Freek.dev

We just released Scotty, a beautiful SSH task runner. It lets you define deploy scripts and other remote tasks, run them from your terminal, and watch every step as it happens. It supports both Laravel Envoy's Blade format and a new plain bash format. Why we built Scotty Even though services like…

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We just released v5 of laravel-activitylog, our package for logging user activity and model events in Laravel.

In Flare, Mailcoach, and Oh Dear we use it to build audit logs, so we can track what users are doing: who changed a setting, who deleted a project, who invited a team member. If you need something similar in your app, this package makes it easy.

This major release requires PHP 8.4+ and Laravel 12+, and brings a cleaner API, a better database schema, and customizable internals. Let me walk you through what the package can do and what's new in v5.

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We just released v7 of spatie/laravel-query-builder, our package that makes it easy to build flexible API endpoints. If you're building an API with Laravel, you'll almost certainly need to let consumers filter results, sort them, include relationships and select specific fields. Writing that logic by hand for every endpoint gets repetitive fast, and it's easy to accidentally expose columns or relationships you didn't intend to.

Our query builder takes care of all of that. It reads query parameters from the URL, translates them into the right Eloquent queries, and makes sure only the things you've explicitly allowed can be queried.

// GET /users?filter[name]=John&include=posts&sort=-created_at

$users = QueryBuilder::for(User::class)
    ->allowedFilters('name')
    ->allowedIncludes('posts')
    ->allowedSorts('created_at')
    ->get();

// select * from users where name = 'John' order by created_at desc

This major version requires PHP 8.3+ and Laravel 12 or higher, and brings a cleaner API along with some features we've been wanting to add for a while.

Let me walk you through how the package works and what's new.

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We're proud to release v3 of laravel-site-search, a package that crawls and indexes your entire site. Think of it as your own private Google. Point it at a URL, let it crawl every page, and get full-text search results back.

Previous versions required Meilisearch as the search engine. That works well, but it means running a separate service.

With v3, your application's own database is all you need. It supports SQLite, MySQL, PostgreSQL, and MariaDB out of the box, and it's the new default.

Let me walk you through it.

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Sometimes you need to access a private property or method on an object that isn't yours. Maybe you're writing a test and need to assert some internal state. Maybe you're building a package that needs to reach into another object's internals. Whatever the reason, PHP's visibility rules are standing in your way.

Our spatie/invade package provides a tiny invade function that lets you read, write, and call private members on any object.

You probably shouldn't reach for this package often. It's most useful in tests or when you're building a package that needs to integrate deeply with objects you don't control.

Let me walk you through how it works.

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We just released v10 of laravel-backup, our package that creates backups of your Laravel app. The backup is a zip file containing all files in the directories you specify, along with a dump of your database. You can store it on any of the filesystems Laravel supports, and you can even back up to…

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We just released v8 of Laravel Sitemap. This package that can generate sitemaps by crawling your entire site or by manually adding URLs. This version upgrades the underlying crawler to v9, adds a couple of nice new features, and cleans up the internals.

Let me walk you through what the package can do and what's new in v8.

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Our spatie/crawler. package is one of the first one I created. It allows you to crawl a website with PHP. It is used extensively in Oh Dear and our laravel-sitemap package.

Throughout the years, the API had accumulated some rough edges. With v9, we cleaned all of that up and added a bunch of features we've wanted for a long time.

Let me walk you through all of it!

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When you share a link on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn, the platform shows a preview image. Getting those Open Graph images right usually means either using an external service or setting up a separate rendering pipeline. We just released laravel-og-image, a package that lets you define your OG image as HTML right inside your Blade views. The package takes a screenshot of that HTML and serves it as the OG image. No external API needed, everything runs on your own server.

Let me walk you through what the package can do.

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We recently released the Flare CLI, a command-line tool to manage your errors and performance data. It also ships with an agent skill that lets AI coding agents use Flare on your behalf.

The CLI has dozens of commands and hundreds of options, yet we only wrote four commands by hand. Our laravel-openapi-cli package made this possible: point it at an OpenAPI spec, and it generates fully typed artisan commands for every endpoint automatically.

Here's how we put it all together.

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PHP 8.0 introduced attributes, and they're a great way to add structured metadata to classes, methods, properties, constants, and parameters. The concept is solid, but the reflection API you need to actually read them is surprisingly verbose. What should be a simple one-liner ends up being multiple lines of boilerplate every time. And if you want to find all usages of an attribute across an entire class, you're looking at deeply nested loops.

We just released spatie/php-attribute-reader, a package that gives you a clean, static API for all of that. Let me walk you through what it can do.

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We just published a new package called Laravel OpenAPI CLI that turns any OpenAPI spec into dedicated Laravel artisan commands. Each endpoint gets its own command with typed options for path parameters, query parameters and request bodies.

Let me walk you through what the package can do.

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We just published a new package called Laravel Markdown Response that lets your Laravel app serve markdown versions of your HTML pages. Your existing controllers and views stay exactly the same.

Let me walk you through what the package can do.

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Our laravel-responsecache package speeds up your app by caching entire responses on the server. When the same page is requested again, the cached response is served without hitting your controller at all.

We just released v8, a new major version with a powerful new feature: flexible caching. It uses a stale-while-revalidate strategy, so that every visitor gets a fast response, even when the cache is being refreshed.

Let me walk you through it.

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We just released laravel-screenshot, a new package to take screenshots of web pages in Laravel apps.

It uses a driver-based architecture, so you can choose between Browsershot (which requires you to install Chromium) and Cloudflare Browser Rendering (which can be used on environments like Laravel Cloud).

Let me walk you through the package.

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