On the SitePoint PHP blog there's a new post that gives you a crash course in using Semaphore, a "continuous delivery pipeline" service, and how to use it to deploy your PHP applications.

Understanding continuous delivery, a now already long-standing buzzword, is not a problem, but implementing it in the right way has been a challenge for quite a few of us, and one we’ll discuss in this post.

[...] In this article, we will cover the process of deploying a Laravel application on a Digital Ocean server through a continuous delivery pipeline using Semaphore. The source code for the application is present on Github.

They walk you through each step of the way (complete with screenshots) to:

• Create a Semaphore account, linking it to GitHub
• Creating a new Project
• Setting up the plan for the deployment
• Performing the first build
• Parallelizing the builds

With the project all set up the tutorial then starts on the continuous deployment changes, adding in a "Deployment" step and making a first push.

The SitePoint PHP blog has a tutorial they've posted that shares information about changes in the exception handling in PHP 7 and what you need to know about them (and potentially change in your application).

Exception handling saves your code in the most unusual circumstances. PHP 7 has introduced two new classes that assist a developer in handling errors with ease, and that’s what we’ll look at in this post. Before the introduction of these classes in PHP 7, exception error classes were written to handle the different types of errors.

They start with the new "Throwable" interface that's the base for both the "Exception" and "Error" class types. From there the article talks about the "Error" type, showing the list of new errors included in PHP 7: ArithmeticErrors, TypeError, ParseError and AssertionError. It also includes code examples for each showing when they'd be thrown and how you can catch them (more specifically than just catching all exceptions).