Freek.dev

The spatie/laravel-sluggable package has been around for close to a decade. A slug is the readable part of a URL that identifies a record, like announcing-laravel-sluggable-v4-with-self-healing-urls in this post's URL. The package generates one for any Eloquent model when you save it, derived from a title or another text field, and most of the time you don't have to think about it.

We just released v4, which adds a few things worth talking about. Let me walk you through them.

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A mobile pass is that thing in your iPhone's Wallet app. A boarding pass, a concert ticket, a coffee loyalty card, a gym membership. Apple calls them passes. Google calls them objects. Both Wallet apps let you generate them, hand them out, and push live updates to the copy that's already on someone's device.

We just released Laravel Mobile Pass, a package that lets you generate those Apple and Google passes from a Laravel app and send updates to already issues passes.

Together with the package, we also published a demo site where you can create Apple Wallet passes and push an update so you can see it all working on your own iOS device.

Dan Johnson and I have been working on it for a while. Let me walk you through what it can do.

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Over the past few months we've been building There There at Spatie, a support tool shaped by the two decades we've spent running our own customer support. The goal is simple: the helpdesk we always wished we had.

We care about using AI in a particular way. It should help support agents write better replies, not substitute for them. The human stays in charge of the conversation, and the model does the unglamorous work of drafting, rephrasing, and suggesting links. There There is in private beta right now, and you can apply for early access at there-there.app.

We're building There There with Laravel and Inertia, and we lean heavily on the latest features Inertia v3 brings. This post is about another one: prefetching on hover.

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A few months ago we started building There There, a helpdesk we're making at Spatie. The premise is simple. After two decades of running customer support for our open source work and our SaaS apps, we wanted the tool we always wished existed.

One thing we care about in particular is using AI to help humans craft better responses, not to replace them. The agent stays in charge of the conversation. The model just helps them reply faster and a little sharper. There There is in private beta right now, and you can apply for early access at there-there.app.

We're building There There with Laravel and Inertia, and we lean heavily on the latest features Inertia v3 brings. In this post I'd like to give one example: optimistic updates.

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We just released Scotty, a beautiful SSH task runner. It lets you define deploy scripts and other remote tasks, run them from your terminal, and watch every step as it happens. It supports both Laravel Envoy's Blade format and a new plain bash format. Why we built Scotty Even though services like…

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We just released v5 of laravel-activitylog, our package for logging user activity and model events in Laravel.

In Flare, Mailcoach, and Oh Dear we use it to build audit logs, so we can track what users are doing: who changed a setting, who deleted a project, who invited a team member. If you need something similar in your app, this package makes it easy.

This major release requires PHP 8.4+ and Laravel 12+, and brings a cleaner API, a better database schema, and customizable internals. Let me walk you through what the package can do and what's new in v5.

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We just released v7 of spatie/laravel-query-builder, our package that makes it easy to build flexible API endpoints. If you're building an API with Laravel, you'll almost certainly need to let consumers filter results, sort them, include relationships and select specific fields. Writing that logic by hand for every endpoint gets repetitive fast, and it's easy to accidentally expose columns or relationships you didn't intend to.

Our query builder takes care of all of that. It reads query parameters from the URL, translates them into the right Eloquent queries, and makes sure only the things you've explicitly allowed can be queried.

// GET /users?filter[name]=John&include=posts&sort=-created_at

$users = QueryBuilder::for(User::class)
    ->allowedFilters('name')
    ->allowedIncludes('posts')
    ->allowedSorts('created_at')
    ->get();

// select * from users where name = 'John' order by created_at desc

This major version requires PHP 8.3+ and Laravel 12 or higher, and brings a cleaner API along with some features we've been wanting to add for a while.

Let me walk you through how the package works and what's new.

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We're proud to release v3 of laravel-site-search, a package that crawls and indexes your entire site. Think of it as your own private Google. Point it at a URL, let it crawl every page, and get full-text search results back.

Previous versions required Meilisearch as the search engine. That works well, but it means running a separate service.

With v3, your application's own database is all you need. It supports SQLite, MySQL, PostgreSQL, and MariaDB out of the box, and it's the new default.

