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

How to handle GitHub webhooks in a Laravel application

Original – Jul 27th 2021 by Freek Van der Herten – 3 minute read

Whenever something happens in one of your repos on GitHub, you can configure a webhook to be sent to your app. This way, you can perform some extra logic when a particular event occurs on the repo. A silly example would be to send someone a mail when an issue is opened.

We've created a new package called spatie/laravel-github-webhooks that makes it easy to consume GitHub webhooks in a Laravel app. In this blog post, I'd like to tell you all about it.

Announcing our Testing Laravel premium video course

Link – Jul 26th 2021

Knowing how to write automated tests is a fundamental skill for any developer. By adding a quality test suite to your application, you'll end up with fewer bugs in production. It allows you to refactor with confidence using a test suite that has your back.

We're currently recording a new premium video course called Testing Laravel. It will be released in September.

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Every two weeks I send out a newsletter containing lots of interesting stuff for the modern PHP developer.

Expect quick tips & tricks, interesting tutorials, opinions and packages. Because I work with Laravel every day there is an emphasis on that framework.

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PHP 8.1: before and after

Link – Jul 23rd 2021 – stitcher.io

The release of PHP 8.1 will be here within a few months, and once again there are many features to get excited about.

7 Things I Look For When Hiring

Link – Jul 23rd 2021 – laracasts.com

In this excellent, humanly written blog post, Laracasts founder Jeffrey Way offers some good tips for applying at any company.

Use Blink to execute something once and only once

Link – Jul 23rd 2021 – sebastiandedeyne.com

Here's a neat use of our Blink package.

Give me /events, not webhooks

Link – Jul 23rd 2021 – blog.syncinc.so

Here are some cool ideas to improve webhooks

Rebuilding iOS15 with Tailwind CSS

Link – Jul 23rd 2021

Simon of the Tailwind Labs team, keeps creating cool videos. In this video he recreates the iOS notifications screen.

The state of the PHP Developer ecosystem in 2021

Link – Jul 23rd 2021 – www.jetbrains.com

JetBrains ran their yearly survey on all the things that devs like and use. Here are the results for the PHP ecosystems

Hostnames as self-executing fetches

Link – Jul 22nd 2021 – www.bram.us

Here's a cool technique by Bram Van Damme

Generators vs arrays

Link – Jul 22nd 2021 – doeken.org - submitted by Doeke Norg

Yield better results by iterating over generators. Learn more about these supercharged arrays that can preserve memory.

Convert Guzzle requests to curl commands

Link – Jul 22nd 2021 – github.com

I came across this cool package that helped me debug a weird request performed by Guzzle.

Introducing Dinero.js

Link – Jul 22nd 2021 – v2.dinerojs.com

Using Dinero, you can perform mutations, conversions, comparisons, format them extensively, and overall make money manipulation in your application easier and safer.

The docs also contain a few falsehoods many developers believe to be true about money.

The State of Laravel survey

Link – Jul 18th 2021 – stateoflaravel.com

Laravel celebrated its 10th anniversary a few weeks ago. Today it is the most popular PHP framework used by thousands of developers every day. The emerged ecosystem around Laravel is huge and new trends are popping up all the time. This survey is an attempt to gain insight into the representation of the diverse technologies and behaviors of this outstanding community.

How to render markdown with perfectly highlighted code snippets

Original – Jul 13th 2021 by Freek Van der Herten – 6 minute read

When reading technical blogpost around the web, you might have noticed that code highlighting is not always perfect.

Shiki is the code highlighter that uses the textmate parser VSCode uses under the hood. The code highlighting it provides is near perfect, even when using modern syntax. It supports 100+ languages (via our package Blade is supported too), and all VS Code themes.

I'm proud to announce that we have released three new Spatie packages that make it easy to use Shiki in your PHP projects:

shiki-php: makes it easy to call Shiki from PHP to highlight a given code snippet
commonmark-shiki-highlighter: allows commonmark to highlight all code snippets in a markdown fragment
laravel-markdown: a batteries included Laravel package that offers a Blade component to easily render Markdown with highlighted code snippets and a class to render Markdown manually.

We're already using this package to render all our documentation pages, our guidelines, and this very blog you are reading.

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