Originals — posts I've written myself.
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…
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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'); //…
Recently I was working an a project where, in order to use the webapp, users should first apply for an account. Potential users can fill in request form. After the request is approved by an admin they may use the app. Our client expected that the barrier to request an account should be very low.…
Last week v2 of laravel-fractal was released. This package is a developer friendly wrapper around the League's Fractal package. It a Laravel context it can be used to transform your Eloquent models to JSON output for an API. Think of it as toJson (or toArray) on steroids. This is how you can work…
I'm very happy to announce that, as of today, our Laravel and PHP packages have been downloaded a million times. We now have more than 80 packages registered on Packagist. All combined they are downloaded around 150 000 times a month, and that number seems to be growing. Our GitHub organisation has…
My colleague Seb needed to convert some color values in PHP. He looked around for some good packages, but there weren't any that fit the bill. So guess what he did? He just created a new package called spatie/color. Here's what it can do: $rgb = Rgb::fromString('rgb(55,155,255)'); echo…