Posts tagged with php
Eric Barnes of Laravel News wrote a good tutorial on how to create a sitemap with Laravel.
A few years ago search engines recommended submitted sitemaps to help with indexing your website and now the importance of this is debatable.I’m of the mindset creating and submitting can’t hurt, so I spent a little time putting one together and wanted to share how easy this is in Laravel.
Joe Ferguson shares a tip on how to make a version of PHPUnit's assertArraySubset where the order of the array does not matter.
The problem with this test is that `assertArraySubset()` will fail if the items in the array are out of order. And since we don’t have an `ORDER BY` on our query in our data source we cannot guarantee the order of the returned data.
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PHP 7.1 is nearing completion. A few days ago Release Candidate 1 was released. One of the areas that got some love from the developers is the type system. Pascal Martin wrote a blogpost about those changes.
One of the most important changes PHP 7.0 brought us last year was about typing, with the introduction of scalar type-declarations for functions/methods parameters and their return value. PHP 7.1 adds to those type-declarations, with several points that were missing in the previous version of the language.
https://blog.pascal-martin.fr/post/php71-en-types.html
That new iterable pseudo-type will sure come in handy.
If you want to know what's changed regarding error handling, Pascal has got that covered as well.
In the beginning of the summer the Belgian company PHPro held a cool hacking contest. The persons the could hack a special site that they had set up could win a prize. Yesterday they published an interesting article on how that site could be hacked. The site was also hacked in ways that the developers of the company did not anticipate.
Since this contest started out as an internal project, we've put a lot of focus on the flow on how to hack the website. It was just a little side project to inform our colleagues that some small mistakes can end up in a big catastrophe. By focussing on the flow of the hackme contest, we forgot to secure the application for malicious contestants. Off course, this was something that fired back to us on the first days of the competition. Here is a little write-up of the problems we've encountered and how we fixed them.
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.
Today my company released a package called laravel-sitemap. There are already a lot of excellent sitemap packages out there. They all have in common that you have to manually add links that must appear in the sitemap. With our new package that isn't required. It can automatically build up a sitemap…
A couple of weeks ago I published a blog post on how you can easily debug collections using a dd macro. Meanwhile my company released a package that contains that macro. In this post I'd like to introduce a new dump macro, recently introduced in the package, that makes debugging collection chain…
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.
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/
PHP offers some functions to work with regular expressions, most notably preg_match, preg_match_all and preg_replace. Unfortunately those functions are a bit hard to use. Take preg_match_all for example, it requires you to pass in an array by reference to get all the matches. When something goes…
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/
In this post I'd like to share a quick tip on how you can improve the readability of your code with array_filter.
Today I was working on some code that looked something like this:
class Address
{
...
public function toArray()
{
$address = [
'name' => $this->name,
'street' => $this->street,
'location' => $this->location,
];
if ($this->line2 != '') {
$address['line2'] = $this->line2;
}
if ($this->busNumber != '') {
$address['busNumber'] = $this->busNumber;
}
if ($this->country != '') {
$address['country'] = $this->country;
}
return $address;
}
}
Did you know that you can use array_filter to clean this up? I didn't, until today.
When that function is called without a second argument it will remove any element that contains a falsy value (so null, or an empty string) Here's the refactored, equivalent code:
class Address
{
...
public function toArray()
{
return array_filter([
'name' => $this->name,
'street' => $this->street,
'line2' => $this->line2,
'busNumber' => $this->busNumber,
'location' => $this->location,
'country' => $this->country,
]);
}
}
That's much better!
Just be careful when using this with numeric data that you want to keep in the array. 0 is considered as a falsy value too, so it'll be removed as well.
Joind.in is a website where attendees can leave feedback for speakers delivering talks and conferences and user groups. This feedback is very useful for the speakers who which improve their skills. In my mind it is an essential part of the PHP ecosystem.
For the last 6 years Lorna Jane Mitchell and Rob Allen have maintained the project. They are now looking for others to take over their duties.
This post is about the open source project, Joind.in. Joind.in is a tool to allow attendees at conferences or other events to offer immediate public feedback to speakers and organisers at those events. Joind.in is an open source project run by volunteers. For the last 6 years I've been a maintainer of this project, following a year or two of being a contributor. Over the last few months, myself and my comaintainer Rob Allen have been mostly inactive due to other commitments, and we have agreed it's time to step aside and let others take up the baton.
In a new post on his site, Christoph Rumpel explains how you can quickly build a Facebook chatbot with PHP.
The chatbot topic is huge right now. Finally there is something quite new again and nobody knows what's happening next. This is the perfect time to start experimenting with chatbots and to build your own one right now. Give me 10 minutes of your time and I will give you your first chatbot!
http://christoph-rumpel.com/2016/08/build-a-php-chatbot-in-10-minutes/
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.
Laravel's collection class is truly wonderful. It contains a lot of handy methods and you can create some very elegant code with it. In client projects I found myself adding the same macro's over and over again. That's why my colleague Seb and I took some time to create a package aptly called…
Matt Stauffer is currently putting the final touches on his new book called Laravel: Up And Running. It aims to be a good guide for newcomers to the framework. But even if you've got some experience with Laravel, it should be worth your time to read it. Even Matt himself picked up a lot of cool…
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.
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.
| spatie/laravel-medialibrary | plank/laravel-mediable | |
|---|---|---|
| Relationship | many-to-one polymorphic, each media record is owned by one related model | many-to-many polymorphic, each media record can connect to any number of related models, and vice versa. |
| Filesystem | Files are stored in directories named after the media id relative to the disk root | Files can be stored anywhere on the disk |
| Association Identifier | Each media record belongs to one "collection" | Media can be attached to a model with any number of "tags" |
| Aggregate Types | Support for images and pdfs | Configurable support for any number of custom types |
| Miscellaneous Features | Glide manipulations | Synchronization commands |
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).
An older but still relevant post by Evert Pot on why and how you should also test your packages with the lowest versions of it's dependencies.
In some projects, there may be packages lying around that are not the latest version. This could be because it introduced some BC break, or introduced a bug.If other packages also use the package that’s being held back, they may get an older version as a dependency.
So for package maintainers, they will want to find out if their package correctly works with the oldest package they claim to support.
https://evertpot.com/testing-composer-prefer-lowest/
EDIT: Here's another old, but also still relevant, blogpost on the subject by Cees-Jan Kiewiet:
https://blog.wyrihaximus.net/2015/06/test-lowest-current-and-highest-possible-on-travis/
