Originals — posts I've written myself.

Our packages have been downloaded 20 million times original

by Freek Van der Herten – 3 minute read

At Spatie we do a lot of open source work. You can find a list of our packages on the open source section of our website. I'm proud to share that, according to Packagist, the Spatie packages have now been downloaded over 20 million times. The rate at which they are being downloaded is growing too.…

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Easily switch PHP versions in Laravel Valet original

by Freek Van der Herten – 2 minute read

Besides enjoying some greenfield work, we often have to work on legacy projects at Spatie too. Sometimes those projects don't run on the latest PHP version. I this blogpost I'd like to show you a way to switch PHP version easily when using Laravel Valet. (I know you could also use Docker or…

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Searching models using a where like query in Laravel original

by Freek Van der Herten – 5 minute read

For a project I'm working on I needed to build a lightweight, pragmatic search. In this blogpost I'd like to go over my solution. Searching Eloquent models Imagine you need to provide a search for users. Using Eloquent you can perform a search like this: User::query() ->where('name',…

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My current setup (2018 edition) original

by Freek Van der Herten – 8 minute read

After tweeting out a screenshot, it often get questions around which editor, font or color scheme I'm using. Instead of replying to those questions individually I've decided to just write down the settings and apps that I'm using. IDE I mainly program PHP. Mostly I develop in PhpStorm. Here's a…

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Use custom html components in your Blade views original

by Freek Van der Herten – 7 minute read

Today we launched our newest package called BladeX. In short this package provides you with an easy html like way to render custom html components in your Blade views. In this blogpost I'd like to introduce the package to you. A first example When building a server rendered app you're probably going…

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Introducing BladeX View Models original

by Freek Van der Herten – 3 minute read

Earlier today we released BladeX, a package that allows you to use Blade components using a Vue inspired syntax. Read all about it in my previous blogpost. In the latest North Meets South podcast Jacob and Michael discussed BladeX and wondered if the package could be married with view models or…

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A tags field for Nova apps original

by Freek Van der Herten – 4 minute read

A while ago I ditched the custom admin of this blog in favour of Laravel Nova. As you might have noticed every blog post on murze.be has some tags. Nova ships with many form fields but a field to use tags is not included out of the box. That's why I created my own tags field and released it as…

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The Laracon US videos have been released original

by Freek Van der Herten – 1 minute read

Laracon US was held in July 2018 at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago. I had the pleasure of speaking at the conference. You can watch my talk on v7 of our medialibrary below. Though there isn't a playlist to hold them yet, you can view recordings of all other talks on the StreamACon…

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Introducing our Laravel Nova packages original

by Freek Van der Herten – 3 minute read

Introducing our Laravel Nova packages Laravel Nova is a beautiful admin panel that was first showcased at Laracon 2018 by Laravel creator Taylor Otwell. Using Nova building rich admin panels is a breeze. Nova was released today. Taylor was kind enough to give us early access to Nova shortly after…

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Announcing the Full Stack Europe conference original

by Freek Van der Herten – 1 minute read

The past few months my buddy Dries and I have been preparing a brand new conference called Full Stack Europe. The conference will take place in the city of Antwerp somewhere in spring or early summer of 2019. With the conference, we want to welcome every type of developer, wether you identify…

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A few notes about the frontend of the renewed spatie.be original

by Willem Van Bockstal – 5 minute read

Before we moved in to our new offices in 2014, we quickly set up a temporary one-page website, initially only in Dutch. It lasted for 4 years and bursted out of its frames ever since, because… hmm … no priority, no time. A new site was like a running joke for a long time, until Laracon US 2018…

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A new website for Spatie: backend highlights original

by Freek Van der Herten – 7 minute read

For the first time in 4 years we completely redesigned our company website. We launched it today. The site is a simple Laravel app with some technical niceties. True to form we also open sourced the app, you can find the code in this repo on GitHub. In this blogpost I'd like you to give you a tour…

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A short introduction to laravel-event-projector original

by Freek Van der Herten – 1 minute read

The last few months I've been working on a package called laravel-event-projector. This package aims to be a simple and very pragmatic way to get started with event sourcing in Laravel. Ahead of it's release, which will happen in a few days, I've recorded a small video introduction. You can find the…

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Breaking Laravel's firstOrCreate using race conditions original

by Freek Van der Herten – 4 minute read

Recently I was working on a client project where a data import was performed via queues. Each record was imported in its own queued job using multiple queue workers. After the data import was done we had more rows than expected in the database. In this blogpost I'd like to explain why that happened.…

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The open source department at Spatie is doing overtime original

by Freek Van der Herten – 3 minute read

Bad title because we don't do overtime at Spatie, but our team has been very busy putting out new open source stuff. In the past weeks our team has released three new packages. In this post I'd like to quickly introduce them too you. sheets First up is spatie/sheets, created by Sebastian. This…

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A package that makes event sourcing in Laravel a breeze ? original

by Freek Van der Herten – 11 minute read

In most applications you store the state of the application in the database. If something needs to be changed you simply update values in a table. When using event sourcing you'll take a different approach. All changes to application state are stored as a series of events. The key benefit here is…

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When empty is not empty original

by Freek Van der Herten – 2 minute read

Recently when I was working on a project I got some strange results when using the empty function. Here's what I was debugging. I've simplified the code a bit to share with you. var_dump( $person->firstName, empty($person->firstName) ); This was the result: string(5) "Freek"…

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Automatically close stale issues and pull requests original

by Freek Van der Herten – 5 minute read

At Spatie we have over 180 public repositories. Some of our packages have become quite popular. We're very grateful that many of our users open up issues and PRs to ask questions, notify us of problems and try to solve those problems, ... Most of these issues and PRs are handled by our team. But…

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