In this section you can read posts I've written myself.

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On all these platforms, regularly share programming tips, and what I myself have learned in ongoing projects.

Every month I send out a newsletter containing lots of interesting stuff for the modern PHP developer.

Expect quick tips & tricks, interesting tutorials, opinions and packages. Because I work with Laravel every day there is an emphasis on that framework.

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Moving PHP and Laravel tests from Travis CI to GitHub Actions

Original – by Freek Van der Herten – 3 minute read

Earlier this year, Travis CI announced a new pricing model that effectively ends the generous open-source offering they had for many years. It seems that, even though there were some plans to provide free resources for OSS projects in the future, all activity for OSS projects has stopped.

At our company, we create a lot of open-source projects and packages. Beginning 2020, we already moved most of our stuff to GitHub actions.

Sure, you can read the GitHub actions docs to start learning the possibilities, but in my experience, it might be better to see some examples of practical uses cases. Here are some interesting links that might help you get started with GitHub actions.

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Building the Imagick PHP extension from master

Original – by Freek Van der Herten – 2 minute read

At the time of writing there is no version of Imagick compatible with PHP 8. Fortuntely, the version on the master brach of the Imagick repo seems to work. Here's how you can use it. Clone the repo somewhere on disk Follow the steps mentioned here to create the extension. cd <directory of cloned…

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Media Library Pro makes uploading files to a Laravel app a breeze

Original – by Freek Van der Herten – 14 minute read

I'm proud to announce that Media Library Pro is now available. Media Library Pro is an add-on package for our free Media Library base package. It contains a set of Blade, Vue and React components that make it easy to upload files to media library and to manage files inside of a media library collection.

In this blog post, I'd like to introduce Media Library Pro to you.

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The best PRs we got in October

Original – by Freek Van der Herten – 4 minute read

At Spatie, we want to stimulate contributing to our open source stuff. That's why we said that we'd give away some of our paid products for free to authors of the best PRs we got in October. In a way, it's our own small version of Hacktoberfest.

In this blog post, I'd like to announce the winners.

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Exploring PHP 8 features

Original – by Freek Van der Herten – 1 minute read

In preparation for creating the Front Line PHP video course I needed to make myself familiar with the features that PHP 8 brings to the table. In this stream you can see me trying out some of these features for the first time.

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Introducing Laravel Backup Server

Original – by Freek Van der Herten – 8 minute read

I'm proud to announce the release of our newest package Laravel Backup Server. This paid package can backup several servers at once. When a backup contains files also present in a previous backup, deduplication using hard links will be performed. Even though you will see full backups in the…

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Selling digital products using Laravel part 9: Serving ads on GitHub

Original – by Freek Van der Herten – 7 minute read

Our company has created a lot of open-source packages. At the moment of writing, we have over 200 packages, which have been downloaded nearly 100 million times. Because we think the package users might be interested in our paid offerings as well, we've put a small ad in the readme of each repo. In this blogpost I'll explain how we manage these ads using Laravel Nova and S3.

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