Generating PDFs from HTML and PhantomJS original
by Freek Van der Herten – 1 minute read – Edit
Originals — posts I've written myself.
A pjax middleware for Laravel 5 original
by Freek Van der Herten – 1 minute read – Edit
A few days ago Jeffrey Way published an interesting lesson on how to integrate pjax with Laravel. Pjax is jquery plugin that leverages ajax to speed up the loading time of webpages. It works by only fetching specific html fragments from the server, and client-side updating only certain parts of the…
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A Fractal service provider for Laravel original
by Freek Van der Herten – 1 minute read – Edit
Today I released a new package called laravel-fractal. It provides a Fractal service provider for Laravel. If you don't know what Fractal does, take a peek at their intro. Shortly said, Fractal is very useful to transform data before using it in an API. Using Fractal data can be transformed like…
Redirect every request in a Laravel app original
by Freek Van der Herten – 1 minute read – Edit
I recently had to redirect every single request in a Laravel app. You might think that would be as easy as this: Route::get('/', function() { return redirect('https://targetdomain.com'); }); But that'll only redirect the "/" page. All other requests will return a 404.…
A middleware to check abilities on the route level original
by Freek Van der Herten – 1 minute read – Edit
Laravel's native authorization functionality allows you to define abilities a user can have. There are multiple ways to check if a user has a certain ability: via the facade, via the user model, within blade templates and within form requests. What Laravel doesn't provide out of the box is a…
A package to add roles and permissions to Laravel original
by Freek Van der Herten – 1 minute read – Edit
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…
How to add multilingual support to Eloquent original
by Freek Van der Herten – 1 minute read – Edit
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.
Making string concatination readable in JavaScript original
by Freek Van der Herten – 1 minute read – Edit
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…
Laracon EU 2015 recap day two original
by Freek Van der Herten – 4 minute read – Edit
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…
Laracon EU 2015 recap day one original
by Freek Van der Herten – 3 minute read – Edit
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…
Making string concatenation readable in PHP original
by Freek Van der Herten – 2 minute read – Edit
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…
View disk space usage on Ubuntu original
by Freek Van der Herten – 1 minute read – Edit
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…
Further refactoring code for readability original
by Freek Van der Herten – 2 minute read – Edit
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…
Using Algolia in Laravel original
by Freek Van der Herten – 2 minute read – Edit
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…
Laravel-medialibrary hits version 3 original
by Freek Van der Herten – 3 minute read – Edit
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…
What would make Laravel Forge even better original
by Freek Van der Herten – 2 minute read – Edit
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…
Upload large files to S3 using Laravel 5 original
by Freek Van der Herten – 1 minute read – Edit
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…
Our open source software original
by Freek Van der Herten – 1 minute read – Edit
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…
Convert a pdf to an image using PHP original
by Freek Van der Herten – 1 minute read – Edit
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…
A new version of the medialibrary package original
by Freek Van der Herten – 1 minute read – Edit
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…
