Originals — posts I've written myself.
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.
In this blog post, I'd like to highlight two tips to make controllers in Laravel feel much lighter.
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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 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.
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.
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.
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…
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 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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
I've been using PhpStorm for quite some time now, but never took the effort to fix a few minor annoyances I had with it. Getting rid of the default comment for new PHP files First up, when creating a new PHP file or class you PhpStorm will add this comment block like this by default: /** * Created…
Here's a video of Surma having technical problems while presenting his State of Houdini talk. Luckily Jake Archibald and others "help" him out ? No matter how well you prepare a talk, you can always have technical difficulties. If you handle the failure gracefully, the public won't mind.…
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…
Let's take a look at how you can define routes to controllers in Laravel. By default you can do it like this: Route::get('my-route', 'MyController@index'); This will look for the MyController class in the App\Http\Controllers namespace. This default namespace is set up in Laravel's…
The past few years I visited and spoke at a lot of PHP conferences. PHP Benelux, Laracon EU and US, PHP UK Conference, PHP World are only a few of the conferences I thoroughly enjoyed. Visiting those conferences can be recommended to anyone interested in PHP. Regardless of which level you're at…
Invokables in PHP are classes that you can use as a function. They have been around since PHP 5.3 and have many interesting use cases. Here's a quick example. class Invokable { public function __invoke() { echo 'I have been invoked'; } } You can use it like this: // outputs 'I have been…
Laravel Nova is cool package to quickly create admin interfaces in a Laravel app. Unfortunately there's no support for multiple locales out of the box. A while ago we published a package called nova-translatable that makes any of the built in field types translatable. Using the package In order to…