Freek.dev

Laravel / PHP / JavaScript

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

An unopinionated package to make Laravel apps tenant aware

Original – May 20th 2020 by Freek Van der Herten – 9 minute read

Today we released a package to make Laravel apps tenant aware, called laravel-multitenancy. The philosophy of this package is that it should only provide the bare essentials to enable multitenancy.

The package can determine which tenant should be the current tenant for the request. It also allows you to define what should happen when switching the current tenant to another one.

It works for multitenancy projects that need to use one or multiple databases.

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

Building a realtime dashboard powered by Laravel, Livewire and Tailwind (2020 edition)

Original – Apr 29th 2020 by Freek Van der Herten – 23 minute read

At Spatie we have a TV screen against the wall that displays a dashboard. This dashboard displays the tasks our team should be working on, important events in the near future, which tasks each of our team members should be working on, what music they are listening to, and so on. Here's what it looks like:

dashboard

This dashboard is built using our laravel-dashboard package. It will allow you to built a similar dashboard in no time.

In this blogpost I'd like to walk you through both the dashboard and the package.

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

You can follow me on these platforms:

On all these platforms, regularly share programming tips, and what I myself have learned in ongoing projects.

Every month 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.

Creating a Tweet wall in 3 minutes using Laravel Dashboard

Original – Apr 28th 2020 by Freek Van der Herten – 1 minute read

In this short video I demonstrate how you can display multiple Twitter feeds using laravel-dashboard. I will release the packages as soon as we hit 50 sponsors on GitHub.

📺 A walkthrough of Laravel Backup Server

Original – Apr 21st 2020 by Freek Van der Herten – 1 minute read

In this stream (which is the first I've ever done) I'll show you what you can do with our upcoming laravel-backup-server package and how it works under the hood.

Mixing event sourcing in a traditional Laravel app

Original – Apr 20th 2020 by Freek Van der Herten – 9 minute read

Together with my colleague Brent, I'm working on designing the architecture of a massive Laravel application. In that application, we'll have traditional parts and event sourced parts. In this blog post, I'd like to give a practical example of how we think to achieve this.

A package to dump anything to the log

Original – Apr 13th 2020 by Freek Van der Herten – 2 minute read

In this post, I'd like to show you a quick demo of our new package called laravel-log-dumper.

Replacing websockets with Livewire

Original – Apr 10th 2020 by Freek Van der Herten – 11 minute read

Up until a few days ago, the real-time UI of Oh Dear (an uptime monitoring SaaS I run) was powered with web sockets. We recently replaced this with Livewire components.

In this blog post, I'd like to explain why and how we did that.

I'm going to assume that you already know what Livewire is. If not, head over to the Livewire docs. There's even a short video course on there. In short, Livewire enables you to create dynamic UIs using server-rendered partials.

Using the 1-click-installer to set up Mailcoach in no time

Original – Apr 6th 2020 by Freek Van der Herten – 7 minute read

A couple of weeks ago, we released Mailcoach: an affordable, self-hosted solution to send out newsletters. Installing it into an existing Laravel application is quite easy if you have experience with Laravel.

We wanted to make getting started with Mailcoach easier for those without experience with Laravel or PHP. Using our a 1-click-installer on the Digital Ocean marketplace you can set up an entire Mailcoach installation in a couple of minutes.

In this blogpost I'd like to show you how you can use the installer and how we built it.

Some cool Laravel 7 Blade components

Original – Apr 2nd 2020 by Freek Van der Herten – 3 minute read

One of my favourite new features of Laravel 7 are Blade components. The allow you to define custom html tags that are backed by Blade partials. In this blogpost I'd like to show you a couple very handy components.

This blogpost assumes that you already know how you can use Blade components.

🐟 A package to execute a random artisan command

Original – Apr 1st 2020 by Freek Van der Herten – 1 minute read

Aren't you tired of having to think about which artisan command to execute? The spatie/laravel-random-command package takes that pain away. It provides a random command that will pick a random command and execute it.

