Freek.dev

I'm one of those people who runs beta software. A short time after the keynote is finished I'll update (or wreck) my phone with the beta version of iOS. My Mac generally gets the beta treatment not much later. Of course there are some risks involved. There's no guarantee that your applications will still work. Though your mileage may vary, it's my experience however that those betas are pretty stable.

With macOS Sierra there was one piece of software that didn't work properly: Laravel Valet. For some obscure reason Valet just stopped working after a couple minutes. The requests just hang. After some time an ERR_CONNECTION_REFUSED was displayed in Chrome. After running valet restart it ran fine for some more minutes. After poking around in the configuration of caddy, the webserver that powers Valet, and the php.ini file I found no solution. A complete reinstall of Laravel Valet did not solve the issue. I learned to live with the problem, regularly running valet restart. I even set up an alias for it.

But luckily Bryce Adams found the solution (Martin Bastien notified me about it). It's very simple: you just have to update the caddy server to the latest version manually. Here are the steps involved:

1. Download `caddy_darwin_amd64.zip` from Caddy's releases page on GitHub.
2. Extract the files and rename the main executable `caddy_darwin_amd64.zip` to `caddy`
3. Copy it over and replace the old `caddy` file in this directory: `~/.composer/vendor/laravel/valet/bin/`
4. Run `valet restart`
5. Profit!

I hope this post can help all the crazy ones running beta software.

EDIT on 2016-09-21: alternatively, you could use the dev-sierra branch to get a working version of Valet on macOS Sierra.

@freekmurze Can also use the `dev-sierra` branch which has Caddy 0.9.1 baked in ??

— Adam Wathan (@adamwathan) September 21, 2016

EDIT on 2016-09-24: Adam has published a list of common problems and solutions for running Valet on Sierra.

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In a Laravel app most sensitive configuration values, like a db password, are being saved in an .env file. This file usually does not get committed in a git repo. In this way you can share the repo with collaborators without having them to know the sensitive values of your production environment.

The keys of the .env are often saved in an .env.example file that is saved in the repo. This helps you and your collaborators get up to speed quickly when installing the app locally. They can immediately see which environment variables are needed to run the app.

Over time however you might add a variable to .env and forgetting to add it to .env.example. It's a mistake that is easily made, and I have made that mistake many times in the past (sorry co-workers).

A couple of days ago Julien Tant released laravel-env-sync. This package makes sure the .env file is in sync with .env.example. After having installed the package you can run this artisan command to perform the sync:

php artisan env:sync

Thanks Julien for that awesome little package.

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Here's Simon Nicklin's recap of day two of the excellent Laracon EU conference: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/laracon-eu-2016-conference-day-2-simon-nicklin

Personally I had a great time at Laracon. I couldn't relax that good until after I delivered my own talk. Luckily it went well and I got some good feedback. It was very good to see both new and familiar faces. Most talks were excellent, and the venue was amazing. Just look at this picture:

I'll be sure to attend next year's Laracon!

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A couple of months ago Jason McCreary, creator of Laravel Shift, wrote down his opinion on the Laravel's LTS release. I couldn't agree more with this piece.

The more developers that get trapped by LTS, the more of a drag it creates on the Laravel community. Potentially having adverse affects on its growth. Using LTS as a minimum compatibility line for a Laravel package or other third-party code is understandable. But freezing your apps to an LTS version is not. Your apps should run the latest stable version of Laravel.

https://medium.com/@jasonmccreary/laravel-lts-is-a-trap-97b1d1103961

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Laravel Passport is an easy to use OAuth2 server that was released alongside Laravel 5.3. Mohamed Said wrote an excellent guest post at Laravel News about the grant types used in Passport.

OAuth2 is a security framework that controls access to protected areas of an application, and it’s mainly used to control how different clients consume an API ensuring they have the proper permissions to access the requested resources.

Laravel Passport is a full OAuth2 server implementation; it was built to make it easy to apply authentication over an API for laravel-based web applications.

https://laravel-news.com/2016/08/passport-grant-types/

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I've seen two different tips for speeding up your tests in Laravel in the past week and thought I'd share them with you. For me, they made a significant impact on the speed of my tests.

https://driesvints.com/blog/two-tips-to-speedup-your-laravel-tests/

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The Laracon EU conference is happening right now. Talking to other developers is a joy like always, the speakers are great and the venue is amazing. Here's a good recap written by Simon Nicklin of the first day of the Laracon EU conference.

We entered the building and joined the back of the queue. I say we, even though I travelled on my own I already felt part of something. The queue snaked around a mood light corner to the awaiting registration desk where we are split into last name lanes. A pleasant volunteer welcomed me as I showed her my ticket. After a quick flick through the name cards I'm registered. For me this was the start of Laracon EU 2016.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/laracon-eu-conference-2016-day-1-simon-nicklin

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Recently Eric L. Barnes put a new coat of paint on Laravel News. Behind the scenes there were some changes as well. In a new post he explains how he integrated the Wordpress backend with a Laravel app.

Last week I relaunched Laravel News, and the new site is running on Laravel with WordPress as the backend. I’ve been using WordPress for the past two years, and I’ve grown to enjoy the features that it provides. The publishing experience, the media manager, the mobile app, and Jetpack for tracking stats.

