks without an SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certificate so that would need to be added to the Apache server/service on a server facing the internet. More information can be found on various sites, and currently one of the best open SSL implantation is Let's Encrypt. It does require some access to the Apache server to setup, but automates the SSL certificate re-registration/authentication so is quite nice for most sites. As an admin it will be up to your team to pick the best solution, but I wanted to ensure that while previous LAMP stacks are both viable test environments, a production environment (hosting a site on the Internet) shoudl have both SSL certicates and strong Firewall protection.

LAMP stack in Docker

This video goes over setting up a LAMP (Linux + Apache + MySQL + PHP) stack in Docker using Docker Compose. 

The video doesn't cover the installation of Docker, but here are the related links. 

Docker MacOS install

Docker Windows install - Windows 10 Pro required

Docker Linux install

Docker-Compose Linux install - Once Docker is setup on Ubuntu just type 'sudo apt install docker-compose'

Generally it's easier to setup the LAMP stack or most stacks for development using Docker since pre-configured images can be pulled from Docker Hub and downloaded quickly without having to know all the packages, and then configuring the packages. That said, our Alpine VM did end up taking up less space, and roughly took the same amount of time to setup - partly my being too talkative, partly just download speed. 

Overall, Docker is a great tool. Its ability to leverage and re-purpose existing images to create new containers, and relative easy install on Windows and MacOS, makes it a go to choice for developers. The mount-bind which we show in the video - ./LAMPcontained:/var/www/html - is amazing as a VM would need the user to upload files using FTP or create another SMB service to share files to in order to upload changes to the VM, whereas Docker can just allow changes from the host to appear in the container using that command. For these reasons, and the relative ease vs setting up a VM environment, Docker is a great choice for developers, and also highly robust in a production / server environment as well. 

I also want to highlight that the original docker-compose.yml file is a modified version I found in the book The Joy of PHP by Alan Forbes which is a great set of example code to get started using PHP and HTML to interact with databases and create interactive websites. I used it to learn PHP and found it very helpful.

docker-compose.yml template

Dockerfile template <- note that the link displays Dockerfile.txt to better show the contents, but Dockerfile should not have a extension. 

One other note with running LinuxMint I've had to manually add the Docker additional repository in the /etc/apt/sources.list.d/additional-repositories.list file, so please be mindful of that if you are a LinuxMint user. Poking around forums it seems this can be finicky so if you can't find the Docker packages after apt-add-repository and then apt update, check that file link to make sure it's there and correct to your build of the system. This could happen on any Linux distro it seems, but I ran into on LinuxMint, while I did not on Ubuntu.

Hope this was helpful, more to come. Thank you as always.