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In a recent interview published on the Cloudways blog Taylor Otwell shares his thoughts on the similarities differences between Laravel and Symfony.

Both Laravel and Symfony are more rapid than building an entire PHP application from scratch. So, in that sense, they both allow rapid application development. However, Laravel does make strong efforts to have a very clean and productive working environment for building applications of all sizes. I think Symfony has also made efforts in this direction over the last few years with their “DX” initiatives and some of the more opinionated things they are doing with Symfony Flex.

https://www.cloudways.com/blog/taylor-otwell-interview/

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Michael Dyrynda, co-host of both the excellent North Meets South podcast and Laravel News podcast, wrote a short article on how he pragmatically manages forms in a Laravel app.

I personally feel that I'm not gaining anything by bringing in another package just to handle generating HTML on my behalf when it's just as fast to use the tools available to me in my editor. It also means there's no implied knowledge of a now non-standard external package, should a new developer be brought on to the projects that I've worked on. HTML is HTML, after all.

https://dyrynda.com.au/blog/elegant-form-handling-in-laravel

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I ❤️ Laravel's tinker command and use it everyday. Caleb Porzio, an engineer at Tighten Co, wrote a good post on the that command, containing lots of cool stuff I didn't knew tinker could do.

Although some of the value Tinker provides is clear at first glance, it also has loads of hidden and exciting features available out-of-the-box. Let’s walk through and take a look at some ways you can super-charge your Tinker workflow.

https://blog.tighten.co/supercharge-your-laravel-tinker-workflow

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In a new post on his blog Sebastian De Deyne, multi disciplinary wizard at Spatie, explains how to set up TypeScript in a typical Laravel app.

In a recent Spatie project we decided to give TypeScript a shot for the business critical part of a new application. TypeScript provides static analysis to reduce the chance of introducing bugs, to have self-documenting code, and to improve our tooling (autocompletion!)

Adding TypeScript support is pretty straight forward and is done in three steps: install the necessary dependencies, configure TypeScript, and finally configure Laravel Mix.

https://sebastiandedeyne.com/posts/2017/typescript-with-laravel-mix

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Tinker is probably one of my most used Artisan commands. A minor annoyance is that it can be quite bothersome having to type the fully qualified classname to do something simple.

Today we release a new package called laravel-tinker-tools. When fully installed let's you use the short class names in a tinker session:

This magic does not only work with models but with every class in your Laravel app.

Installing the package

There are a few non standard steps you need to take in order to install the package.

First, pull in the package like you normally would:

composer require spatie/laravel-tinker-tools

Next, create a file named .psysh.php in the root of your Laravel app with this content:

<?php

\Spatie\TinkerTools\ShortClassNames::register();

Finally, dump the optimized version of the autoloader so autoload_classmap.php gets created.

composer dump-autoload -o

And with that all out of the way you can use short class names in your tinker session.

A peek behind the curtains

When you use a class that hasn't been loaded in yet, PHP will call the registered autoloader functions. Such autoloader functions are responsible for loading up the requested class. In a typical project Composer will register an autoloader function that can include the file where the class is stored in.

Composer has a few ways to locate the right files. In most cases it will convert the fully qualified class name to a path. For example, when using a class App\Models\NewsItem Composer will load the file in app/Models/NewsItem.php. It's a bit more complicated behind the scenes but that's the gist of it. To make the process of finding a class fast, Composer caches all the fully qualified classnames and their paths in the generated autoload_classmap.php, which can be found in vendor/composer.

Now, to make this package work, \Spatie\TinkerTools\ShortClassNames will read Composer's autoload_classmap.php and convert the fully qualified class names to short class names. The result is a collection that's being kept in the $classes property

Our class will also register an autoloader. When you use NewsItem in your code. PHP will first call Composer's autoloader. But of course that autoloader can't find the class. So the autoloader from this package comes next. Our autoloader will use the aforementioned $classes collection to find to fully qualified class name. It will then use class_alias to alias NewsItem to App\Models\NewsItem.

