In this section you can read posts I've written myself.
A new coat of paint for freek.dev
It's funny that even something as simple as a blog app is never finished. One and a half years ago, I did a significant update my moving my blog from WordPress to a Laravel app. In August of last year, I also ditched my custom admin section in favor of Nova. Even though not that much time has passed, it was time for a refresh of the entire blog.
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.
Caching the entire response of a Laravel app
When a request comes in your app will return a response. To create that response, your application has to do some work. Most likely queries will execute. This all takes some time. Wouldn't it be nice if the same request comes in, we can return the response the application has constructed previously?
A rule to validate delimited data
laravel-validation-rules is a package that contains handy custom validation rules that are being used in various client projects we made at Spatie. Last week I added a new validate rule called Delimited to the package.
In this blog post, I'd like to explain why we added it and how it can be used.
Video: getting started with event sourcing in Laravel
The last few months I gave a talk on how to get started with event sourcing at several conferences and user groups. I took the time to record the talk at home. It's now published on YouTube so everybody can enjoy it.
Implementing event sourcing: improving the developer experience
Recently we've released v2 of laravel-event-projector. The package is probably the easiest way to get started with event sourcing in Laravel. In v2 we've introduced two "invisible" features that improve the developer experience: auto-detection of event handling methods and auto-discovery of event handlers.
Implementing event sourcing: aggregates
Recently we've released v2 of laravel-event-projector. The package is probably the easiest way to get started with event sourcing in Laravel.
One of the prominent new features is support for aggregates. While creating v2, I found it surprising that such a powerful concept could be implemented in so little code. In this short blog post, I'd like to explain how aggregates are coded up.
When to use Gate::after in Laravel
In a Laravel app policies are a great way to organize authorization logic that revolves around models.
For the longest time, I've been using Gate::before to allow superadmins to do anything they want. While working on a new app, it finally clicked how Gate::after can be useful too. I'd like to share that knowledge in this blog post.
Simplifying controllers
In this blog post, I'd like to highlight two tips to make controllers in Laravel feel much lighter.
An important security release for laravel-query-builder
Our laravel-query-builder package exposed a serious security issue: it allowed SQL injection attacks. Laravel Query Builder v1.17.1, which is now available, fixes the vulnerability. If you're using the package, stop reading now and upgrade to the latest version first. For Laravel 5.6, 5.7 and 5.8…
Laravel event projector v2 has been released
Laravel event projector is a package that aims to be the entry point for event sourcing in Laravel. It can help you setting up aggregates, projectors and reactors. Earlier today our team released v2. This version streamlines the projectors and reactors from v1 and adds support for aggregates.
In this blogpost I'd like to explain a potential problem with traditionally built applications. After that we'll take a look at what projectors and aggregates are. Finally we'll walk through an example how you can create an aggregate laravel-event-projector.
A Laravel package to flash messages
For the past few years, we've been using the laracasts/flash package to flash messages in all projects. In case you don't know: a flash message is a message that is being passed from a request to only the next request. The Laracasts package does its job pretty well. It has support for multiple flash messages, overlay messages. It comes with bootstrap styling out of the box and a few messaging levels preconfigured.
We've noticed that in our projects we only use a tiny bit of functionality from the laracasts/flash. That's why we whipped up our own lightweight package called spatie/laravel-flash. In this blog post, I'd like to introduce it to you.
A package to create personal data exports
One of the good things that GDPR brought us was the right to data portability. Shortly put, this means that an app should be able to export all data that it has for a user.
Because we have multiple apps at Spatie that need to create such an export, we decided to extract our solution to a package called laravel-personal-data-export. In this blog post, I'd like to introduce the package to you.
A package to use Artisan Tinker in your browser
Laravel comes with a very handy tinker command out of the box. Unfortunately running multiple lines of code on the command line, or editing the code you just executed, can be a bit bothersome. That's why we created a new package called laravel-web-tinker that allows you to run arbitrary code in your…
Tools to automatically format PHP, JavaScript and CSS files
When working on a project with other people, it's important to pick a coding standard. A coding standard like PSR-2 in the PHP world specifies rules on where certain characters, like braces of an if statement, or comma's should be put. Agreeing on a coding standard makes the code more readable for…
laravel-backup v6 has been released
laravel-backup is a Laravel package that can backup your application. It can create a zip containing a dump of your database together with other files that you can select. Using the power of Laravel's filesystem abstraction this zip can than be uploaded to one or more remote filesystems. The package…
Preventing spam submitted through forms
When adding a form to a public site, there's a risk that spam bots will try to submit it with fake values. We recently released a new package, called laravel-honeypot, that can detect these spammy requests. How honeypots work The majority of spam bots are pretty dumb. You can thwart most of them by…
A recap of 2018
Now that 2018 is coming to a close, a lot of awesome people have written a recap post. Here's mine! The most significant change on a personal level is that my girlfriend an I bought a house in Ghent. Together with our two kids, we moved this summer, and we now live in an awesome house that's very…
Handcrafting mocks
In an application I was working on I wanted to implement automated tweets. Of course, this logic should also be tested. In this blogpost I'd like to show you how you can easily handcraft your own mocks. Setting things up Let's first take a look at how you can tweet something in PHP. We're going to…
Introducing laravel-websockets, an easy to use WebSocket server implemented in PHP
laravel-websockets is a Laravel package that can handle the server side of WebSockets entirely. It completely replaces the need for a service like Pusher or a JavaScript-based laravel-echo-server. It has extensive documentation and a demo application you can play with. Marcel, developer and co-owner…