A simple scoring system for deciding what to build next. Score each idea on Strategic Heft, Income potential, and Perspiration (effort), then rank them to find your highest-ROI opportunities.
Read more [deployempathy.substack.com]
We just released v8 of Laravel Sitemap. This package that can generate sitemaps by crawling your entire site or by manually adding URLs. This version upgrades the underlying crawler to v9, adds a couple of nice new features, and cleans up the internals.
Let me walk you through what the package can do and what's new in v8.
Join 9,500+ smart developers
Get my monthly newsletter with what I learn from running Spatie, building Oh Dear, and maintaining 300+ open source packages. Practical takes on Laravel, PHP, and AI that you can actually use.
"Freek publishes a super resourceful and practical newsletter. A must for anyone in the Laravel space"
No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. You can also follow me on X.
Our spatie/crawler. package is one of the first one I created. It allows you to crawl a website with PHP. It is used extensively in Oh Dear and our laravel-sitemap package.
Throughout the years, the API had accumulated some rough edges. With v9, we cleaned all of that up and added a bunch of features we've wanted for a long time.
Let me walk you through all of it!
I've been using Claude Code as my daily driver for coding tasks. Over time, I've built up a pretty specific configuration that makes the whole experience better. I keep everything in my dotfiles repo under config/claude/, so it's easy to sync across machines. In this post I'll walk through my setup.…
When you share a link on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn, the platform shows a preview image. Getting those Open Graph images right usually means either using an external service or setting up a separate rendering pipeline. We just released laravel-og-image, a package that lets you define your OG image as HTML right inside your Blade views. The package takes a screenshot of that HTML and serves it as the OG image. No external API needed, everything runs on your own server.
Let me walk you through what the package can do.
We recently released the Flare CLI, a command-line tool to manage your errors and performance data. It also ships with an agent skill that lets AI coding agents use Flare on your behalf.
The CLI has dozens of commands and hundreds of options, yet we only wrote four commands by hand. Our laravel-openapi-cli package made this possible: point it at an OpenAPI spec, and it generates fully typed artisan commands for every endpoint automatically.
Here's how we put it all together.
The Flare CLI lets you manage errors and performance monitoring from the terminal. It was built with almost no hand-written code, generated from our OpenAPI spec. Having a CLI is useful on its own, but where it gets really interesting is when you let an AI coding agent use it.
The Flare CLI ships with an agent skill that teaches AI agents like Claude Code, Cursor, and Codex how to interact with Flare on your behalf. Let me show you how it works.
At Flare, we track errors and monitor performance for your applications. Until now, that meant opening the Flare dashboard in your browser whenever you wanted to check on things.
We just released the Flare CLI, a command-line tool that lets you manage your errors, projects, and performance monitoring data directly from the terminal. It also ships with an agent skill that lets AI coding agents like Claude Code and Cursor use Flare on your behalf. And the fun part: the entire CLI was built with almost no hand-written code, generated from our OpenAPI spec.
Let me walk you through how to install and use the CLI.
Claude Code has a nice little feature called the status line that lets you add a custom bar at the bottom of the terminal. I use it to show the current repo name and how much of the context window I've used. To set this up, first create a script at ~/.claude/statusline.sh: #!/bin/bash # Read JSON…
Matt Pocock shares his ideal Claude Code status line setup, showing repo name, git branch info, and context window usage percentage. The post includes step-by-step instructions using bash scripts and the ccstatusline package.
Read more [www.aihero.dev]
Tempest 3.0 has been released with a new exception handler, PHP 8.5 as minimum requirement, improved CSRF protection using browser headers, database performance improvements, and closure-based validation rules.
Read more [tempestphp.com]
PHP 8.0 introduced attributes, and they're a great way to add structured metadata to classes, methods, properties, constants, and parameters. The concept is solid, but the reflection API you need to actually read them is surprisingly verbose. What should be a simple one-liner ends up being multiple lines of boilerplate every time. And if you want to find all usages of an attribute across an entire class, you're looking at deeply nested loops.
We just released spatie/php-attribute-reader, a package that gives you a clean, static API for all of that. Let me walk you through what it can do.
A comprehensive guide to making your Laravel app work well with AI agents. Covers llms.txt, markdown responses, structured data, and coding guidelines.
Read more [hafiz.dev]
Geocodio shares practical advice on getting engineering teams to adopt AI tools like Claude Code, addressing the growing gap between eager adopters and skeptical engineers.
Read more [www.geocod.io]
The title is a tad hyperbolic, but this blogpost provides a nice overview of how the Laravel PDF package works under the hood.
Read more [jpcaparas.medium.com]
We just published a new package called Laravel OpenAPI CLI that turns any OpenAPI spec into dedicated Laravel artisan commands. Each endpoint gets its own command with typed options for path parameters, query parameters and request bodies.
Let me walk you through what the package can do.
Hafiz Riaz walks through building a document analyzer agent with the Laravel AI SDK. The tutorial covers structured output, streaming responses, and tool use, all in about 30 minutes.
Read more [hafiz.dev]
What if you could write your terminal prompt and shell commands with a language you're already familiar with?
We just published a new package called Laravel Markdown Response that lets your Laravel app serve markdown versions of your HTML pages. Your existing controllers and views stay exactly the same.
Let me walk you through what the package can do.
My Oh Dear co-founder Mattias Geniar was a guest on the WP Legends podcast. They talked about how we built Oh Dear over the past eight years, common misconceptions about monitoring, and how AI is changing developer workflows.
