In this section you can read posts I've written myself.
Last week our team released a new package called laravel-db-snapshots. It provides a few artisan commands to quickly dump and load a database. We've built this for is to help us develop features in an app that require the database to be in a specific state. With this package we can take a dump of…
Imagine you're building an single page application that has a couple of forms. How are you going to validate those forms? Because we don't want to refresh the page submitting the form as usual isn't possible. Adding validation logic to the JavaScript side of things would just duplicate the…
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We all dream of servers that need no maintenance at all. But unfortunately in reality this is not the case. Disks can get full, processes can crash, the server can run out of memory... Last week our team released a server monitor package written in PHP that keeps an eye on the health of all your…
All our packages are MIT-licensed. But if you use our stuff and want to make us happy, we highly appreciate a postcard from your hometown. This suggestion is mentioned in all readme's of our packages We've been asking for postcards for quite some time now and have built up a nice collection. Today,…
A little known helper function, called tap was added to Laravel 5.3. In this short post I'll explain how this function can be used. Let's first take a look at the tap function itself. It's actually a very short one. function tap($value, $callback) { $callback($value); return $value; } So you give it…
In this post I'd like to share some of the packages that make developing a Laravel app easier. laravel-debugbar This package really needs no introduction as it is one of the most popular packages around. It's made by Barry Vd. Heuvel and it's a real powerhouse. Once the package is installed it…
Today we released a new package called image that makes manipulation images in PHP extremely easy. In this post I'd like to explain why we built it and how it can be used. Manipulating images in PHP To manipulate images in PHP there are already a lot of options. You can go hardcore and use the Gd or…
Apart from our open source work, we do client work at Spatie as well. Over the years we've learned that one of the most critical moments of a project is when it is going live. No matter how you confident you are about the correctness of the code base there are so many big and little things that…
Twitter provides a streaming API with which you can do interesting things such as listen for tweets that contain specific strings or actions a user might take (e.g. liking a tweet, following someone,...). In this post you'll learn an easy way to work with that API. Phirehose When researching on how…
Out of the box Laravel comes with a few commands to migrate the database. One of them is migrate:refresh. That one will first run the down-steps for all your migrations and then run all the up steps. After that process your database should have the same structure as specified in your migrations. But…
For a project we're working on at Spatie we're expecting high traffic. That's why we spent some time researching how to improve the request speed of a Laravel application and the amount of requests a single server can handle. There are many strategies and services you can use to speed up a site. In…
On most of my day to day work I use Laravel Valet to develop locally. When hitting a bug often I just put a dd() statement in the code to quickly inspect what's going on. But when encountering a complex bug this becomes tedious. Wouldn't it be nice if we could add a breakpoint to our code and be…
A few weeks ago we released our uptime and ssl certificate monitor. It's written in PHP and distributed as a Laravel package. If you're familiar with Laravel that's all fine, but if you have no experience with that (kick ass) framework, it's a bit difficult to get started with using our uptime…
Schema.org is a vocabulary of microdata markup that aims to make it easer for search crawlers to understand what's on a webpage. The vocabulary is very extensive: here's the official list of things that can be described with Schema.org. This article on Tutsplus explains schema.org and structured…
PHP 7.1 was released last week. It has many nice new features. If you're anything like me, you want to use the latest version right way. Upgrading to PHP 7.1 is not that difficult. Personally I use homebrew. The steps required to upgrade from 7.0 are laughably simple. Just issue this command in your…
Today a new major version of our homegrown crawler was released. The crawler is used to power our http-status-check, laravel-sitemap and laravel-link-checker packages. A new major feature is the greatly improved crawling speed. This was accomplished by leveraging multiple concurrent requests. Let's…
Here's something fun, you can get a weather report right in your terminal. For my hometown Antwerp I excecute this command curl http://wttr.in/antwerp to see this:
I'm happy to share that this blog now celebrates its second anniversary. Two years ago I started murze.be to share my bookmarks and interesting links I found with other developers. Along the way I started to write some articles of my own, mainly introductory posts to the now 100+ packages my team…
Today we released our newest package: spatie/laravel-uptime-monitor. It's a powerful, easy to configure uptime monitor. It's written in PHP and distributed as a Laravel package. It will notify you when your site is down (and when it comes back up). You can also be notified a few days before an SSL…
There are a lot of developers active on Twitter. Most of them tweet out interesting links, their opinions or stuff they're working on. I think Twitter is an excellent tool to stay in touch with what's going on in the Laravel and PHP community. If you're looking for some people to follow here are…
