Freek.dev

Rémi Collin shares a cool approach on where to place code that doesn't really belong in a controller. He creates small, reusable, testable, decoratable classes, called Actions.

Using this approach can seems a lot of classes at first. And, of course the user registration is a simple example aimed to keep the reading short and clear. Real value starts to become clear once the complexity starts growing, because you know your code is in one place, and the boundaries are clearly defined.

Read more [medium.com]

Christopher Rumpel created a cool BotMan powered quiz on Laravel take you can take via Telegram. In a new blogpost he shares how it was built.

Hey everyone. In this article, I want to show you how I built the LaravelQuiz Chatbot. If you haven't tried it yet, it is a good idea to check it out before reading this article. This will help to understand what I am talking about. Right now it only supports Telegram. The chatbot provides a quiz with all kinds of questions about the Laravel framework. Every question comes with up to three possible answers. You need to pick the right one to collect points and make it to the highscore. But besides the ranks, the quiz is about having a good time. Enjoy the questions and see what you know about Laravel. Have fun!

https://christoph-rumpel.com/2018/05/how-i-built-the-laravelquiz-chatbot-with-botman-and-laravel

I took the quiz and scored pretty good.

? Day2 of LaravelQuiz: We still got 3 players in the top10 who reached the score with their first try ? Nice @freekmurze @adamwathan @ClaudioDekker Can you beat them? https://t.co/AGkBphJWtj pic.twitter.com/bQpKfTg2Z1

— Christoph Rumpel (@christophrumpel) May 25, 2018

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In an older but still relevant blogpost Matt Stauffer explains how you can extend PHPUnit's native @requires annotation. It's pretty handy if you want to only run certain tests in certain environments.

I was primarily interested in learning—how do PHPUnit annotations work? What does it look like to extend a pre-existing annotation? How do you not just check for the annotation, but also check its value? I'll show you what I found and then you can run willy-nilly with your own naming schemes.

Read more [mattstauffer.com]

? Killing conditionals with Eloquent's "firstOr" method. If firstOrCreate, firstOrFail, or firstOrNew don't quite cut it. pic.twitter.com/PKrtqDc0vl

— Caleb Porzio (@calebporzio) 22 mei 2018

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? Laravel Quick Tip: Did you know that you can change the keys of a collection to a given value of the collection? ? Perfect for removing items of a collection by the model id. #laravel pic.twitter.com/kgsVnkFCBe

— Christoph Rumpel (@christophrumpel) 24 mei 2018

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Marcel Pociot, the mind behind BotMan, has released a cool package to create visual diff in your PHPUnit tests. Under the hood it uses our Browsershot package.

I'm not sure how you feel, but I consider myself a backend developer. Sure - I know my way around Vue.JS and really enjoy working with it, but writing CSS has never been my strong point. At one of our companies recent projects, we are working together with another development team, which is mostly taking care of frontend development. So we build controllers, repositories, services, etc. and hand it over to some basic views. They handle the rest. We introduced continuous integration to them and showed them our usual workflow, when I thought that it would be excellent to also have some kind of visual CI for frontend changes.

Read more [marcelpociot.de]

Like he already did a few times in the past, Composer co-creator Jordi Boggiano published some interesting statistics on PHP version usage as measured by Packagist.

A few observations: PHP 7.1 is still on top but 7.2 is closing real quick with already 1/5th of users having upgraded. That's the biggest growth rate for a newly released version since I have started collecting those stats. Ubuntu 18.04 LTS ships with 7.2 so this number will likely grow even more in the coming months.

https://seld.be/notes/php-versions-stats-2018-1-edition

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? Did you know you could use the afterCreating and lots of other "after" callbacks on Eloquent Factories to create additional models in Laravel? https://t.co/XejFph55zO #Laravel #PHP pic.twitter.com/oc8BfpEPqN

— Dries Vints (@driesvints) May 15, 2018

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In a new video Jason McCreary, the creator of the wonderful Laravel Shift, demonstrates a few good tips to clean up code. In the video below Jason uses a code snippet taken from my side project Oh Dear!

If you're interested in more tips from Jason be sure to check out his upcoming BaseCode field guide.

