Freek.dev

Laravel / PHP / JavaScript

In this section you can read posts I've written myself.

Dealing with expired signed URLs in Laravel

Original – May 6th 2021 by Freek Van der Herten – 2 minute read

Out of the box, Laravel comes with the ability to generate "signed" URLs. These URLs have a hash in their query string that verifies that the URL was not modified.

At Flare, we use these signed URLs to add action links in mail notifications. The action links allow users to snooze and resolve errors right from the mail without having to be logged in. Pretty convenient!

My buddy Dries Vints noticed a slight drawback. He got a mail from Flare that contains these action links. A few hours after the mail arrived, he clicked one of the action links. This is what he saw.

Develop faster by adding dev routes file in a Laravel app

Original – May 5th 2021 by Freek Van der Herten – 3 minute read

Laravel's awesome closure based routing was probably one of the first features I fell in love with. I take it for granted now, but back in the days, such a simple way of adding a route felt like a glass of water in hell compared to the other frameworks.

Typically, you would only add routes that are necessary for the users of your app. Something that I have been doing for a long time is to create a routes file, called dev.php, with routes that can help with app development.

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

Follow me on Twitter. I regularly tweet out programming tips, and what I myself have learned in ongoing projects.

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.

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

Keep controllers clean by using form requests in Laravel

Original – May 3rd 2021 by Freek Van der Herten – 1 minute read

Most people use form requests solely for validation, but they can also help to keep your controllers clean. Here's how we use them in Mailcoach

Exploring Event Sourcing (part 2)

Original – May 3rd 2021 by Freek Van der Herten – 1 minute read

In this stream my colleague Brent and I continued our conversation about the foundations of event sourcing. This time we showed a shopping cart that we've built using Laravel and event sourcing.

If you're interested in learning more about event sourcing, be sure to check out our upcoming course on using event sourcing in Laravel.

A lightweight solution for running PHP code concurrently

Original – May 3rd 2021 by Freek Van der Herten – 1 minute read

Our team released a new package called spatie/fork. Using this package you can easily execute multiple pieces of code concurrently.

Laravel Worldwide Meetup #8: Using Vite in Laravel & How to optimize your DB indexes

Original – Apr 28th 2021 by Freek Van der Herten – 1 minute read

Here's the recording of Laravel Wordwide Meetup #8. My guests for this edition were Kai Sassnowski talking on the importance of DB indexes, and Sebastian De Deyne on how to use Vite in Laravel.

How Flare's GitHub integration works under the hood

Original – Apr 28th 2021 by Freek Van der Herten – 1 minute read

Last week, my colleague Ruben and I launched a major new feature at Flare: there's a new integration with GitHub that makes it possible to:

create a GitHub issue directly on a Flare error
associate a GitHub issue with a Flare error by mentioning a Flare URL in the GitHub issue
automatically resolve an error on Flare when you close the GitHub issue
automatically close a GitHub issue when you resolve an error in Flare

In this stream, Ruben and I will show you how you can use this integration and how it works under the hood.

Easily test large chunks of output using snapshots

Original – Apr 26th 2021 by Freek Van der Herten – 1 minute read

In this video we'll take a look at how large chunks of output can be tested in Mailcoach using snapshots.

Injecting extra data in the payload of queued jobs in Laravel

Original – Apr 20th 2021 by Freek Van der Herten – 2 minute read

I'm proud to announce yet another package by our team: spatie/laravel-interacts-with-payload. This one, which was inspired by a blog post by James Brooks, can inject data in all your jobs with just one line of code.

In this video, you'll see the package in action, I explain the internals and the tests. If you prefer reading, continue below the video.

Controlling the flow of time in your tests

Original – Apr 19th 2021 by Freek Van der Herten – 1 minute read

Our test-time package makes writing tests, for code that makes its decisions based on the current time, very easy.

Here's how we use the package for some tests in Mailcoach.

A lightweight Laravel package to track changes over time

Original – Apr 14th 2021 by Alex Vanderbist and Freek Van der Herten – 3 minute read

I'm proud to announce that our team has released a new package called spatie/laravel-stats. This package is a lightweight solution for summarizing changes in your database over time.