I wasn’t ready to give these features up, and I didn’t have the time to build my own system, so I decided to keep WordPress and just use an API plugin to pull all the content I needed out, then store it in my Laravel application. In this tutorial, I wanted to outline how I set it all up.

https://laravel-news.com/2016/08/wordpress-api-with-laravel/

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In a new post on his blog Jason McCreary, creator of Laravel Shift, wrote down the summary of his Laracon US talk.

I consider myself a searcher. On a quest to find the Holy Grail of programming practices - that single practice which instantly levels up my skills. While I know this doesn’t exist, I do believe in a set of practices. Recently, I found one to be YAGNI.

YAGNI is a principle of eXtreme Programming - something I practice daily at work. YAGNI is an acronym for You Aren’t Gonna Need It. It states a programmer should not add functionality until deemed necessary. In theory, this seems straightforward, but few programmers practice it.

http://jason.pureconcepts.net/2016/08/practicing-yagni/

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Earlier today laravel-news.com, the official Laravel news source, received a new coat of paint. In a post announcing the launch Eric shares how the site works behind the curtains.

During this move, I have redone the way the site is powered. Previously it ran on WordPress with a custom theme I put together, it worked fine but added new features, and sections became harder and harder, and I wanted the ability to use what I am comfortable with, Laravel. However, I didn’t want to give up the media library and editing experience of WordPress.

So to have the best of both worlds I kept the old site on WordPress and used the WP Rest API paired with the Laravel Scheduler. This allows me to automatically sync data from WordPress into my database without having to rebuild an entire CMS admin area. I have the same setup for the podcast section, and it hooks into the Simplecast API to pull those over.

https://laravel-news.com/2016/08/welcome-to-the-next-version-of-laravel-news/

I sure would like to read a tutorial on how that sync works in detail.

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Laravel-Mediable is a package to upload and handle all sorts of files (aka media) in a Laravel app. It was built by a Canadian based web agency called Plank.

With it you can do things like this:

$media = MediaUploader::fromSource($request->file('thumb'))
    ->toDestination('uploads', 'post/thumbnails')
    ->upload();

$post = Post::create($this->request->input());
$post->attachMedia($media, ['thumbnail']);

Pretty cool. You can read more on the way and how the package was built in an introductory post on the Plank blog.

At Spatie we've also built our own solution for handling media. In Plank's blogpost Sean lists these differences between their package and our Medialibrary.

Since our medialibary was introduced I've been asked from time to time why our medialibrary uses a many-to-one polymorphic relationship. The answer is: simplicity.

A previous iteration of our Blender CMS (a version that used Zend Framework 1 instead of Laravel ?) had a screen where the user could pick a file from all uploaded files (it looked much like this wordpress screen). We saw that, after having set up a lot of sites with Blender, that almost none of our clients used that screen...

In our projects we also see that our clients mostly need to attach an image, or a pdf or whatever, ... to only one model (for instance a news item). It rarely happens that a client wants to attach the same file to different models.

In our code we want to handle that use case as simple as possible and that's why we preferred using a many-to-one relation over a many-to-many relation. All the other differences listed in Plank's post are caused by the same reasoning, we preferred simplicity and ease of use over flexibility.

If you're looking for a good solution to handle media in a Laravel app I suggest you take a look at both our Medialibrary and Plank's Mediable package. Both packages are good at what they do. Pick the one that best fits your project (and just feels good to you).

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On his blog Christoph Rumpel explains how you can add a vue component to a Spark app.

Taylor Otwell, the creator of Laravel, is a big Vue fan and this is why you will find it in a lot of Laravel products. Spark is using Vue too. ... When I started to use Spark I wanted to use some of my already given .vue components too, but since Spark is a little bit different from standard Laravel projects I didn’t managed to use them. After some weeks of reaching out for help, I finally got the solution.

http://christoph-rumpel.com/2016/05/Larave-Spark-Using-Vue-Component/

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Apache Solr is a high performance search engine much like Elastic. On his blog Peter Steenbergen explains how you can use Solr in a Laravel app.

This is my second blog in a series about SOLR with the PHP Solarium library. My first blog was about the usage of OR filters to create Multi-Select facets with SOLR. With this blog item I will show you how easy it is to implement the PHP Solarium library in the Laravel framework.

http://petericebear.github.io/laravel-php-solarium-integration-20160725/

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In a post on masterzendframework.com Matthew Setter shares his experiences with building the same application in both Laravel and Zend Expression.

The reason being, is that you can't give a straight yes or no answer. It's like asking: is desktop Linux as easy as Windows? The presumption there is that you want to do exactly the same thing in Linux as you can with Windows.

Well, if you wanted the exact same experience on Linux, as you get with Windows, then use Windows! As you're working with two different systems, two different approaches to solving the same challenge, then the end result may be the same — but how they work will naturally be different.

So it is with Laravel and Zend Expressive. They're two exceptional PHP frameworks which can be used to create similar applications. Yet they were designed with different preconceptions about how an application's should be put together. They were designed for different developer mindsets. And the list goes on.

So, whilst I was able to create the same application, roughly about the same size, the way they were developed was different.

http://www.masterzendframework.com/zend-expressive-or-laravel/

I'm currently perfectly happy in the Laravel ecosystem, so I won't be making a switch soon. But I like to keep an eye out on how other frameworks and communities are doing things to learn from that.

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