Freek Van der Herten's blog on PHP, Laravel and JavaScript

🏝 If you like the content of this blog, I would really appreciate your vote in Tuple's Send an Open Source Developer on Vacation contest. Just search for "Freek Van der Herten" in the nominees list and cast your vote. 🙌

😀 This holiday won't only be a nice reward for me, but also for my girlfriend who always gives me a lot of time working on open source packages and blog posts.

Encrypting Laravel Eloquent models with CipherSweet

Link – Jul 1st 2022 – rias.be

We've just released laravel-ciphersweet. This package is a wrapper over CipherSweet, which allows you to easily use it with Laravel's Eloquent models.

Linked Lists explained in PHP

Link – Jun 30th 2022 – doeken.org - submitted by Doeke Norg

Linked lists are a linear data structure that provides quick insertion and deletion.

Introducing sidecar-browsershot

Link – Jun 30th 2022 – stefanzweifel.io - submitted by Stefan Zweifel

A short introduction to sidecar-browsershot package: How it works and for what it can be used for.

Using Laravel Vite to automatically refresh your browser when changing a Blade file

Original – Jun 29th 2022 by Freek Van der Herten – 2 minute read

Yesterday, the Laravel team released the vite-plugin. Going forward, Vite will become the standard build tool for Laravel apps.

One of the cool features of this Vite integration is that you'll get hot reloading by default. Whenever you run Vite with nom dev and modify a JS or CSS file, Vite will automatically recompile the assets and refresh your browser. This way, you won't have to refresh your browser manually after making a change.

Wouldn't it be cool if this automatic refresh would work when we're changing a Blade file?

Making Vite and Valet play nice together

Original – Jun 29th 2022 by Freek Van der Herten – 3 minute read

Yesterday, the Laravel team launched the official vite-plugin. From now on, Vite will be the standard build tool for Laravel. The main benefits are vastly improved build times and a more straightforward API. Want to know more about it? Head over to the official docs. There's also a migration guide to go from Mix to Vite.

When I followed that guide to upgrade the freek.dev codebase from Mix to Vite , npm dev could successfully start-up Vite, but in the browser the JS / CSS did not load. Let's review how I could fix that.

Building social images with Browsershot and AWS

Link – Jun 27th 2022 – yoeri.me - submitted by Yoeri

Creating social images for your website is super simple using Browsershot and AWS Lambda.

Using the `Attachable` interface to attach any kind of object to a mail in a Laravel app

Original – Jun 26th 2022 by Freek Van der Herten – 4 minute read

Laravel 9 has gained a excellent new way to attach files in mails. Using the Attachable interface, you can specify what should happen when an object gets used as an attachment.

Using our media library package you can easily associate any file with an Eloquent model. We've added support for Laravel's Attachable in the latest version of the package.

In this blog post, I'd like to tell you all about it.

Highlighting code using Sidecar & Shiki

Link – Jun 26th 2022 – rias.be

Shiki is a beautiful syntax highlighter powered by the same language engine that many code editors use. We've just released a package that allows you to run Shiki on AWS Lambda through Sidecar.

Ten Tips to Make Conference Talks Suck Less

Link – Jun 26th 2022 – www.morling.dev

These tips are also useful for any kind of presentation, whether on a conference, or an internal presentation for your company.

Good developer experience examples

Link – Jun 22nd 2022 – leerob.io

A nice list of things to keep in mind when writing software or documentation.

A Laravel package to onboard your users

Link – Jun 21st 2022 – rias.be

Onboarding your users is one of the most important things you can do in your SaaS or application. After all, first impressions matter! Caleb Porzio has created an onboard package for Laravel which we (at Spatie) recently took over development and maintenance on.

Add Interfaces to Laravel to Increase Code Readability and Verbosity

Link – Jun 21st 2022 – www.aaronsaray.com

Personally I don't know if this is a good practice, but you (and future me) might like it.

Upgrading to native PHP enums

Link – Jun 20th 2022 – tomasvotruba.com

Tomas Votruba explains how you can refactor old enum classes (from Spatie and MyCLabs) to native PHP enums

How to use Stripe CLI with Laravel Valet to listen for events

Link – Jun 18th 2022 – ralphjsmit.com - submitted by Ralph J. Smit

Use the Stripe CLI with Laravel Valet to listen to webhooks locally.

Adding a Laravel backend to a Remix App

Link – Jun 17th 2022 – davecalnan.blog

Dave Calnan has been using Remix in production for about 6 months now and has decided to add a Laravel backend to the stack. Here's what he's learned from the process.

Variadic arguments in PHP

Link – Jun 16th 2022 – www.exakat.io

A good overview what you can do with variadic arguments...

New UUID formats

Link – Jun 16th 2022 – www.ietf.org

There are a couple of nice ideas there to solve longstanding problems with UUIDs

What’s the best lossless image format?

Link – Jun 15th 2022 – siipo.la - submitted by Peter

What’s the best lossless image format? Comparing PNG, WebP, AVIF, and JPEG XL

What's new in Tailwind 3.1

Link – Jun 9th 2022

Adam shows the cool new stuff!

Restructuring a Laravel Controller using Services, Events, Jobs, Actions, and more

Link – Jun 1st 2022 – laravel-news.com

Laravel gives you the flexibility to choose the structure of controllers yourself, which is both a blessing and a curse. You won't find any recommendations in the official Laravel docs, so let's try to discuss various options, based on one specific example.