Freek.dev

PHP 7.1 is nearing completion. A few days ago Release Candidate 1 was released. One of the areas that got some love from the developers is the type system. Pascal Martin wrote a blogpost about those changes.

One of the most important changes PHP 7.0 brought us last year was about typing, with the introduction of scalar type-declarations for functions/methods parameters and their return value. PHP 7.1 adds to those type-declarations, with several points that were missing in the previous version of the language.

https://blog.pascal-martin.fr/post/php71-en-types.html

That new iterable pseudo-type will sure come in handy.

If you want to know what's changed regarding error handling, Pascal has got that covered as well.

Read more

Over at Laravel News Eric L. Barnes posted a new tutorial on how he used our Analytics package to create a list of most popular posts. Great stuff!

Here on Laravel News, I wanted to generate a list of the most popular posts for the past seven days and display the results from most popular to least popular.

To solve this problem I thought of two solutions. The first is to build my own tracking system so I could keep a count and then use it for ordering. However, that could generate a huge amount of data and it seemed like a solution that an analytics tracking service could handle.

As I was fumbling through the Google Analytics API I found a Laravel Analytics package by Spatie.be that allows you to easily retrieve data from your Google Analytics account and it seemed like the best way to solve this problem. Let’s look at how I used it to generate a list of popular posts here on Laravel News.

https://laravel-news.com/2016/09/most-popular-list-laravel-google-analytics/

Read more

In the beginning of the summer the Belgian company PHPro held a cool hacking contest. The persons the could hack a special site that they had set up could win a prize. Yesterday they published an interesting article on how that site could be hacked. The site was also hacked in ways that the developers of the company did not anticipate.

Since this contest started out as an internal project, we've put a lot of focus on the flow on how to hack the website. It was just a little side project to inform our colleagues that some small mistakes can end up in a big catastrophe. By focussing on the flow of the hackme contest, we forgot to secure the application for malicious contestants. Off course, this was something that fired back to us on the first days of the competition. Here is a little write-up of the problems we've encountered and how we fixed them.

http://phpro.be/news/hackme-results

Read more

I'm one of those people who runs beta software. A short time after the keynote is finished I'll update (or wreck) my phone with the beta version of iOS. My Mac generally gets the beta treatment not much later. Of course there are some risks involved. There's no guarantee that your applications will still work. Though your mileage may vary, it's my experience however that those betas are pretty stable.

With macOS Sierra there was one piece of software that didn't work properly: Laravel Valet. For some obscure reason Valet just stopped working after a couple minutes. The requests just hang. After some time an ERR_CONNECTION_REFUSED was displayed in Chrome. After running valet restart it ran fine for some more minutes. After poking around in the configuration of caddy, the webserver that powers Valet, and the php.ini file I found no solution. A complete reinstall of Laravel Valet did not solve the issue. I learned to live with the problem, regularly running valet restart. I even set up an alias for it.

But luckily Bryce Adams found the solution (Martin Bastien notified me about it). It's very simple: you just have to update the caddy server to the latest version manually. Here are the steps involved:

1. Download `caddy_darwin_amd64.zip` from Caddy's releases page on GitHub.
2. Extract the files and rename the main executable `caddy_darwin_amd64.zip` to `caddy`
3. Copy it over and replace the old `caddy` file in this directory: `~/.composer/vendor/laravel/valet/bin/`
4. Run `valet restart`
5. Profit!

I hope this post can help all the crazy ones running beta software.

---

EDIT on 2016-09-21: alternatively, you could use the dev-sierra branch to get a working version of Valet on macOS Sierra.

@freekmurze Can also use the `dev-sierra` branch which has Caddy 0.9.1 baked in ??

— Adam Wathan (@adamwathan) September 21, 2016

EDIT on 2016-09-24: Adam has published a list of common problems and solutions for running Valet on Sierra.

Read more

In a Laravel app most sensitive configuration values, like a db password, are being saved in an .env file. This file usually does not get committed in a git repo. In this way you can share the repo with collaborators without having them to know the sensitive values of your production environment.

The keys of the .env are often saved in an .env.example file that is saved in the repo. This helps you and your collaborators get up to speed quickly when installing the app locally. They can immediately see which environment variables are needed to run the app.

Over time however you might add a variable to .env and forgetting to add it to .env.example. It's a mistake that is easily made, and I have made that mistake many times in the past (sorry co-workers).

A couple of days ago Julien Tant released laravel-env-sync. This package makes sure the .env file is in sync with .env.example. After having installed the package you can run this artisan command to perform the sync:

php artisan env:sync

Thanks Julien for that awesome little package.

Read more

A great story by DHH on his quest to find good names for some functions he was working on.

One of the real delights of programming is picking great variable, method, and class names. But an even greater treat is when you can name pairs, or even whole narratives, that fit just right. And the very best of those is when you’re forced to trade off multiple forces pulling in different directions.

https://m.signalvnoise.com/hunting-for-great-names-in-programming-16f624c8fc03

Read more

Here's Simon Nicklin's recap of day two of the excellent Laracon EU conference: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/laracon-eu-2016-conference-day-2-simon-nicklin

Personally I had a great time at Laracon. I couldn't relax that good until after I delivered my own talk. Luckily it went well and I got some good feedback. It was very good to see both new and familiar faces. Most talks were excellent, and the venue was amazing. Just look at this picture:

I'll be sure to attend next year's Laracon!

