Freek.dev

Laravel / PHP / AI

Originals — posts I've written myself.

Handling console signals in Laravel original

by Freek Van der Herten – 7 minute read

When you cancel a long-running artisan command with Ctrl+C, a SIGINT signal is sent by the operating system to the PHP process. You can use this signal to perform some cleanup quickly.

Symfony 5.2 introduced support for handling signals in commands.

We've released a package called spatie/laravel-signal-aware-commands that provides a substantial improvement to how you can use these signals in a Laravel app. In this blog post, I'd like to tell you all about it.

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Why and how you should remove inactive users and teams original

by Freek Van der Herten – 8 minute read

There are many SaaS applications that allow potential new customers to try out the service using a trial period. Of course, not everybody will convert. After the trial period is over, some people will not use the service anymore. However, if nothing is being done about it, their email address and…

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Mailcoach v4 has been released: drip campaigns, automations, mail templates and much more original

by Freek Van der Herten – 4 minute read

I'm proud to announce that Mailcoach v4 has been released. Mailcoach already was a great solution to send out bulk emails affordably. With an entirely refreshed UI and new capabilities, Mailcoach now becomes a more powerful platform for all things email:

We've also rewritten our extensive documentation.

In this blog post, I'd like to give you a tour of everything Mailcoach can do.

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Building a Laravel package from scratch original

by Freek Van der Herten – 1 minute read

In this streaming session, you can see me build up the package from scratch. You can find the code seen in the stream in the spatie/laravel-remote repo on GitHub. If you want to learn how to build PHP and Laravel packages, consider purchasing our Laravel Package Training video course.

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Introducing monthly playlists from team Spatie original

by Freek Van der Herten – 2 minute read

At Spatie, each one of our team members loves music. Scattered across our office are a couple of HomePods. Everyone in our team is free to stream his favourite music for others to hear (of course at an acceptable volume so everyone can still work).

This is a great way to discover music. In my mind, any automated algorithm that picks music for you is trumped what your friends and peers suggest to you.

Because of the pandemic, this way of sharing music with each other was lost. That's why our team will from now on create monthly playlists. The process is easy: every month we will choose a theme for the playlist and each team member picks two or three tracks.

The first theme is "Late Night Something" (it's not "late night coding" because not everyone on our team codes.

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Here's our playlist on Apple Music. And here is the same playlist on Spotify.

Here's at the Spotify embed so you can listen from your browser too.

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Debug apps running on remote servers using Ray original

by Freek Van der Herten – 1 minute read

Earlier this year, we released Ray, a desktop app that allows you to debug faster. Instead of dumping values to the browser or console, Ray allows you to display debugging information beautifully in a dedicated window.

Since launch, Ray helps you debug local projects. Today, we're adding the most requested feature to Ray: the ability to connect to remote servers. All output of the ray() call, will be sent securely from your remote server to the local app via SSH.

Using this feature, you can quickly investigate problems on your production servers that you are unable to recreate locally.

In this short video you'll see a quick demo!

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Determining the start of the next business day in Oh Dear original

by Freek Van der Herten – 9 minute read

When a site is down, Oh Dear sends a notification every hour. Since last year, our notifications can be snoozed for a fixed amount of time (5 minutes, 1 hour, 4 hours, one day).

In the evenings and weekends, our users might not want to receive repeated notifications. That's why we've added a nice human touch: all notifications can now be snoozed until the start of the next workday.

In this blog post, I'd like to share some of the code that powers this feature. We'll focus on how the start of the next workday is calculated.

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Simplifying service providers in Laravel packages original

by Freek Van der Herten – 3 minute read

In almost every Laravel package, there is a ServiceProvider class responsible for registering bindings package resources such as config files, views, migrations, ...

While preparing a workshop that I gave on package development, I watched some videos of our own Laravel package training video course again. While watching the videos on using the service provider again, I had the idea to simplify how resources can be registered.

Meanwhile, I've fleshed out the idea and release it as a new package called laravel-package-tools. In this blog post, I'd like to introduce the package to you.

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Introducing Ray: a debugging tool for pragmatic developers original

by Freek Van der Herten – 16 minute read

I'm proud to announce the immediate release of Ray, a desktop app that vastly improves your debugging experience. Ray is a dedicated window to send dumped values to. It has a lot of features that help you find and fix bugs faster.

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Ray is available for macOS, Windows and Linux.

In this blog post, I'd like to share why and how we've built Ray. If you just want to know what Ray is, head to the Ray homepage.

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Announcing our secret project original

by Freek Van der Herten – 1 minute read

These past few months, my team and I have worked on something that we think will be very usefull for PHP and Laravel devs.

At 14:30 CEST you can see me release it live in this stream on YouTube.

I've already shown our project to a couple of friends. This is what they said:

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A recap of 2020 original

by Freek Van der Herten – 35 minute read

What a year this has been. I guess that in January, nobody suspected that we'd got ourselves a worldwide pandemic on our hands.

For many people, 2020 has been a pretty rough year. While the pandemic also impacted me, I think that the problems I have only exist in my head. Nobody around me had health or financial troubles, and I also don't have any complaints on those fronts. That makes me a very lucky man.

In this blog post, I'd like to reflect on the things I did in 2020.

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