Enforce the Disposal of Objects in PHP

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October 22nd, 2021

Enforce the Disposal of Objects in PHP

The using PHP package by Ryan Chandler enforces the disposal of objects in PHP. Inspired by Hack and C#, this package is useful when working with file handles:

The package contains a Disposable interface and a global using() function to ensure object disposal.

Given the following class in the readme:

use RyanChandler\Using\Disposable;
 
class TextFile implements Disposable
{
private $resource;
 
public function dispose(): void
{
$this->resource = fclose($this->resource);
}
}

The using() helper ensures the dispose() method is called even in the event of an exception via finally:

// Simple `using()` implementation
function using(Disposable $disposable, callable $callback): void
{
try {
$callback($disposable);
} finally {
$disposable->dispose();
}
}
 
// Example usage
$file = new TextFile('hello.txt');
using($file, function (TextFile $file) {
DB::create('messages', [
'message' => $file->contents(),
]);
});
 
// The `$resource` property is no-longer a valid stream,
// since we closed the handle in the `dispose` method.
var_dump($file->resource);

You can learn more about this package, get full installation instructions, and view the source code on GitHub. In C#, you can learn more about the using statement, which inspired this package.

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Paul Redmond

Full stack web developer. Author of Lumen Programming Guide and Docker for PHP Developers.