Let me walk you through it.

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Sometimes you need to access a private property or method on an object that isn't yours. Maybe you're writing a test and need to assert some internal state. Maybe you're building a package that needs to reach into another object's internals. Whatever the reason, PHP's visibility rules are standing in your way.

Our spatie/invade package provides a tiny invade function that lets you read, write, and call private members on any object.

You probably shouldn't reach for this package often. It's most useful in tests or when you're building a package that needs to integrate deeply with objects you don't control.

Let me walk you through how it works.

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We just released v10 of laravel-backup, our package that creates backups of your Laravel app. The backup is a zip file containing all files in the directories you specify, along with a dump of your database. You can store it on any of the filesystems Laravel supports, and you can even back up to…

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We just released v8 of Laravel Sitemap. This package that can generate sitemaps by crawling your entire site or by manually adding URLs. This version upgrades the underlying crawler to v9, adds a couple of nice new features, and cleans up the internals.

Let me walk you through what the package can do and what's new in v8.

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Our spatie/crawler. package is one of the first one I created. It allows you to crawl a website with PHP. It is used extensively in Oh Dear and our laravel-sitemap package.

Throughout the years, the API had accumulated some rough edges. With v9, we cleaned all of that up and added a bunch of features we've wanted for a long time.

Let me walk you through all of it!

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I've been using Claude Code as my daily driver for coding tasks. Over time, I've built up a pretty specific configuration that makes the whole experience better. I keep everything in my dotfiles repo under config/claude/, so it's easy to sync across machines. In this post I'll walk through my setup.…

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When you share a link on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn, the platform shows a preview image. Getting those Open Graph images right usually means either using an external service or setting up a separate rendering pipeline. We just released laravel-og-image, a package that lets you define your OG image as HTML right inside your Blade views. The package takes a screenshot of that HTML and serves it as the OG image. No external API needed, everything runs on your own server.

Let me walk you through what the package can do.

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We recently released the Flare CLI, a command-line tool to manage your errors and performance data. It also ships with an agent skill that lets AI coding agents use Flare on your behalf.

The CLI has dozens of commands and hundreds of options, yet we only wrote four commands by hand. Our laravel-openapi-cli package made this possible: point it at an OpenAPI spec, and it generates fully typed artisan commands for every endpoint automatically.

Here's how we put it all together.

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The Flare CLI lets you manage errors and performance monitoring from the terminal. It was built with almost no hand-written code, generated from our OpenAPI spec. Having a CLI is useful on its own, but where it gets really interesting is when you let an AI coding agent use it.

The Flare CLI ships with an agent skill that teaches AI agents like Claude Code, Cursor, and Codex how to interact with Flare on your behalf. Let me show you how it works.

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At Flare, we track errors and monitor performance for your applications. Until now, that meant opening the Flare dashboard in your browser whenever you wanted to check on things.

We just released the Flare CLI, a command-line tool that lets you manage your errors, projects, and performance monitoring data directly from the terminal. It also ships with an agent skill that lets AI coding agents like Claude Code and Cursor use Flare on your behalf. And the fun part: the entire CLI was built with almost no hand-written code, generated from our OpenAPI spec.

Let me walk you through how to install and use the CLI.

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Claude Code has a nice little feature called the status line that lets you add a custom bar at the bottom of the terminal. I use it to show the current repo name and how much of the context window I've used. To set this up, first create a script at ~/.claude/statusline.sh: #!/bin/bash # Read JSON…

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PHP 8.0 introduced attributes, and they're a great way to add structured metadata to classes, methods, properties, constants, and parameters. The concept is solid, but the reflection API you need to actually read them is surprisingly verbose. What should be a simple one-liner ends up being multiple lines of boilerplate every time. And if you want to find all usages of an attribute across an entire class, you're looking at deeply nested loops.

We just released spatie/php-attribute-reader, a package that gives you a clean, static API for all of that. Let me walk you through what it can do.

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We just published a new package called Laravel OpenAPI CLI that turns any OpenAPI spec into dedicated Laravel artisan commands. Each endpoint gets its own command with typed options for path parameters, query parameters and request bodies.

Let me walk you through what the package can do.

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