In this section you can read posts I've written myself.
With the release of Laravel 5.1.1 last week the framework gained some nice Authorization features. It provides an easy way to define abilities (aka permissions). Checking if a user has certain abilities is very simple as well. The code powering authorization is a thing of beauty. If you're a…
Eric Barnes, the curator of Laravel News, recently decided to publish guest posts. Mike Bronner contributed the first guest post on how to install Z-Ray in Homestead. Today, an article written by me was published.
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At Laracon EU Frank De Jonge gave a talk on modern JavaScript development. It struck a cord with me. On a project I'm currently working on I'm learning a bit of React and using some of these neat new JavaScript features. One of those features is called template strings. It allows you do make string…
Today the second day of the Laracon EU took place in Amsterdam. Like yesterday there were a lot of interesting speakers. Jessica Rose started with a great talk on imposter syndrome. Impostor syndrome is the feeling that you don't know what you're doing, while everyone else is getting on fine. She…
I'm having the pleasure to attend Laracon EU. The event is located at a truly beautiful venue: the Royal Tropical Institute in Amsterdam. Today was the first day of the conference. Matt Stauffer kicked off Laracon EU with a great talk about empathy. He explained why it is a key trait that every…
Probably all PHP developers know how to concatenate strings. The most popular method is using the .-operator. For small concatenations using this operator works fine. When lots of strings or variables need to be combined it can become cumbersome. Here's an example: $logMessage = 'A…
A while ago, a disk of one of our DigitalOcean droplets had almost no free space. Ncdu (NCurses Disk Usage) is a command line tool to view and analyse disk space usage on Ubuntu. It can be installed with this command: sudo apt-get install ncdu Once it has been installed it can be launched by simply…
A few days ago Dylan Bridgman published a post on writing highly readable code. He cleaned up a truly horrible piece of code. The code was further improved the very same day by Ryan Winchester. I believe the code can be improved still. Read the mentioned blog posts to see which code we are going to…
Algolia is a hosted service that makes advanced searching very easy. It's well documented and lightning quick. You can see some impressive examples on their site. Artisans probably know that Jeffrey Way recently published a series on Algolia. Earlier this year I made a package to easily work with a…
Not a month has gone by since v2 of the laravel-medialibrary package got released. If you're not familiar with it: the package provides an easy way to associate files with Eloquent models. Though I was quite happy with the improvements made over v1 there were some things that bothered me. Take a…
A little over a year ago Laravel Forge was launched. At Spatie we currently have 60 servers that are provisioned by and administered using it. I'm assuming we still hold the biggest Forge-account. By this time next year the number of servers will probably be higher. So yeah, I'm a very happy…
Chris Blackwell yesterday published a tutorial on how to upload files to S3 using Laravel. This is the code he used (slightly redacted): $disk= Storage::disk('s3'); $disk->put($targetFile, file_get_contents($sourceFile)); This is a good way to go about it for small files. You should note…
The past few months my colleagues and I invested quite some time on creating open source software. Because there now are a lot of packages under the Spatie-vendor name, we decided to put a nice overview on our website. Obviously these packages benefit the community, but there are a lot of advantages…
Converting a pdf to an image is easy using PHP, but the API kinda sucks. $imagick = new Imagick('file.pdf[0]'); $imagick->setImageFormat('jpg'); file_put_contents($pathToImage, $imagick); The pdf-to-image-package aims to fix that. Here is the equivalent code: $pdf = new…
When starting out with Laravel I made a medialibrary to associate uploaded files with models. In our custom made cms we use the medialibrary to for example associate articles with images. In short the medialibrary could: associate files with models generate thumbnails and other derived images from…
Earlier tonight the first PHP Antwerp meetup was held. The event was organised by Dries Vints of BeatSwich. I was the first speaker and talked a little bit about Satis and how we use it at Spatie. You can view the slides on Speakerdeck. The big talk of the evening was delivered by Mitchell van…
Google Tag Manager allows you to add tags to your site without editing the site code. A tag, in Google parlance, is a snippet of JavaScript that sends information to a third party, such as... Google. There are tags to install things like Analytics, Adwords or others on your site . To use GTM you…
Inspired by Edd Man's post on optional value control-flows I made a small Laravel package to optionally abort your application. The package provides a Spatie\OrAbort\OrAbort-trait that can be used on any class you want. All the methods of the class will gain orAbort-variant. When the original…
Laravel offers a nice way to add pagination. As far as your routes are concerned you don't have to do a thing. It just works out of the box. Unfortunately the generated url's are pretty ugly: http://example.com/news?page=2 What we want are url's that look like this: http://example.com/news/page/2…
Prosper Otemuyiwa recently wrote an article on how to create Laravel 5 packages on his blog. Although his approach is entirely valid and may suit you well, I work a little differently when creating a new package. First, I create a new GitHub repository where the package will live. In that repo I…
