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Freek.dev

Laravel / PHP / JavaScript

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Stay up to date with all things Laravel, PHP, and JavaScript.

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On all these platforms, regularly share programming tips, and what I myself have learned in ongoing projects.

Every month 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.

Rest assured that I will only use your email address to send you the newsletter and will not use it for any other purposes.

How to generate and view code coverage reports in PhpStorm using PHPUnit and Xdebug

Link –

In this video, you'll learn how to generate code coverage reports, and how to display them directly in PhpStorm.

This video is part of our Laravel Package Training video course. In that course, you'll learn how to create both framework agnostic and Laravel specific packages. We'll also source dive some popular Spatie packages together, so you can pick up some tricks we apply there.

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Learn how to create PHP and Laravel packages using our new premium video course

Original – by Freek Van der Herten – 4 minute read

Together with my colleagues at Spatie, we have produced over 200 packages with more than 75 million downloads in total.

We learned a lot by quality packages like laravel-permission, laravel-backup, browsershot, laravel-medialibrary, and many more. We feel we have a pretty good workflow to produce reliable, readable, and maintainable packages.

We want to share the knowledge we have built up over the year with you in our new premium video course, titled Laravel Package Training.

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How we created over 200 PHP and Laravel packages

Original – by Freek Van der Herten – 15 minute read

I work at and co-own a company named Spatie, which specializes in creating large Laravel applications for our clients. Our team is rather small: we consist of only 10 people. At first glance we are a software development company like there are so many others. But there’s one thing that sets our company apart: we have an open source first policy. We try to create and contribute to open source as much as possible.

Currently we have around 200 open source repositories on GitHub. Our packages have been downloaded nearly 75 million times. They are being downloaded 4,5 million times each month. Probably we will hit 100 million downloads by the end of this year.

We've also just released our premium video course, titled Laravel Package Training. In this course, we use our experience to teach you how to build reliable and maintainable packages.

This all did not happen overnight. Read on to learn the story behind our open source efforts.

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An unopinionated package to make Laravel apps tenant aware

Original – by Freek Van der Herten – 9 minute read

Today we released a package to make Laravel apps tenant aware, called laravel-multitenancy. The philosophy of this package is that it should only provide the bare essentials to enable multitenancy.

The package can determine which tenant should be the current tenant for the request. It also allows you to define what should happen when switching the current tenant to another one.

It works for multitenancy projects that need to use one or multiple databases.

In this blog post, I'd like to introduce the package to you.

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