Freek.dev

Laravel / PHP / AI

Run tasks locally with Envoy

Envoy is an easy to use task runner created by master artisan Taylor Otwell. It offers a simple blade-like syntax to create tasks. If you're not familiar with it, you can watch this free Laracasts-video. Chris Fidao recently showed, in his excellent Servers For Hackers newsletter, how you can create a light version of Capistrano with Envoy.

Up until a few hours ago a task could only run via ssh. But now that this pull request has been merged, you can also use envoy to locally run commands.

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Using StackPHP middleware in Laravel 5

Middleware is a series of wrappers around your application that decorate the request and the response. By wrapping the app in decorators you can add new behavious from the outside. This image explains the idea more visually:

[caption id="attachment_475" align="alignnone" width="726"]onion source: StackPHP.com[/caption]

 

The concept isn't new, solutions already exists for many languages (eg. Ruby, Python, Node, ...)

The PHP equivalent is StackPHP. Here's an excellent post by Richard Bagshaw explaining it. There are a lot of StackPHP style middlewares available that you can use in your applications.

Laravel 5 uses middleware for putting an application in maintenance mode, CSRF protection, authentication and more. Unfortunately Laravel 5 middleware isn't compatible with StackPHP-style middleware. Barry vd. Heuvel created at package to convert StackPHP middleware to Laravel 5 middleware and explained the inner workings on his blog.

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Add a command to dump your database in Laravel 5 original

by Freek Van der Herten – 1 minute read

This Laravel 5 package provides an artisan command to dump your database to a file. When installed you can dump your database with this command [code]php artisan db:backup``` A file containing the dump of your database will be created in the directory you specified in the config-file. I plan on…

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Building Gistlog

Matt Stauffer shows how he built Gistlog in under two hours.

Gistlog is a blogging "platform" for people who want to quickly write and publish content, in Markdown, and don't want to bother with yet another platform and yet another login and yet another group hoarding their content. With Gistlog, you use your pre-existing Github login, you store the data in your own Github account, and you can publish with a single click.
A must see if you want to know how to get things done quickly in Laravel.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g4BbeHYCR1E

Also make sure you check out his blogposts on the new features of Laravel 5.

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Some Laravel 5 compatible packages

Recently some of the Laravel-packages I built at Spatie were updated for Laravel 5.

spatie/laravel-glide This package enables you to generate image manipulations on the fly and generate URL's to those images. These URL's will be signed so only you will be able to specify which manipulations should be generated. Every manipulation will be cached. Under the hood, Glide is being used.

spatie/searchindex This is an opinionated package to store and retrieve objects from Elasticsearch. It was tailormade for a project I was working on and only provides the functionality that I needed. If you need full control over elasticsearch via PHP, take a look at the official low-level client.

spatie/googlesearch This package can fetch results from a Google Custom Search Engine. It returns an array with searchresults.

eloquent-sortable This package provides a trait that adds sortable behaviour to an Eloquent model. The value of the ordercolumn of a new record of a model is determined by the maximum value of the ordercolumn of all records of that model + 1.

 

A big thank you goes out to Matthias De Winter, who is helping me update these packages.

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Scalar type hints vote cancelled

For my own reasons, I have decided to cease my involvement with PHP development. This isn’t a judgement of the PHP community nor the internals mailing list, you’re all wonderful people and it’s really been a pleasure, and I mean that completely honestly. However, this has ended up taking up too much of my time (which is my own fault, and my own fault alone) and I can’t really justify it to myself anymore.

So, I’m no longer contributing to PHP, and all four active RFCs authored by myself are therefore withdrawn: Scalar Type Hints, Spaceship/Combined Comparison Operator, Void Return Type, Big Integer Support.

http://news.php.net/php.internals/82750

Damn.

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Babel, a JavaScript transpiler

ECMAScript 6 is the upcoming version of the ECMAScript standard. This standard is targeting ratification in June 2015. ES6 is a significant update to the language, and the first update to the language since ES5 was standardized in 2009. Implementation of these features in major JavaScript engines is underway now.
Babel will turn your ES6+ code into ES5 friendly code, so you can start using it right now without waiting for browser support.
https://babeljs.io/

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Running Symfony2 on PHP7

This chart shows the number of requests per second that were performed (more is better). You can see that PHP 7 can do a lot more in comparison with the other versions. Response times drop from 0.2269 to 0.0865 seconds in the production environment.
http://www.intracto.com/nl/blog/running-symfony2-on-php7

Nice benchmark-work by Tom Van Looy. It is clear that you'll benefit from impressive speed bumps when upgrading to the next major version of PHP. Tom also provides instructions on how to setup PHP7 so you can perform your own tests.

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certificatechain.io: an online tool to download intermediate ssl certificates

When installing an SSL certificate on your server you should install all intermediate certificates as well. If you fail to do so, some browsers will reported “untrusted” warnings for your site like this one.

untrusted

Searching and downloading those intermediate certificates can be a hassle.

Today my colleagues at Spatie and I launched certificatechain.io. This online tool helps you download all intermediate certificates. Just paste or upload your certificate and you'll get a file containing the entire trust chain that you can install on your server.

The site is built with Laravel 5 and uses the SSL certificate chain resolver we made last month.

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The missing tail command for Laravel 5 original

by Freek Van der Herten – 1 minute read

Last week Laravel 5 was released. Unfortunately that handy command for tailing the logs that you know and love from Laravel 4 was not included. The laravel-tail package brings it back. You can install it via composer: composer require spatie/laravel-tail After that you'll have to register the…

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How much difference does HTTP/2's server side push make?

The DOM and all additional resources don't need to be parsed, the client can already begin the download of the `screen.css` resource, without "wasting time" processing the DOM and all external resources, only to make a new request to the server to begin fetching them.

When you add this all up for all resources on a page, this can easily save 100-200ms of the total page load/paint of a website. Those are numbers that should really have you consider implementing HTTP/2.

http://ma.ttias.be/service-side-push-http2-nghttp2/

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Reprogramming Super Mario World

This guy beats Super Mario World in 6 minutes. He uses the credits warp glitch to reprogram the game while playing it.

The exploit works by transferring control to sprite X-position table via the chuck eating glitch so that the game executes the X-position of sprites as if it were code. Using koopa shells, the X-position table can be filled with values which switches the game from mode 0x14 (normal level execution) to 0x1C (midway through the credits).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=14wqBA5Q1yc#t=24

EDIT: Today Carlsagan42 finished the game under 2 minutes.

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Trees vs facets vs tags

... any CMS managing any sizeable amount of data needs to support trees. Anything else will lead to an unmanageable mess. However, systems with smaller sets of content, especially with a smaller group of authors, can get away with tagging as well. Facetting only really works well with a system that stores content that is highly structured at least on a per node type basis.
http://www.sitepoint.com/cms-content-organization-structures-trees-vs-facets-vs-tags/

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