Freek Van der Herten's blog on PHP, Laravel and JavaScript

Posts tagged with spatie

Pragmatically testing multi-guard authentication in Laravel

Feb 3rd 2020 by Freek Van der Herten – 2 minute read

Last week our team launched Mailcoach, a self-hosted solution to send out email campaigns and newsletters. Rather than being the end, laughing something is the beginning of a journey. Users start encountering bugs and ask for features that weren't considered before.

One of those features requests we got, is the ability the set the guard to be used when checking if somebody is allowed to access the Mailcoach UI.

In this blog post, I'd like to show you how we implemented and tested this.

Building Mailcoach

Jan 30th 2020 by Freek Van der Herten – 12 minute read

Today, our team released Mailcoach, a beautiful, self-hosted mailing list manager. It integrates with services like Amazon SES, Mailgun, or Sendgrid to send out mailings affordably. It’s packaged as a stand-alone app, or can be integrated into a Laravel project, it's perfect for bloggers, artisans, and entrepreneurs.

Even if you're not in the market for an email solution, Mailcoach includes a video course on how it’s built. I'm sure you'll see some valuable techniques that you can bring to your own project.

In this blogpost, I'd like to share why and how we've built this.

Join thousands of developers

Every two weeks, I share practical tips, tutorials, and behind-the-scenes insights from maintaining 300+ open source packages.

No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. You can also follow me on X.

📺 Building filters using laravel-query-builder

Dec 19th 2019 by Freek Van der Herten – 1 minute read

On the subscribers screens of the Mailcoach, you can filter out the subscribers that have a certain status, you can search and sort them.

In the video below, which is part of the upcoming Mailcoach video course, I explain how we built these filters, powered by three of our packages: laravel-query-builder, query-string and Blade X.

Using view models

Dec 13th 2019 – stitcher.io

Brent explains what view models are and how you can use them. We use view models in almost every project at Spatie.

In essence, view models are simple classes that take some data, and transform it into something usable for the view. In this chapter I'll show you the basic principles of the pattern, we'll take a look at how they integrate in Laravel projects, and finally I'll show you how we use the pattern in one of our projects.

📺 Video: Using tags and segments in Mailcoach

Dec 11th 2019 by Freek Van der Herten – 1 minute read

My team and I are currently building Mailcoach, a self-hosted solution to easily send out newsletters and email campaigns. In this video, I demonstrate how email lists can be segmented using tags.

A recap of 2019

Dec 8th 2019 by Freek Van der Herten – 17 minute read

A year ago, I wrote a recap of 2018. Now that 2019 is coming to a close, I thought it might be fun to write a similar post on what I did this year.

Streaming a large export as a CSV file to the browser

Nov 29th 2019 by Freek Van der Herten – 3 minute read

A while ago, I created an easy to use framework agnostic PHP package to read and write CSV and Excel files called spatie/simple-excel. Behind the scenes, generators are used to ensure low memory usage, even when working with large files. Today I added a method that allows you to stream CSV files to the browser. In this small blog post, I'd like to demonstrate how you can use it.

freek.dev turns five!

Nov 26th 2019 by Freek Van der Herten – 6 minute read

How time flies. My blog is again one year older. I've been running it now for five years. Like all the previous years, I'd like to give an overview of everything that's happened on this blog in the past year.

Thoughts on pricing for Mailcoach

Nov 21st 2019 – www.sigerr.org

At Spatie we currently building Mailcoach: a solution to self-host newsletters and email campaigns. It can be used a stand alone app or as a laravel package. We'll also create a video course that explains the internals of the package. We're not going to make this software open source, but sell it. We're still are deciding on our pricing model.

Julien Bourdeau, engineer at Algolia, shares his thoughts on how it should be priced.

Today, Freek announced that they're going to release the pricing model soon and opened a conversation about what it could be. It got me thinking, and unfortunately, I couldn't fit my thought in 280 characters. First, it's important to understand that MailCoach will be 2 main things: a full-fledged app and a Laravel package.

Sending a welcome notification to new users of a Laravel app

Nov 15th 2019 by Freek Van der Herten – 7 minute read

My team and I currently building Mailcoach, a solution to self-host newsletters and email campaigns. In Mailcoach you can create new users to use the app.

