Freek Van der Herten's blog on PHP, Laravel and JavaScript

Posts tagged with development

Running Claude Code with a Local LLM: A Step-by-Step Guide

Jul 14th 2025 – www.shawnmayzes.com

Even though I use Claude Code, I haven't used local models. It seems very convenient to be able to use Claude Code without an internet connection.

Continuous AI in software engineering

Jul 9th 2025 – www.seangoedecke.com

Continuous AI in software engineering involves integrating AI tooling automatically into existing development flows, such as automated PR reviews, issue labeling, and daily summaries.

Accessing Databases in PhpStorm

Nov 18th 2024 – seankegel.com - submitted by Sean Kegel

Powerful Database Features You Didn't Know PhpStorm Had

Introducing Laravel Error Share

Jun 10th 2024 – flareapp.io - submitted by Spatie

Introducing Laravel Error Share, simply share and debug local errors with your team!

Pausing and disabling Ray execution

May 6th 2024 – myray.app - submitted by Spatie

This is one of Ray's coolest features!

How we built our GitLab integration

Jan 9th 2024 – flareapp.io - submitted by Spatie

A few days ago, we added a GitLab integration. In this blog post, we'll talk about the road to that integration and our struggles.

Workbench App for Packages

Sep 13th 2023 – world.hey.com - submitted by Tony Messias

A new package by Mior called Workbench lets us set up an example Laravel app inside our packages. This Workbench app can serve as documentation of how the package integrates with a Larave app. Plus, we can use the Workbench models, controllers, routes, etc., in our package's tests and quickly run the Workbench app in the browser!

Ray is the best home for your Next.js debugging output

Jun 21st 2023 – myray.app - submitted by Spatie

Debug logging is difficult in Next.js. In this post, we'll provide a solution to this issue.

Leverage Symfony VarDumper Component to Enhance your Dumps

Mar 24th 2023 – jolicode.com

Let's take a look how we can extend Var Dumper to dump our objects, or some vendor objects, in a more readable way.

Valet 4.0 is released

Mar 16th 2023 – laravel-news.com

Valet is one of my favourite pieces of technology: I don't notice that I'm using it, still I use it every single day.

Local Environment Seeders in Laravel

Feb 2nd 2023 – stefanzweifel.dev

This makes not just testing the UI of an app easier, but also makes onboarding new developers to a project simpler.

Automatically restart Horizon when local PHP files change

Oct 31st 2022 by Freek Van der Herten – 3 minute read

We've released a new package called spatie/laravel-horizon-watcher. This one can automatically restart Horizon after any code change.

In this post, I'd like to share why we've built and how you can use it.

Using CLion with php-src

Sep 18th 2022 – dev.to

Ben Ramsey explains how can start working on PHP's source code using JetBrains' C IDE.

A step-debugger for the PHP AST

Sep 13th 2022 – matthiasnoback.nl

A cool new tool by Matthias Noback.

Using Laravel Vite to automatically refresh your browser when changing a Blade file

Jun 29th 2022 by Freek Van der Herten – 2 minute read

Yesterday, the Laravel team released the vite-plugin. Going forward, Vite will become the standard build tool for Laravel apps.

One of the cool features of this Vite integration is that you'll get hot reloading by default. Whenever you run Vite with npm dev and modify a JS or CSS file, Vite will automatically recompile the assets and refresh your browser. This way, you won't have to refresh your browser manually after making a change.

Wouldn't it be cool if this automatic refresh would work when we're changing a Blade file?

Making Vite and Valet play nice together

Jun 29th 2022 by Freek Van der Herten – 3 minute read

Yesterday, the Laravel team launched the official vite-plugin. From now on, Vite will be the standard build tool for Laravel. The main benefits are vastly improved build times and a more straightforward API. Want to know more about it? Head over to the official docs. There's also a migration guide to go from Mix to Vite.

When I followed that guide to upgrade the freek.dev codebase from Mix to Vite , npm dev could successfully start-up Vite, but in the browser the JS / CSS did not load. Let's review how I could fix that.

Freek.dev