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Freek.dev

Laravel / PHP / JavaScript

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

Strategies for decreasing the number of queries in a Laravel app

Original – by Freek Van der Herten – 13 minute read

Oh Dear is all-in-one solution to monitor your site that my buddy Mattias Geniar and I have created. It can monitoring uptime, certificates, broken links, scheduled jobs, and much more.

Under the hood, Oh Dear is a large Laravel application that performs many queries all of the time. To power future features, we've recently changed our database structure and refactored some pieces in our code base. We increased performance by decreasing the number of queries.

In this blog post, we'd like to to share some techniques that might be helpfull to increase the performance of your Laravel app too.

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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.

How to handle GitHub webhooks in a Laravel application

Original – by Freek Van der Herten – 3 minute read

Whenever something happens in one of your repos on GitHub, you can configure a webhook to be sent to your app. This way, you can perform some extra logic when a particular event occurs on the repo. A silly example would be to send someone a mail when an issue is opened.

We've created a new package called spatie/laravel-github-webhooks that makes it easy to consume GitHub webhooks in a Laravel app. In this blog post, I'd like to tell you all about it.

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How to render markdown with perfectly highlighted code snippets

Original – by Freek Van der Herten – 6 minute read

When reading technical blogpost around the web, you might have noticed that code highlighting is not always perfect.

Shiki is the code highlighter that uses the textmate parser VSCode uses under the hood. The code highlighting it provides is near perfect, even when using modern syntax. It supports 100+ languages (via our package Blade is supported too), and all VS Code themes.

I'm proud to announce that we have released three new Spatie packages that make it easy to use Shiki in your PHP projects:

  • shiki-php: makes it easy to call Shiki from PHP to highlight a given code snippet
  • commonmark-shiki-highlighter: allows commonmark to highlight all code snippets in a markdown fragment
  • laravel-markdown: a batteries included Laravel package that offers a Blade component to easily render Markdown with highlighted code snippets and a class to render Markdown manually.

We're already using this package to render all our documentation pages, our guidelines, and this very blog you are reading.

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🚀 Event Sourcing for Laravel is now available

Original – by Freek Van der Herten – 1 minute read

I'm thrilled to announce that our premium course Event Sourcing in Laravel has just launched.

If you ever wanted to get started with event sourcing, this is the course for you. It contains a beautifully designed ebook, two hours worth of videos, and a demo Laravel app containing an event-sourced shopping cart.

Event sourcing isn't an all or nothing approach. Even if your project doesn't need the full power of event sourcing, you can still benefit from knowing and implementing best practices from the event sourcing world.

We're offering a 20% launch discount for the next two weeks to celebrate this release.

In this stream, you can see my colleague Brent and I launch the course, and answer questions from the audience.

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A new design for Ignition

Original – by Freek Van der Herten – 5 minute read

A couple of years ago, Ignition became the default error page in Laravel.

Ignition provided a vastly improved design over Whoops: it brought Laravel specific niceties (such as showing the routing, queries) and the ability to display and even run solutions (e.g. generating an app key).

At Spatie, we think we can improve the design of Ignition even more. Our initial plan was to release this new design in tandem with Laravel 9 as a big bang surprise release. We've changed our mind on this because we'd like to have feedback from the community.

In this blog post, I'd like to share our ideas and plans for Ignition.

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Dealing with expired signed URLs in Laravel

Original – 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.

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Develop faster by adding dev routes file in a Laravel app

Original – 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.

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