Originals — posts I've written myself.
by Freek Van der Herten – 3 minute read – Edit
A few years ago all the projects I worked on were served on a shared hosting environment. It was quite common that a client had ftp access to server to upload some files. A control like Cpanel or Plesk made it really easy to create some ftp accounts. Fast forward to today. Most projects are hosted…
by Freek Van der Herten – 1 minute read – Edit
Most databases will contain some records that must be cleaned up. The reasons why a record can become unneeded are diverse: maybe it's a temporary record that was only needed for a little while if you're logging stuff to a table, a record may become too old to be of interest anymore ... To help a…
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by Freek Van der Herten – 9 minute read – Edit
Today our team released a new major version of laravel-backup. It can backup the files and databases of your application to one or more external filesystems. It uses Laravel's native cloud filesystem to do this. The package can also notify you via Slack and/or email when something goes wrong with…
by Freek Van der Herten – 2 minute read – Edit
Yesterday our newest package laravel-feed was released. It makes generating RSS feeds in Laravel very easy. It's very opinionated to fit the needs of our projects, but I believe lots of other developers will find it useful too. There's almost no coding involved to create some feeds. Installation…
by Freek Van der Herten – 6 minute read – Edit
A few days ago Spatie, the company where I work, launched a new website: vrijwilligerswerk.be. Translated to english it roughly comes down to workforvolunteers.be. On the website various organizations can post their jobs that can be filled by a volunteer. Volunteers have a very user-friendly way to…
by Freek Van der Herten – 1 minute read – Edit
A few weeks ago I released a package called db-dumper. The package can dump the structure and contents of a database to a file. Here's how it can be used: Spatie\DbDumper\Databases\MySql::create() ->setDbName($databaseName) ->setUserName($userName) ->setPassword($password)…
by Freek Van der Herten – 1 minute read – Edit
Using plain PHP it's kinda hard to display emoji characters. In PHP 5 those characters could be generated by using json_encode. echo json_decode('"\uD83D\uDE00"'); //displays ? I bet no one can type this code by heart. In PHP 7 it's a little bit easier. The hot new version of PHP…
by Freek Van der Herten – 4 minute read – Edit
This morning I got a mail from the support department of DigitalOcean, which hosts most sites for my company Spatie. (If you're not familiar with DO-speak, "droplet" is just a synonym for "server")
by Freek Van der Herten – 3 minute read – Edit
At the end of this month our local user group, PHP Antwerp, will hold it's third meetup. It'll be sponsered by Spatie, of which I'm a co-owner. In this post I'd like to explain why we are sponsering this event. Of course as a company it's good to get our name out there but there are other more…
by Freek Van der Herten – 1 minute read – Edit
If you don't want a site to be indexed by search engines you must place a robots.txt file. Typically you don't want anything indexed except production sites. Today Spatie released a new package called laravel-robots-middleware. It was coded up by my colleague Sebastian. Instead of you having to…
by Freek Van der Herten – 1 minute read – Edit
For a project I needed to extract some text from a pdf. Although there were already a few packages that could to this, I still created spatie/pdf-to-text because I wanted something that was really easy to use. And also because it's fun creating packages. Under the hood a utility called pdftotext is…
by Freek Van der Herten – 1 minute read – Edit
I decided to add a newsletter to my blog. The plan is to send out a newsletter every two weeks. Newsletters will contain lots of interesting stuff for the modern PHP developer. You can expect quick tips, links to interesting tutorials, opinions and packages. Because I work with Laravel every day…
by Freek Van der Herten – 2 minute read – Edit
Spatie, the company where I work, recently released a Laravel package called laravel-sluggable. It automatically creates unique slugs when saving a model. To install the package you just need to put the provided Spatie\Sluggable\HasSlug-trait on all models that have slugs. The trait contains an…
by Freek Van der Herten – 1 minute read – Edit
A few weeks ago I made a cli tool to check the status code of all links on a site. It made use of a home grown crawler. Today the Laravel integration gets released. The new package called laravel-link-checker can log all broken links. By default, a link is considered broken if the status code of…
by Freek Van der Herten – 2 minute read – Edit
Exactly one year ago the very first post on murze.be was published. This blog was mainly started as a way to bookmark interesting links. Along the way I shared programming tips, talked a bit about learning and gave some background on the Spatie packages. It's been a fun ride and looking at the…
by Freek Van der Herten – 4 minute read – Edit
Envoy is Laravel's official task runner. Using a Blade style syntax tasks can be defined that can be run both locally and remotely. At Spatie, we've been using Envoy for quite some time to deploy code on production servers. Summarized our trusty Envoy script did the following things: bringing the…
by Freek Van der Herten – 1 minute read – Edit
Laravel ships with some good validation capabilities. Form request validation is a nice way to make sure http requests pass valid data. To validate stuff that enters the application in some other way validators can be created manually. Unfortunately this is kinda verbose: $validator =…
by Freek Van der Herten – 4 minute read – Edit
When Spatie unleashes a new site on the web we want to make sure that all, both internal and external, links on it work. To facilitate that process we released a tool to check the statuscode of every link on a given website. It can easily be installed via composer: composer global require…
by Freek Van der Herten – 1 minute read – Edit
At Spatie we're constantly improving our application template called Blender. We love using packages to pull in functionality. Creating and using packages has many benefits. Though we try to create public packages that benefit the community, there are some packages that are very specific to Blender.…
by Freek Van der Herten – 3 minute read – Edit
At Spatie we use a homegrown Laravel template called Blender. It's being used on nearly all our projects. When starting with a greenfield project we take a copy of Blender and make project specific changes in that copy. We built it because we want maximum flexibility and don't want to be hampered by…