What happens if there are multiple classes with same name?

Now you might wonder what'll happen it there are more classes with the same name in different namespaces? E.g. App\Models\NewsItem, Vendor\PackageName\NewsItem. Well, autoload_classmap.php is sorted alphabetically on the fully qualified namespace. So App\Models\NewsItem will be used and not Vendor\PackageName\NewsItem.

Because App starts with an "A" there's a high chance that, in case of a collision, a class inside your application will get picked. Currently there are no ways to alter this. I'd accept PRs that make this behaviour customizable.

Need more tinker magic?

There are a lot of other options that can be set in tinker.config.php. Learn all the options by reading the official psysh configuration documentation. Caleb Porzio's excellent blogpost "Supercharge Your Laravel Tinker Workflow" is an excellent read as well. This package was inspired by that blogpost

Maybe you don't need tinker...

If you want to run a single line of code tinker can be a bit of overkill. You must start up tinker, type the code, press enter, and quit tinker. Our laravel-artisan-dd package contains an Artisan command that can dump anything from the commandline. No need to start and quit tinker anymore.

We've updated the package so you can make use of short class names too. Here's how you can dump a model using a minimal amount of keystrokes:

In closing

laravel-tinker-tools and laravel-artisan-dd aren't the only packages we've made that make developing Laravel apps easier.

Be sure to take a look at these ones at well:

• laravel-tail
• laravel-migrate-fresh
• laravel-db-snapshots
• laravel-mailable-test
• laravel-demo-mode

Need even more stuff? The open source section on our company website lists everything we've released previously: https://spatie.be/en/opensource

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On April 22nd Laravel Nigeria held its first meetup. It was a big success with over 150 developers showing up.

Here's a recap written by Neo Ighodaro, the organiser of the meetup: https://blog.devcenter.co/building-the-laravel-nigeria-community-with-over-150-attending-the-first-meetup-c919d5ca373c

The talks of the meetup were recorded, you can watch them here:

• Learn Frontend with Vue.js
• Deploying Your Laravel Application
• Surviving With "Thin" Controllers and Models

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In a new post on his blog Taylor Otwell gives a nice example on how real time facades can make code more testable.

Recently, I worked on some code that surfaced my most common use-case for Laravel 5.4’s “real-time” facades. If you’re not familiar with this feature, it allows you to use any of your application’s classes as a Laravel “facade” on-demand by prefixingFacades to the namespace when importing the class. This is not a feature that is littered throughout my code, but I find it occasionally provides a clean, testable approach to writing expressive object APIs.

https://medium.com/@taylorotwell/expressive-code-real-time-facades-41c442914291

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Mohammed Said, Laravel employee #1 and diver, explains how you can avoid pushing unnecessary jobs to a queue.

How many customers will reach the 10K purchase milestone? does it make sense to push a Job to queue for every single purchase while there's a huge chance that this job will just do nothing at all? IMHO this is a waste of resources, you might end up filling your queue with thousands of unnecessary jobs.

It might be a good thing if we can check for that condition before queueing the listener.

http://themsaid.com/conditionally-queue-listeners-laravel-20170505/

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Bobby Bouwmann, a very helpful guy, created a new free service that can generate email markdown themes for use in a Laravel application.

https://markdownmail.com/

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Paul Redmond explains how you can use Guzzle 6' middleware to add a HMAC authorization header.

I prefer to keep my dependencies as up-to-date as possible so I decided to learn Guzzle 6 and become more familiar with the middleware. The concepts are pretty straightforward and I have a few patterns that I like to use when building out middleware within my Laravel applications.

https://medium.com/@paulredmond/using-guzzle-6-middleware-in-a-laravel-application-7fbd6d966235

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A few week ago we released a new major version of laravel-permission. This package makes it easy to store permission and roles in the database. Our package plays nice with Laravel's Gate and has support for multiple guards.

In a new post on his blog Saqueib Ansari shows how you can create an interface to assign permissions and roles to a user using our package.

