In this section you can read posts I've written myself.
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…
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Expect quick tips & tricks, interesting tutorials, opinions and packages. Because I work with Laravel every day there is an emphasis on that framework.
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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…
Last friday Taylor Otwell tweeted an easy to use memoization function called once: Wanted a slick way to generalize class method memoization. Y'all don't even want to know how it works. ? ? pic.twitter.com/xRJAY1C14y— Taylor Otwell (@taylorotwell) November 4, 2016 Taylor was kind…
There are a lot of quality tagging packages out there. Most of them offer the same thing: creating tags, associating them with models and some functions to easily retrieve models with certain tags. But in our projects at Spatie we need more functionality. Last week we released our own - very…
In the beginning of the year we released a package to notify you when a queued job in your Laravel application fails. Today we tagged v2 of that laravel-failed-job-monitor package. The big change is that it now uses Laravel 5.3's native notification capabilities. So it's a cinch to modify the…
When transitioning from a old site to a new one the URLs of your site may change. If your old site was popular you probably want to retain your SEO worth. One way of doing this is by providing permanent redirects from your old URLs to your new URLs. Our new spatie/laravel-missing-page-redirector…
For several projects and other packages we need to manipulate URL's. Instead of coding the same URL class over and over again, we extracted URL manipulation to it's own package. Here are some code examples on how you can use it. $url = Url::fromString('https://spatie.be/opensource'); echo…
For several different clients we needed to display a schedule of opening hours on their websites. They also wanted to display if a department / store / ... is open on the moment you visit the site. My colleague Seb extracted all the functionality around opening hours to the newly released…
In a vanilla Laravel installation you can use language files to localize your app. The Laravel documentation refers to any string in a language file as a language line. You can fetch the value of any language line easily with Laravel's handy trans-function. trans('messages.welcome'); //…