Data Transfer Object v3 has been released

Original – Apr 7th 2021 by Brent Roose and Freek Van der Herten – 4 minute read

We've released a new major version of spatie/data-transfer-object. This package makes it easy to create objects that have a certain shape. Properties can even be validated.

ðŸ˜ Need self-validating PHP objects? Here you go!https://t.co/osPCSr0qu8

Gotta love PHP 8

Very nice work by @brendt_gd pic.twitter.com/Sn1mS7R8Sv
— Freek Van der Herten ðŸŽ† (@freekmurze) April 2, 2021

In this post I'd like to tell you more the package.

Handling console signals in Laravel

Original – Apr 5th 2021 by Freek Van der Herten – 7 minute read

When you cancel a long-running artisan command with Ctrl+C, a SIGINT signal is sent by the operating system to the PHP process. You can use this signal to perform some cleanup quickly.

Symfony 5.2 introduced support for handling signals in commands.

We've released a package called spatie/laravel-signal-aware-commands that provides a substantial improvement to how you can use these signals in a Laravel app. In this blog post, I'd like to tell you all about it.

Creating a Laravel package from scratch

Original – Apr 5th 2021 by Freek Van der Herten – 1 minute read

In this stream, you'll see me lay the foundations for the spatie/laravel-signal-aware-command package.

Why and how you should remove inactive users and teams

Original – Mar 29th 2021 by Freek Van der Herten – 8 minute read

There are many SaaS applications that allow potential new customers to try out the service using a trial period. Of course, not everybody will convert. After the trial period is over, some people will not use the service anymore.However, if nothing is being done about it, their email address andâ€¦

Mailcoach v4 has been released: drip campaigns, automations, mail templates and much more

Original – Mar 25th 2021 by Freek Van der Herten – 4 minute read

I'm proud to announce that Mailcoach v4 has been released. Mailcoach already was a great solution to send out bulk emails affordably. With an entirely refreshed UI and new capabilities, Mailcoach now becomes a more powerful platform for all things email:

send out regular email campaigns with a provider of your choice
create drip campaigns and send automated emails based on the activity of your audience
administer and log transactional emails from your application.

We've also rewritten our extensive documentation.

In this blog post, I'd like to give you a tour of everything Mailcoach can do.

Laravel WorldWide Meetup #7: signing in with Laravel and how the Laracon Online website was built

Original – Mar 24th 2021 by Freek Van der Herten – 1 minute read

Here's a recording of the Laravel Worldwide Meetup #7.

Miguel Piedrafita talked about the various options of signing in with Laravel. After that, Caneco shared some of the secrets behind the Laracon Online website.

Execute Artisan commands on remote servers

Original – Mar 10th 2021 by Freek Van der Herten – 3 minute read

Using the newly released spatie/laravel-remote package, you can quickly execute Artisan commands on a remote server.

Here's an example that will clear the cache on the remote server.

php artisan remote cache:clear

In this blog post, I'd like to tell you all about it!

Building a Laravel package from scratch

Original – Mar 10th 2021 by Freek Van der Herten – 1 minute read

In this streaming session, you can see me build up the package from scratch.You can find the code seen in the stream in the spatie/laravel-remote repo on GitHub.If you want to learn how to build PHP and Laravel packages, consider purchasing our Laravel Package Training video course.

Introducing monthly playlists from team Spatie

Original – Mar 10th 2021 by Freek Van der Herten – 2 minute read

At Spatie, each one of our team members loves music. Scattered across our office are a couple of HomePods. Everyone in our team is free to stream his favourite music for others to hear (of course at an acceptable volume so everyone can still work).

This is a great way to discover music. In my mind, any automated algorithm that picks music for you is trumped what your friends and peers suggest to you.

Because of the pandemic, this way of sharing music with each other was lost. That's why our team will from now on create monthly playlists. The process is easy: every month we will choose a theme for the playlist and each team member picks two or three tracks.

The first theme is "Late Night Something" (it's not "late night coding" because not everyone on our team codes.

Here's our playlist on Apple Music. And here is the same playlist on Spotify.

Here's at the Spotify embed so you can listen from your browser too.