Freek.dev

I'm proud to announce that we have launched a redesigned Oh Dear. If you're unfamiliar with Oh Dear, it's the best all-in-one monitoring tool for your entire website. You can register for a 10-day free trial.

You can help us spread the good news by upvoting us on Product Hunt, or retweeting our launch tweet.

In this blog post, I'd like to share what Oh Dear can do for you, how we've rebuilt various parts, and give you an overview of the technology behind the service.

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My team and I are currently working on the hosted version of Mailcoach Cloud, which now is in public beta. Using the Markdown capabilities of Mailcoach and its API, I can easily create new editions of my own newsletter.

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I'm proud to announce that our team has released a new package called laravel-dynamic-servers.

This package can help start and stop servers when you need them. The prime use case is to spin up extra working servers to help you process the workload on queues.

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

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Here's my talk on our popular Laravel Data package, which I gave at Laracon Online earlier this week.

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One of the joys of using packages in the Laravel ecosystem is how easy they are to install. Packages can be pulled in using Composer, and Laravel will automatically discover them.

In this post, you'll learn how to easily add an install command, making it even easier for package users to start using a package.

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I'm proud to announce that our team has released a new small package: spatie/laravel-model-info. Let's take a look at what this package can do.

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While working on the upcoming Oh Dear redesign, I noticed that list that displays all sites of a team was very slow.

To display that list, a lot of queries were used. With a couple of minor adjustments, I could reduce the number of queries needed to just a single one, solving the performance problem.

In this small blog post, I'd like to share one of the techniques I used.

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A typical Laravel application will likely have many routes, config files and possibly some events. In your development environment, these routes and config files will be loaded and registered in each request. The performance penalty for this is not too big. In a production environment, you want to…

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When developing web applications, you probably encounter a lot of places where someone needs to select one or more options in a select or multi-select. These select boxes always need a list of options with labels and values.

In one of our projects, we had options being generated in lots of places. Sometimes these lists of options were the same, leading to a lot of code duplication. Even worse, in some cases, different formats were used to output the same options.

That's why we've created a new package called spatie/laravel-options. It will take a resource which can create options such as an enum, a list of models or even a plain array. And will always create a standardized array of options you can use within your frontend application.

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Yesterday, the Laravel team released the vite-plugin. Going forward, Vite will become the standard build tool for Laravel apps.

One of the cool features of this Vite integration is that you'll get hot reloading by default. Whenever you run Vite with npm dev and modify a JS or CSS file, Vite will automatically recompile the assets and refresh your browser. This way, you won't have to refresh your browser manually after making a change.

Wouldn't it be cool if this automatic refresh would work when we're changing a Blade file?

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Yesterday, the Laravel team launched the official vite-plugin. From now on, Vite will be the standard build tool for Laravel. The main benefits are vastly improved build times and a more straightforward API. Want to know more about it? Head over to the official docs. There's also a migration guide to go from Mix to Vite.

When I followed that guide to upgrade the freek.dev codebase from Mix to Vite , npm dev could successfully start-up Vite, but in the browser the JS / CSS did not load. Let's review how I could fix that.

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Laravel 9 has gained a excellent new way to attach files in mails. Using the Attachable interface, you can specify what should happen when an object gets used as an attachment.

Using our media library package you can easily associate any file with an Eloquent model. We've added support for Laravel's Attachable in the latest version of the package.

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

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I'm proud to announce that our team has launched a new package called spatie/laravel-login-link.

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

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I'm proud to announce that our team has released a new premium package called Laravel Comments. Using this package, you can set up a comments section in your Laravel app in no time.

We've made a nice, errr I mean epic launch movie to get you in the right mood.

Laravel Comments includes a Livewire component to render comments. Here's what it looks like:

Of course, we wrote extensive documentation, covering every aspect of Laravel Comments.

It comes with batteries included:

• comments can be nested
• emoji reactions
• notifications to all participants when a new comment is posted
• an inline approval flow for new comments
• markdown editing and code highlighting
• endlessly customisable

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

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I'm proud to announce that our team has released a new package called laravel-livewire-wizard. Using this package, you can set up multi-step wizards quickly using Livewire.

The package is headless, which means that it provides no UI itself, but it makes it easy to build any UI you desire.

You can easily control which step is displayed, access state of other steps, and build any navigation you desire.

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

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As developers, we tend to like shortcuts to speed up our workflow. One of the tools I'm using to speed up doing stuff on my Mac is Raycast. It offers a lovely command palette that allows opening apps and URLs, working with clipboard history, and much more.

Wouldn't it be nice to also add such a command palette to a Laravel app? This way, power users of your app can get around quickly and perform small tasks without having to click around.

The good news is that there's already a package to add such a thing: Spotlight by Philo Hermans. In this blog post, I'd like to show how we use this fantastic package at Oh Dear.

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PHP is a wonderful dynamic language that's capable of many cool things. I recently stumbled upon something quite fantastic that I want to share with you.

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A couple of months I go I had the honour giving a talk at the GPUG usergroup on how to convert a PHPUnit testsuite to Pest.

Nowadays, I use Pest as the default testrunner for every package / project that I start.

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I'm proud to announce that our new premium course on writing readable PHP is now available. It's called Writing Readable PHP.

This course contains a collection of bite-size tips (both in written form and videos) that make your code a joy to read for your co-workers and future self. These tips are aimed towards developers who know the basics of PHP and want to improve their craft. As a bonus, you'll learn to use static analysis to ensure that your code is understandable and correct.

Writing Readable PHP has been created by our team and Christoph Rumpel. It contains our combined knowledge on how to write the best PHP possible.

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Passing booleans to a method can be code smell, as it is not clear what a boolean does by reading the calling code.

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