Building complex forms with Laravel Livewire in Oh Dear

Original – Mar 23rd 2020 by Freek Van der Herten – 16 minute read

Together with my buddy Mattias Geniar, I run Oh Dear, an uptime checker service on steroids.

Unlike most uptime trackers, Oh Dear doesn't only check your homepage, but every single page of your site. When we detect a broken link or some mixed content, we send a notification. Oh, and we provide status pages, like this one from Laravel and Flare too.

In this blog post, I'd like to show you how we use Livewire to render some complex forms in the UI of Oh Dear.

📺 The Full Stack Europe 2019 keynote: Building by Jeremy Keith

Original – Mar 16th 2020 by Freek Van der Herten – 1 minute read

Last year, my buddy Dries and I organised the first edition of the Full Stack Europe Conference. We recorded all the session and intend to publish each one of them in the coming months.

We just finished processing the first video. Here's the keynote, titled "Building" by Jeremy Keith.

How to configure and use multiple SES accounts in a Laravel app

Original – Mar 16th 2020 by Freek Van der Herten – 4 minute read

When working on Mailcoach, it was unclear to me how I could use multiple SES (or Mailgun or Postmark) accounts inside a Laravel app. In this short blog post, I'd like to explain that to you.

How to check which version of PHP you are running

Original – Mar 14th 2020 by Freek Van der Herten – 1 minute read

When working on open source code, I like using the latest version of PHP. When developers that are not on the latest version use the package, they might see syntax errors.

You might ask why Composer doesn't protect against this? When composer.json requires the latest version, how do devs, not on the latest version, can even install the package?

Well, there seemingly are a lot of people that only upgrade the PHP version on the command line. For handling web requests, they are unknowingly using an older version of PHP. Here's how to make sure you are on the latest version of PHP on both the CLI and for handling web requests.

Mailcoach v2 has been released with support for custom HTML editors and multiple mailers

Original – Mar 12th 2020 by Freek Van der Herten – 9 minute read

A couple of months ago, my team released Mailcoach, a self-hosted solution to send out newsletters. It sends out mail via services like Amazon SES, Mailgun, Sendgrid, and Postmark. It can optionally track opens and clicks. When your email list grows, this is a much more cost-effective solution when compared to a service like Mailchimp.

Mailcoach can be used as a premium Laravel package or as a stand-alone app. When installed into a Laravel app, it can be greatly customized. The Mailcoach stand alone app can be used without knowing how to program.

Today we're releasing v2 of Mailcoach. It offers support for Laravel 7, html editors, and multiple mailers, together with a bunch of quality of life improvements. In this blog post, I'd like to walk you through these features and show some technical details.

On using arrow functions in PHP 7.4

Original – Mar 10th 2020 by Freek Van der Herten – 3 minute read

In PHP 7.4 a widely requested feature landed: arrow function. In this blogpost I'd like to show you how I like to use them.

Writing readable PHP: decrease indentation by returning early

Original – Mar 9th 2020 by Freek Van der Herten – 2 minute read

In this short post, I'd like to give you a tip on writing readable PHP.

How to use a MySQL database on GitHub Actions

Original – Mar 4th 2020 by Freek Van der Herten – 2 minute read

Recently we started using GitHub Actions to test all our packages. You can read more about our general setup in this blog post.

For most of the packages, this works great. However, some of our packages, such as Laravel Tags, use JSON functions that are not available in SQLite. Luckily it's straightforward to use a database like MySQL in GitHub Actions.

Behind the scenes of Flare (or How to structure big Laravel applications)

Original – Mar 2nd 2020 by Freek Van der Herten – 1 minute read

At Laracon AU, I gave a talk on how you can structure a big Laravel application. The codebases of both Flare and Oh Dear served as examples.

By watching this talk you'll gain some valuable insights that could be applicable to your projects as well. Enjoy!

How to write exceptionally good exceptions in PHP

Original – Feb 24th 2020 by Freek Van der Herten – 1 minute read

In this video, which is part of the mailcoach video course, I show how I like to write my exceptions.

At the time of writing this post, we're running a contest where you can win a free mailcoach license.