How should these new users be onboarded? The easy way out would be to send these new users a default password reset notification to those users, but that isn't a good first experience. The default auth scaffold by Laravel doesn't help us here: it only contains functionality to log in and to let users register themselves.

To onboard new users created by other users, I've created a package called laravel-welcome-notification which can send a welcome notification to new users that allows them to set an initial password.

In this blogpost I'd like to explain how you can use the package).

Writing open source software, and staying sane while at it

Oct 31st 2019 – sebastiandedeyne.com

My colleague Seb lists a few very good actionale tips that help you maintaining open source software.

In the 4.5 years I’ve been a developer at Spatie, over 200 packages have been built and released by our team. I’ve done quite some authoring and maintenance over the years, and I’d like to share 8 actionable tips on writing and maintaining open source software without going insane.

A PHP package to read and write simple Excel or CSV files

Oct 28th 2019 by Freek Van der Herten – 5 minute read

For a couple of projects I needed to read and write a couple of very large Excel and CSV files. I didn't find a good package that does this so I decided to create one myself. Under the hood it uses generators, so memory usage will remain low, even when working with large files.

In this blogpost I'd like to walk you through spatie/simple-excel.

The mixin PHP DocBlock

Oct 14th 2019 by Freek Van der Herten – 5 minute read

When using PHP, you've probably used DocBlocks. They can be used to add additional information that can't be inferred by looking at the source code alone. DocBlocks can be used by IDEs, like PhpStorm, to improve autocomplete suggestions.

In this blogpost, I'd like to highlight a not so well known DocBlock: mixin.

A job middleware to rate limit jobs

Oct 8th 2019 by Freek Van der Herten – 3 minute read

Recently we released a new small package called laravel-rate-limited-job-middleware. As the name implies, this package can be used to limit how many times a job may be executed in a given amount of time.

In this short blog post, I'd like to introduce the package to you.

A package that adds resource links to your Laravel API resources

Oct 1st 2019 by Freek Van der Herten – 3 minute read

At Spatie we have several projects where the UI is rendered using JavaScript (we're big fans of Inertia). The backend and routes are defined in the Laravel app. The backend sends information to the frontend using API resources.

We often add the available routes the frontend can use as links property on the resource. To avoid having to add all routes manually, my colleague Ruben released a package, called laravel-resource-links that can automatically add resource links to the API resource.

In this post, I'd like to introduce the package to you.

Event store optimizations in laravel-event-sourcing

Sep 23rd 2019 by Freek Van der Herten – 5 minute read

About a year ago, we released laravel-event-projector. It focused on adding projectors, an important concept in event sourcing, to Laravel.

After the release of the package, we continually kept improving it. We added aggregates, a way to test those, a brand new section in the our documentation that explains event sourcing from scratch, and DX improvements all across the board.

We now feel confident that the package is a good starting point for getting started with event sourcing in Laravel. That's why we're renaming the package to laravel-event-sourcing.

Creating beautiful status pages using Oh Dear!

Sep 17th 2019 by Freek Van der Herten – 9 minute read

My buddy Mattias and I are running an uptime checker service called Oh Dear. Earlier this week, we've launched a new major feature: status pages.

In this blog post, I'd like to walk you through what status pages have to offer. We'll also dive deep in some technical details of the underlying Laravel app.

Generating speaker cards using Tailwind and Laravel

Sep 11th 2019 by Freek Van der Herten – 3 minute read

I'm currently organizing the Full Stack Europe conference. The first edition will be on 23 - 25 October in the beautiful city of Antwerp, Belgium. I believe that the best apps or sites aren't built by programmers. They're built by teams. That's why we designed this conference for everybody and don't stick to just one aspect of programming.

Ignition: a new error page for Laravel

Aug 30th 2019 by Freek Van der Herten – 14 minute read

Today at Laracon EU, Marcel Pociot and I unveiled Ignition, a beautiful new error page for Laravel. It is the new default error screen in Laravel 6 and you can manually install it into Laravel 5 applications. In this blog post, I'd like to tell you all about it.

Flare: an error tracker built for Laravel apps

Aug 30th 2019 by Freek Van der Herten – 5 minute read

Today at Laracon EU Flare was introduced: a new error tracker built for Laravel apps. Our service also works hand in hand with the new error page we've launched called Ignition.