Laravel comes with Authentication and Authorization out of the box, I have implemented many role and permissions based system in the past, using laravel, it’s peace of cake. In this post, we are going to implement a fully working and extensible roles and permissions on laravel 5.4. When we finish we will have a starter kit which we can use for our any future project which needs roles and permissions based access control.

http://www.qcode.in/easy-roles-and-permissions-in-laravel-5-4

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Danny Van Kooten did an interesting experiment. He completely rewrote an Laravel app to a version in Go. In a post on his blog he shares some details about his project along with some benchmarks.

Earlier this year, I made an arguably bad business decision. I decided to rewrite the Laravel application powering Boxzilla in Go.

No regrets though.

Just a few weeks later I was deploying the Go application. Building it was the most fun I had in months, I learned a ton and the end result is a huge improvement over the old application. Better performance, easier deployments and higher test coverage.

https://dannyvankooten.com/laravel-to-golang/

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While working a little bit on laravel-sitemap I decided to refactor the tests to make use of our own snapshot assertions package. The snapshot package enables you to generate snapshots with the output of your tests. On subsequent runs of those tests it can assert if the output still matches the contents of the snapshot.

In this video I demonstrate how the refactor of the tests of laravel-sitemap was done. (double-click on it to view it full-screen)

If you want to know more about snapshot testing, then read this blog post written by my colleague Sebastian. The refactor of the tests can be viewed in this commit on GitHub.

(Little note on the video itself: this is my first tutorial video I ever made. After recording it I noticed that I used a wrong ratio resulting in those black bars on the side. Ah well, you live you learn. Next time it will be better. For those interested, I used a Blue Yeti Pro mic to record my voice and ScreenFlow to record and edit the video.)

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Jarek Tkaczyk demonstrates how you can use a helper relation to eager load specific models.

Have you ever needed to show only single related model from the hasMany relationship on a set of parents?

Being it latest, highest or just random, it’s not very clever to load whole collection using eager loading, just like running query per every parent.

Of course you can do that better, and now let me show you how.

https://softonsofa.com/tweaking-eloquent-relations-how-to-get-latest-related-model/

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On his blog Matt Stauffer published a new post explaining the steps required to deploy your app without any downtime.

The reason you're getting zero-downtime deploy from these tools is because the entire deploy process—clone, composer install, etc.—doesn't happen in the directory that is currently serving your site. Instead, each new release gets its own separate "release" directory, all while your site is still being served from its current "release" directory.

https://mattstauffer.co/blog/how-to-set-up-your-laravel-application-for-zero-downtime-envoyer-capistrano-deploys

In my own projects I handle these capistrano like deploys using a custom Envoy script: https://github.com/spatie/blender/blob/master/Envoy.blade.php

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Michael Dyrynda, one of the co-hosts of the Laravel News and the North Meets South podcasts, explains how to easily uptime your models with data coming from requests.

Instead of littering your controller method with multiple request()->has('field') checks, you can employ the request object's intersect method. The intersect method will return a new array containing only the keys that are present in both the specified list and the request itself.

Using intersect allows you to easily handle a PATCH request - one where you partially update a resource's data, rather than all of it as with a PUT - in a much more concise manner.

https://dyrynda.com.au/blog/partial-model-updates-in-laravel

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There are multiple good ways to pass data from Laravel to Vue. In a new blogpost Jesse Schutt covers all the options.

It has been helpful to think of my application as "layers" or separate sections of code each with varying responsibilities. I like to think of Laravel as the intermediary between the persistent data in the database, and the Vue components comprising the front-end of the app.

Though the boundaries between Laravel and Vue may appear unclear at the outset, the only way one can know about the other's data is if it is explicitly passed. Blade templates implicitly know a lot about the application, but Vue operates on a different layer, so it only knows what we tell it. Fortunately, there are a number of ways to provide Vue with the data it needs.

https://zaengle.com/blog/layers-of-a-laravel-vue-application

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