A recap of 2021 original
by Freek Van der Herten – 23 minute read – Edit
Now that we are in the final days of 2021, let's take a look back at that stuff my team and I did in 2021.
Originals — posts I've written myself.
by Freek Van der Herten – 23 minute read – Edit
Now that we are in the final days of 2021, let's take a look back at that stuff my team and I did in 2021.
by Freek Van der Herten – 1 minute read – Edit
Whenever I upgrade PHP, I seem to have troubles installing imagick. This command pecl install imagick always results in an error "'pcre2.h' file not found". To fix that error, you should issue these commands: brew install pcre2 ln -s /opt/homebrew/Cellar/pcre2/10.39/include/pcre2.h…
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by Freek Van der Herten – 15 minute read – Edit
I'm proud to announce that we've released a new package called Laravel Health. As the name implies, this package can be used to monitor the health of your Laravel application.
It offers many checks out of the box, and an easy way to create custom checks. When something is wrong, you can get a notification, or view the status on a dashboard.
The package also offers deep integration with Oh Dear, allowing for even more robust monitoring
I want to tell you all about it in this blog post. Let's go!

by Freek Van der Herten – 2 minute read – Edit
I've used this little bash alias for many years to quickly run the tests inside of a project.
alias p="vendor/bin/phpunit"
With this alias in place, I can run the tests by typing "p" on the CLI. Nice!
For a long time, everything was great! But then, Pest appeared on the scene. It's an alternative test runner for PHP with a high focus on developer experience.
by Freek Van der Herten – 1 minute read – Edit
Earlier this week the PHP Foundation was announced. In this stream on GitHub, my buddies Christoph Rumpel, James Brooks and I discuss what we think this means for the future of PHP.
by Freek Van der Herten – 4 minute read – Edit
For years, my team and I manually updated the changelog for our 250+ packages. Recently, we've improved how we go about this.
In this blog post, I'd like to tell you all about it.
by Freek Van der Herten – 2 minute read – Edit
I am excited to share that my team and I have just launched v2.0 of our Laravel Package Training video course.
Here's a the introductory video for the course:
by Freek Van der Herten – 1 minute read – Edit
In your tests, you might have used assertDatabaseHas to make sure that a model actual is persisted.
by Freek Van der Herten – 1 minute read – Edit
Here's the recording of the latest edition of the Laravel Worldwide meetup. Philo Hermans showed off two great Livewire packages that he made. Steve McDougall did a cool live coding session on how to build APIs. And at the end, our suprise guest Caneco gave a nice little presentation on Lumen as…
by Freek Van der Herten – 11 minute read – Edit
My current setup (end 2021 edition)
After tweeting out a screenshot, it often get questions around which editor, font or color scheme I'm using. Instead of replying to those questions individually I've decided to just write down the settings and apps that I'm using.
by Ruben Van Assche – 12 minute read – Edit
In the vast majority of applications you work with data structures. Sometimes that data is described multiple times. Think for instance of a form request that tries to validate a blog post model, and an API transformer class for that same blog post model. Changes are that both classes describe the same properties.
Using our new laravel-data package, those structures only need to be described once.
by Brent Roose – 2 minute read – Edit
Have you ever had to write an API integration from scratch? Where you're managing the HTTP calls yourself instead of being able to rely on third-party packages?
by Brent Roose – 3 minute read – Edit
Mocking, faking; these might sound like intimidating words if you don't know what they are about, but once you do, you'll be able to improve your testing skills significantly.
Part of "the art of testing" is being able to test code in some level of isolation to make sure a test suite is trustworthy and versatile. These topics are so important that we actually made five or six videos on them in our Testing Laravel course.
In this post, I want to share three ways how you can deal with mocking and faking. Let's dive in!
by Freek Van der Herten – 12 minute read – Edit
The newly released spatie/laravel-site-search package can crawl and index the content of one or more sites. You can think of it as a private Google search for your sites. Like most Spatie packages, it is highly customizable: you have total control over what content gets crawled and indexed.
To see the package in action, head over to the search page of this very blog.
In this post, I'd like to introduce the package to you and highlight some implementation and testing details. Let's dig in!
by Brent Roose – 1 minute read – Edit
One of the things I really like about modern Laravel projects, are the new model factories introduced in Laravel 8.
by Adriaan Marain – 3 minute read – Edit
Ray is an app we built at Spatie to make debugging your applications easier and faster. Being web developers, we naturally decided to write this app in Electron, which enabled us to move from nothing to a working prototype to a released product on 3 separate platforms within a matter of weeks.
by Freek Van der Herten – 2 minute read – Edit
A few days ago, a new version of 1Password was released that is able to detect where a user can reset his or her password.
by Brent Roose – 1 minute read – Edit
Testing a Laravel project is one of the most pleasant experiences I've ever had: there's a clean testing API, a very powerful layer added on top of testing frameworks; all while keeping the simplicity and eloquence you'd expect from a Laravel project.
– flareapp.io – Edit
At Flare, we launched a new search experience. We have a very cool search field with autocompletions (powered by the rendering engine behind VS Code), and a very smooth graph powered by AmCharts. Let's take a look at the technical details!
Read more [flareapp.io]
by Freek Van der Herten – 1 minute read – Edit
This edition of the meetup features those two excellent talks: