A PHP package to execute commands via SSH
Our team released a new package called spatie/ssh. This package allows you to execute commands via an SSH connection.
In this section you can read posts I've written myself.
Manage Docker containers using PHP
Last week, my colleague Ruben and I released a package called spatie/docker, that makes it easy to spin up docker containers and execute commands on them. In this blog post, I'd like to introduce what you can do with it and why we built this.
Stay up to date with all things Laravel, PHP, and JavaScript.
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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.
Pragmatically testing multi-guard authentication in Laravel
Last week our team launched Mailcoach, a self-hosted solution to send out email campaigns and newsletters. Rather than being the end, laughing something is the beginning of a journey. Users start encountering bugs and ask for features that weren't considered before.
One of those features requests we got, is the ability the set the guard to be used when checking if somebody is allowed to access the Mailcoach UI.
In this blog post, I'd like to show you how we implemented and tested this.
Building Mailcoach
Today, our team released Mailcoach, a beautiful, self-hosted mailing list manager. It integrates with services like Amazon SES, Mailgun, or Sendgrid to send out mailings affordably. It’s packaged as a stand-alone app, or can be integrated into a Laravel project, it's perfect for bloggers, artisans, and entrepreneurs.
Even if you're not in the market for an email solution, Mailcoach includes a video course on how it’s built. I'm sure you'll see some valuable techniques that you can bring to your own project.
In this blogpost, I'd like to share why and how we've built this.
Remove all history from a GitHub repository
From time to time I need to remove all history from a GitHub repository, for instance right before releasing a package I've worked on in private. Sometimes I don't want people to see all mistakes I've made along the way :-).
Using GitHub actions to run the tests of Laravel projects and packages
For many years we've relied on Travis to run the tests of our packages. For projects we used Circle CI. Recently we moved this responsibility from Travis and Circle CI to GitHub actions. In this blogpost I'd like to explain why and how we did this.
📺 How to avoid large function signatures by using pending objects
In this video I demonstrate how to you can create a fluent API by using pending objects. We'll take a look at how subscribers can be created in Mailcoach. As a bonus I explain how jobs are dispatched using a pending object in Laravel.
My favourite albums released in 2019
These are my 10 favourite albums which were released in 2019, alphabetically sorted.
📺 Building filters using laravel-query-builder
On the subscribers screens of the Mailcoach, you can filter out the subscribers that have a certain status, you can search and sort them.
In the video below, which is part of the upcoming Mailcoach video course, I explain how we built these filters, powered by three of our packages: laravel-query-builder, query-string and Blade X.
📺 Video: Using tags and segments in Mailcoach
Building Mailcoach: deleting unconfirmed users automatically
My team and I are currently building Mailcoach, a self-hosted solution to easily send out newsletters and email campaigns. In this video, I live code a new small feature.
This video was created unrehearsed and I didn't make any edits. So you can see every mistake that I made along the way.
A recap of 2019
A year ago, I wrote a recap of 2018. Now that 2019 is coming to a close, I thought it might be fun to write a similar post on what I did this year.
Automatically convert your code to PHP 7.4 syntax using Rector
In PHP 7.4, two new features were introduced that I'd like to use in my packages and projects: short closures and typed properties. Even though an IDE can help with converting to the new syntax, I'd don't want to manually hunt down all the places where the new syntax can be used. Lucky there's a tool that can do this work automatically.
Streaming a large export as a CSV file to the browser
A while ago, I created an easy to use framework agnostic PHP package to read and write CSV and Excel files called spatie/simple-excel. Behind the scenes, generators are used to ensure low memory usage, even when working with large files. Today I added a method that allows you to stream CSV files to the browser. In this small blog post, I'd like to demonstrate how you can use it.
Video: a first look at the alpha version of Mailcoach
freek.dev turns five!
My Alfred workflows
Sending a welcome notification to new users of a Laravel app
My team and I currently building Mailcoach, a solution to self-host newsletters and email campaigns. In Mailcoach you can create new users to use the app.
How should these new users be onboarded? The easy way out would be to send these new users a default password reset notification to those users, but that isn't a good first experience. The default auth scaffold by Laravel doesn't help us here: it only contains functionality to log in and to let users register themselves.
To onboard new users created by other users, I've created a package called laravel-welcome-notification which can send a welcome notification to new users that allows them to set an initial password.
In this blogpost I'd like to explain how you can use the package).
Improving Artisan commands
In this small blog post, I'd like to give you a couple of tips to make your Artisan commands better.
A PHP package to read and write simple Excel or CSV files
For a couple of projects I needed to read and write a couple of very large Excel and CSV files. I didn't find a good package that does this so I decided to create one myself. Under the hood it uses generators, so memory usage will remain low, even when working with large files.
In this blogpost I'd like to walk you through spatie/simple-excel.