Site remake

Posted on Wednesday 25th of September, 2024

I remade my website! I went from using Rust to PHP!

Why? Don't you love Rust?

I love Rust! I don't love using the wrong tool for the job though! I think that PHP is the perfect language for a Personal Home Page.

• It's interpreted, so I don't have to recompile the thing every time I want to change something
• PHP is quick and easy, and comes with great templating built in.
  • In Rust, I had to import minijinja to do this

Rust web development is dependency hell!

Dependencies in Rust suck. They add to your compile time, mess up your Cargo.toml, and if they have macros they're even worse for compile time!

Look at all the dependencies I used to make this site!

[dependencies]
ansi-to-html = "0.2.1"
axum = "0.7.4"
chrono = "0.4.35"
comrak = "0.21.0"
erased-serde = "0.4.4"
include_dir = "0.7.3"
itertools = "0.12.1"
kdl = "4.6.0"
knuffel = "3.2.0"
miette = { version = "7.2.0", features = ["fancy"] }
minijinja = { version = "1.0.16", features = ["loader"] }
rand = "0.8.5"
select = "0.6.0"
serde = { version = "1.0.197", features = ["derive"] }
syntect = "5.2.0"
thiserror = "1.0.58"
tokio = { version = "1", features = ["full"] }
tower-http = { version = "0.5.2", features = ["fs"] }
tracing-subscriber = "0.3.18"

How many dependencies do I have in PHP?

{
    "require": {
        "altorouter/altorouter": "^2.0",
        "michelf/php-markdown": "^2.0"
    }
}

Two! I could probably get it even lower if I were to use my web server's routing, but ehhhhhhhhhh

Altorouter is a pretty nice to use router, and PHP Markdown renders my blog's posts.

Okay, but how do you do syntax highlighting?

PHP-Markdown doesn't come with it! We need to shoehorn it in ourselves.

After looking around, I found Shiki-PHP, which offers code highlighting by making bindings to Shiki: https://github.com/spatie/shiki-php

However, Shiki is slow. Very slow. It uses Node JS. As we both know, running JavaScript on the server is the worst thing you can do for your poor program.

A solution

I used Syntect before to do highlighting in Rust. It's very good! Just one issue: It's in Rust!

Let's use Rust in PHP!

Using ext-php-rs, all I need to do is to make a stub program to hook Syntect in, then install it as a PHP Module.

I need two functions:

• One, to turn code into HTML
• Another, to generate CSS for the highlighting

#[php_function]
pub fn syntect_highlight(code: &str, language_ext: &str) -> String {
    let syntax_set = SyntaxSet::load_defaults_newlines();
    let syntax = syntax_set.find_syntax_by_extension(language_ext).unwrap();
    let mut html_generator = ClassedHTMLGenerator::new_with_class_style(syntax, &syntax_set, ClassStyle::Spaced);
    for line in LinesWithEndings::from(code) {
        html_generator.parse_html_for_line_which_includes_newline(line).unwrap();
    }
    let output_html= html_generator.finalize();
    output_html
}

#[php_function]
pub fn syntect_css(theme_path: &str) -> String {
    let theme = ThemeSet::get_theme(PathBuf::from(theme_path)).unwrap();
    css_for_theme_with_class_style(&theme, ClassStyle::Spaced).unwrap()
}

Now, we can just build this with cargo build, and uh. Get a .dylib.

Our glue library ext-php-rs offers a solution to install this all for us, but it doesn't work on my machine! And it seems abandoned! Instead, let's just install it ourselves.

Note

I got this working on my Ubuntu Server! Not my MacOS laptop though. I had to build it from git instead of the latest version though.

cargo install cargo-php --git https://github.com/davidcole1340/ext-php-rs

If you have PHP installed globally you will have to install it on the super-user (use sudo). Overall this seems spotty, and I'm looking for an alternative to this.

From cargo-php

fn get_ext_dir() -> AResult<PathBuf> {
    let cmd = Command::new("php")
        .arg("-r")
        .arg("echo ini_get('extension_dir');")
        .output()
        .context("Failed to call PHP")?;

Okay, so...

$ php -r "echo ini_get('extension_dir');"

/opt/homebrew/lib/php/pecl/20230831

$ # Please ignore how i blatantly misspelled syntect here. Shame on me.
$ cp ./target/release/libsyntext_ext_php.dylib /opt/homebrew/lib/php/pecl/20230831

Okay, now we need to enable it in php.ini.

$ nvim /opt/homebrew/etc/php/8.3/php.ini



extension=libsyntext_ext_php.dylib

[ Normal ]    /opt/homebrew/etc/php/8.3/php.ini    976:1
:x

Now we can use it in PHP. Awesome! The code blocks on this site are being rendered like this :)

Note that this technically adds a third dependency, if you were keeping track. Better than 19!!

Also: if you want to use it, here's the repo: https://github.com/j0lol/ext-php-syntect