Read more

A couple of months ago Jason McCreary, creator of Laravel Shift, wrote down his opinion on the Laravel's LTS release. I couldn't agree more with this piece.

The more developers that get trapped by LTS, the more of a drag it creates on the Laravel community. Potentially having adverse affects on its growth. Using LTS as a minimum compatibility line for a Laravel package or other third-party code is understandable. But freezing your apps to an LTS version is not. Your apps should run the latest stable version of Laravel.

https://medium.com/@jasonmccreary/laravel-lts-is-a-trap-97b1d1103961

Read more

Laravel Passport is an easy to use OAuth2 server that was released alongside Laravel 5.3. Mohamed Said wrote an excellent guest post at Laravel News about the grant types used in Passport.

OAuth2 is a security framework that controls access to protected areas of an application, and it’s mainly used to control how different clients consume an API ensuring they have the proper permissions to access the requested resources.

Laravel Passport is a full OAuth2 server implementation; it was built to make it easy to apply authentication over an API for laravel-based web applications.

https://laravel-news.com/2016/08/passport-grant-types/

Read more

I've seen two different tips for speeding up your tests in Laravel in the past week and thought I'd share them with you. For me, they made a significant impact on the speed of my tests.

https://driesvints.com/blog/two-tips-to-speedup-your-laravel-tests/

Read more

The Laracon EU conference is happening right now. Talking to other developers is a joy like always, the speakers are great and the venue is amazing. Here's a good recap written by Simon Nicklin of the first day of the Laracon EU conference.

We entered the building and joined the back of the queue. I say we, even though I travelled on my own I already felt part of something. The queue snaked around a mood light corner to the awaiting registration desk where we are split into last name lanes. A pleasant volunteer welcomed me as I showed her my ticket. After a quick flick through the name cards I'm registered. For me this was the start of Laracon EU 2016.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/laracon-eu-conference-2016-day-1-simon-nicklin

Read more

Recently Eric L. Barnes put a new coat of paint on Laravel News. Behind the scenes there were some changes as well. In a new post he explains how he integrated the Wordpress backend with a Laravel app.

Last week I relaunched Laravel News, and the new site is running on Laravel with WordPress as the backend. I’ve been using WordPress for the past two years, and I’ve grown to enjoy the features that it provides. The publishing experience, the media manager, the mobile app, and Jetpack for tracking stats.

I wasn’t ready to give these features up, and I didn’t have the time to build my own system, so I decided to keep WordPress and just use an API plugin to pull all the content I needed out, then store it in my Laravel application. In this tutorial, I wanted to outline how I set it all up.

https://laravel-news.com/2016/08/wordpress-api-with-laravel/

Read more

In this post I'd like to share a quick tip on how you can improve the readability of your code with array_filter.

Today I was working on some code that looked something like this:

class Address
{
    ...

    public function toArray()
    {
        $address = [
            'name' => $this->name,
            'street' => $this->street,
            'location' => $this->location,
        ];

        if ($this->line2 != '') {
            $address['line2'] = $this->line2;
        }

        if ($this->busNumber != '') {
            $address['busNumber'] = $this->busNumber;
        }

        if ($this->country != '') {
            $address['country'] = $this->country;
        }


        return $address;
    }
}

Did you know that you can use array_filter to clean this up? I didn't, until today.

When that function is called without a second argument it will remove any element that contains a falsy value (so null, or an empty string) Here's the refactored, equivalent code:

class Address
{
    ...

    public function toArray()
    {
        return array_filter([
            'name' => $this->name,
            'street' => $this->street,
            'line2' => $this->line2,
            'busNumber' => $this->busNumber,
            'location' => $this->location,
            'country' => $this->country,
        ]);
    }
}

That's much better!

Just be careful when using this with numeric data that you want to keep in the array. 0 is considered as a falsy value too, so it'll be removed as well.

Read more

Joind.in is a website where attendees can leave feedback for speakers delivering talks and conferences and user groups. This feedback is very useful for the speakers who which improve their skills. In my mind it is an essential part of the PHP ecosystem.

For the last 6 years Lorna Jane Mitchell and Rob Allen have maintained the project. They are now looking for others to take over their duties.

This post is about the open source project, Joind.in. Joind.in is a tool to allow attendees at conferences or other events to offer immediate public feedback to speakers and organisers at those events. Joind.in is an open source project run by volunteers. For the last 6 years I've been a maintainer of this project, following a year or two of being a contributor. Over the last few months, myself and my comaintainer Rob Allen have been mostly inactive due to other commitments, and we have agreed it's time to step aside and let others take up the baton.

http://lornajane.net/posts/2016/joind-in-needs-help

Read more

Jordan Scales examined the contents of the node_modules directory a discovered a lot of junk.

While code bloat continues to slow down our websites, drain our batteries, and make “npm install” slow for a few seconds, many developers like myself have decided to carefully audit the dependencies we bring into our projects. It’s time we as a community stand up and say enough is enough, this community belongs to all of us, and not just a handful of JavaScript developers with great hair.

I decided to document my experiences in auditing my projects’ dependencies, and I hope you find the following information useful.

https://medium.com/friendship-dot-js/i-peeked-into-my-node-modules-directory-and-you-wont-believe-what-happened-next-b89f63d21558

Read more