Meanwhile I've cleaned up (and deployed) the code in the actual app. This is what I ended up with:

class Check
{
    public function needsToRun(): bool
    {
      if (!$this->belongsToTeamOnActiveSubscriptionOrOnGenericTrial()) {
          return false;
      }
			
      if ($this->disabled()) {
          return false;
      }
			
      if ($this->alreadyRunningOrScheduled()) {
          return false;
      }
			
      if ($this->didNotRunBefore()) {
          return true;
      }
			
      if ($this->checkType()->is(CheckType::UPTIME) && $this->latestRun()->failed()) {
          return true;
      }
			
      if ($this->previousRunCrashed()) {
          return true;
      }
      return $this->latestRun()->endedMoreThanMinutesAgo($this->checkType()->minutesBetweenRuns());
    }
		
    protected function checkType(): CheckType
    {
        return new CheckType($this->type);
    }  
}

use MyCLabs\Enum\Enum;

class CheckType extends Enum
{
    const UPTIME = 'uptime';
    const BROKEN_LINKS = 'broken_links';
    const MIXED_CONTENT = 'mixed_content';
    const CERTIFICATE_HEALTH = 'certificate_health';
    const CERTIFICATE_TRANSPARENCY = 'certificate_transparency';
    public function minutesBetweenRuns(): int
    {
        if ($this->getValue() === static::MIXED_CONTENT) {
            return 60 * 12;
        }
				
        if ($this->getValue() === static::BROKEN_LINKS) {
            return 60 * 12;
        }
				
        if ($this->getValue() === static::CERTIFICATE_HEALTH) {
            return 5;
        }
				
        if ($this->getValue() === static::UPTIME) {
            return 3;
        }
				
        throw new Exception("Minutes between runs not specified for type `{$this->getValue()}`");
    }
    public function is(string $type): bool
    {
        return $type === $this->getValue();
    }
}

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Love being able to catch multiple exception types in one catch block thanks to PHP 7.1 pic.twitter.com/YthVWxKG0A

— Jacob Bennett (@JacobBennett) May 10, 2018

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John Bonaccorsi, a developer from Tighten, wrote some good ways of structuring model factories in a Laravel app.

Thanks to class-based model factories, our test setup went from being a bloated mess to simple and succinct. The optional fluent methods give us flexibility and make it obvious when we are intentionally changing our world. Should you read this blog post and immediately go and update all of your model factories to be class-based instead? Of course not! But if you begin to notice your tests feeling top heavy, class-based model factories may be the tool to reach for.

https://tighten.co/blog/tidy-up-your-tests-with-class-based-model-factories

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My favorite Laravel feature: `higher order tap`. So simple, yet so powerful. ? pic.twitter.com/cfBU4i0zk7

— Raul (@rcubitto) May 2, 2018

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Barry van Veen recently fixed an interesting performance issue at our permissions package.

Recently I was investigating the performance of an application we have built at SWIS. To my surprise, one of the most excellent costly methods was part of the spatie/laravel-permission package. After reading some more it was clearly a performance issue that could be improved upon. Since the solution was already clearly outlined it was quite easy to code it and submit a pull request.

https://barryvanveen.nl/blog/46-improving-the-performance-of-spatie-laravel-permission

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Rachid Laasri explains how to easily register multiple macros at once using the mixin function present on the Macroable trait.

Laravel Macros are a clean way to add pieces of functionality to classes you don’t own (core Laravel components) and re-use them in your projects. It was first introduced in the 4.2 version but it was only recently that I discovered the ability to define class-based macros. So, this is what this article is going to be about.

http://rachidlaasri.com/php/laravel/macro/2018/04/28/class-based-macros.html

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Frank de Jonge, author of the great EventSauce and Flysytem packages, wrote a blopost on how to use array destructuring in PHP.

In PHP 7.1 the array type has become even more powerful! An RFC was accepted (and implemented) to provide square bracket syntax for array destructuring assignment. This change to the language made it possible to extract values from array more easily.

https://blog.frankdejonge.nl/array-destructuring-in-php/

Not mentioned in Frank's excellent post is PHP's ability to destructure arrays in foreach loops.

$members = [
	[1, 'Seb'],
	[2, 'Alex'],
	[3, 'Brent'],
];

foreach ($members as [$id, $name]) {
   // do stuff with $id and $name
}

You can even specify in which variable a value of a specific key should go:

	$members = [
	['id' => 1, 'name'=> 'Seb', 'twitter' => '@sebdedeyne' ],
	['id' => 2, 'name'=> 'Alex', 'twitter' => '@alexvanderbist'],
	['id' => 3, 'name'=> 'Brent', 'twitter' => '@brendt_gd'],
];

foreach ($members as ['twitter' => $twitterHandle, 'name' => $firstName]) {
	// do stuff with $twitterHandle and $firstName
}

Very neat!

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⏲️ Handy eloquent macro for the date comparison impaired ? pic.twitter.com/rUgLlEywrn

— Caleb Porzio (@calebporzio) April 25, 2018

Read more [twitter.com]