Join 9,500+ smart developers

Get my monthly newsletter with what I learn from running Spatie, building Oh Dear, and maintaining 300+ open source packages. Practical takes on Laravel, PHP, and AI that you can actually use.

No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. You can also follow me on X.

Start testing your Laravel applications

jasonmccreary.me

Jason McCreary wrote an epic blogpost on how to get started with tests in a Laravel app. I wish I could have read this when I started out with testing.

This brings me to the next common response, we don’t know where to start testing. This comes in two forms. The first form is quite literally we don’t know which test to write first. The second form is more not knowing how to write the first test. ... Today, I want to focus on getting started with testing your Laravel applications.

Read more [jasonmccreary.me]

Adding webmentions to my blog

sebastiandedeyne.com

A few weeks ago, my colleague Seb added webmentions to his blog.

I first noticed webmentions in the wild on Hidde de Vries’ blog about two years ago. Last week it finally happened, I added webmention support to my blog too! Well, partial support at least. I’m now receiving and displaying webmentions. Sending them out is a project for another day.

Read more [sebastiandedeyne.com]

Going serverless with Hugo and Netlify original

by Freek Van der Herten – 5 minute read

Our team releases a lot of open source packages. All of our packages are well documented. For the smaller packages, we use a simple readme on GitHub. The bigger packages, like medialibrary and event projector get documented on our documentation site. We recently moved our site from a Digital Ocean…

Read more

The case of the Laravel TestCase

timacdonald.me

Tim MacDonald, a freelance software developer based in Sydney, investigates how to make Laravel tests run faster. Turns out you a lot can be gained by caching the config.

I saw a conversation on Twitter the other day discussing how Laravel was slowing down a test suite. I decided I wanted to dig into this and see if there was anything to it.

Read more [timacdonald.me]

Creating encrypted backups of Laravel apps

simonkollross.de

Simon Kollross explains how to use our laravel-backup package to create an encrypted backup of your Laravel based app.

You should always encrypt backups of your apps and securely transfer them to one or multiple backup destinations. If you encrypt the backups on your server and transfer only the encrypted version, your backups are stored encrypted at rest in your backup destination. Not even your backup storage provider is able to read them.

Read more [simonkollross.de]

How to handle front-end authorization using Laravel, Inertia and TypeScript original

by Freek Van der Herten – 6 minute read

Recently Jeffrey Way published a video titled "Frontend Authorization Brainstorming" on Laracasts. In that video, he shows three ways of passing authorization results to the front-end.

Currently I'm working on a big project that uses Inertia, React and TypeScript. In this blog post, I won't cover those things in detail, but I'd like to show you have we, using those technologies, pass authorization (and routes) to the front-end.

Read more

Forget about component lifecycles and start thinking in effects

sebastiandedeyne.com

In a new blogpost, my colleague Seb explains why you should and how you can use useEffect.

React recently introduced a new way to deal with side effects: the useEffect hook. Translating lifecycle methods to useEffect calls can be confusing at first. It’s confusing because we shouldn’t be translating imperative lifecycle methods to declarative useEffect calls in the first place.

Read more [sebastiandedeyne.com]

Laravel Blade Helpers

liamhammett.com

Liam Hammett created a cool package to easily create Blade Helpers in Laravel.

I put together a package that attempts to help make these helper functions that little bit easier to define without the boilerplate of returning the string or having to consider what an expression may be when creating a Blade directive.

Read more [liamhammett.com]

Vue's Darkest Day

dev.to

Daniel Elkington comments on the reactions to an important RFC that adds function-based components to Vue.

Today I was amazed to see the usually positive and friendly VueJS community descend into a bitter war. Two weeks ago Vue creator Evan You released a Request for Comment (RFC) for a new function-based way of writing Vue components in the upcoming Vue 3.0. Today a critical Reddit thread followed by similarly critical comments in a Hacker News thread caused a flood of developers to flock to the original RFC to voice their outrage, some of which were borderline abusive

Read more [dev.to]

A Look At PHP’s isset()

medium.com

Liam Hammet wrote a good blogpost on the isset language construct.

Let’s take a look through how isset behaves and what’s so special about it. Even if you’re a veteran PHP developer, hopefully, you’ll pick up something new here.

Read more [medium.com]

Sending and receiving webhooks in Laravel apps original

by Freek Van der Herten – 8 minute read

A webhook is a mechanism where an application can notify an other application that something has happened. Technically, the application sends an HTTP request to that other application. In this blog post, I'd like to introduce you to two packages that we recently released. The first is laravel-webhook-server, which allows you to send webhook requests. The second one is laravel-webhook-client, which makes it easy to receive those webhook request.

Read more

Timelapse of the future

An amazing video on the fate of our universe.

To me, this overhead view of time gives a profound perspective - that we are living inside the hot flash of the Big Bang, the perfect moment to soak in the sights and sounds of a universe in its glory days, before it all fades away. Although the end will eventually come, we have a practical infinity of time to play with if we play our cards right. The future may look bleak, but we have enormous potential as a species.

Read more