Add daily email for 2023-12-13

Reviving an old PHP project

src/content/daily-email/2023-12-13.md

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+---
+title: >
+  Reviving an old PHP project
+pubDate: 2023-12-13
+permalink: >
+  archive/2023/12/13/reviving-an-old-php-project
+tags:
+  - php
+  - phpc
+  - open-source
+---
+
+I use Gmail/Google Apps for my email address, and I used to use a LOT of filters.
+
+Inspired by a Ruby gem, I created a PHP library that allows me to declare my filters in PHP and create them in XML.
+
+I could import the generated XML into Gmail to create the filters.
+
+## Gmail Filter Buider
+
+The project is [Gmail Filter Builder], and the last commit was in July 2020.
+
+It was based on PHP 7 (unsupported since November 2022) and uses five Symfony components and several other packages.
+
+Today, as I looked at my current Gmail filters, I decided to revisit and update Gmail Filter Builder.
+
+## Updating the project
+
+I set PHP 8.1 as the minimum required version and used a Nix Flake to ensure this was available.
+
+I updated the Symfony components from the 3.x versions to 6.x, the latest versions compatible with PHP 8.1. I also updated the other PHP packages to their compatible versions.
+
+After some small changes to the application's code, it worked with PHP 8.1 and generated filters.
+
+Once it worked, I updated [the examples][examples].
+
+Whilst it wasn't a difficult process in this instance, having a test suite I could rely on helped me to know it worked as expected during the upgrade.
+
+I don't know if I'll continue to use or maintain Gmail Filter Builder again, but it was an interesting exercise to do this morning.
+
+[examples]: https://github.com/opdavies/gmail-filter-builder/tree/3.x/examples
+[gmail filter builder]: https://github.com/opdavies/gmail-filter-builder/tree/3.x