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

Laravel PDF v2 has been released: adds support for Laravel Cloud and easy queuing

Feb 8th 2026 by Freek Van der Herten – 6 minute read

A while ago, we released laravel-pdf, a package to generate PDFs in Laravel apps.

Under the hood, it used Browsershot (and therefore Puppeteer/Chrome) to convert HTML to PDF. That approach works great, but it does require Node.js and a headless Chrome binary on your server.

Last week, my buddy Dries shared on X how to generate PDFs using Cloudflare services. This way doesn’t require Node or any binaries. Very neat! This unlocks PDF generation for environments where Node or Chrome cannot be installed easily, like Laravel Cloud.

To support this way of rendering a PDF, we’ve released a new major release (v2) of Laravel PDF. The package now ships with three drivers: Browsershot, Cloudflare Browser Rendering, and DOMPDF. You can also create your own driver. On top of that, we've added queued PDF generation and the ability to set PDF metadata. And to let your AI understand our package, we've added a Laravel Boost skill.

Let me walk you through all of it.

SQL performance improvements: automatic detection & regression testing

Jan 28th 2026 – ohdear.app

The final part of Oh Dear's series on SQL performance. Mattias introduces phpunit-query-count-assertions, a package that catches N+1 queries, duplicate queries, and missing indexes in your test suite. Since implementing this at Oh Dear, they've eliminated 15% of their SELECT queries.

Eval Testing LLMs in PHPUnit

Jan 5th 2026 – joshhornby.com - submitted by Joshua Hornby

Prompts break silently. Here's how to catch regressions with PHPUnit evals before your users do.

Improving unit test run time in a Laravel modular monolith

Nov 17th 2025 – cosmastech.com

Using Laravel’s new traits, WithCachedRoutes and WithCachedConfig, you can significantly reducing test run times.

Creating custom Facade fakes in Laravel

Nov 6th 2025 – ryangjchandler.co.uk - submitted by Ryan Chandler

Adding fake() methods to your custom facades in applications and packages can provide some nice DX and APIs.

PSR-20 Clocks: Testable Time in PHP

Sep 22nd 2025 – doeken.org - submitted by Doeke Norg

Learn how a ClockInterface helps you decouple time and write stable, testable code. It's about time!

What sets Tempest apart as a framework for modern PHP development

Jun 9th 2025 – tempestphp.com

Brent is doing some interesting stuff here.

Simplifying work with custom stubs in Laravel

May 19th 2025 – blog.genijaho.dev - submitted by Geni Jaho

Stubs are fake implementations of interfaces or classes that simulate the behavior of real services.

Running PHP tests in parallel on GitHub actions

Apr 22nd 2025 by Freek Van der Herten – 6 minute read

A couple of years ago, Laravel introduced a great feature which allows to run PHPUnit / Pest tests in parallel. This results in a big boost in performance.

By default, it determines the concurrency level by taking a look at the number of CPU cores your machine has. So, if you're using a modern Mac that has 10 CPU cores, it will run 10 tests at the same time, greatly cutting down on the time your testsuite needs to run completely.

A default runner on GitHub doesn't have that many cores, so you can't leverage parallel testing as good as in your typical local environments.

In this blog post, I'd like to show you a way of running your tests on GitHub, by splitting them up in small chunks that can run concurrently.

We use this technique at Oh Dear to cut down the running time of our vast testsuite from 16 minutes to only just 4. In this blog post all examples will come from the Oh Dear code base.

Easier endpoint tests with Policy::fake

Jan 29th 2025 – nolanphillips.substack.com

This make testing endpoint authorization much simpler.

Laravel’s parallel testing on multiple DB connections

Dec 23rd 2024 – sarahjting.com

Pretty cool that this behaviour can be customized easily.

5 Ways to Extract Value from Overmocked Tests

Nov 22nd 2024 – tomasvotruba.com

Tomas shares his approach to get the most out of mocks, drop dead code, and make tests more valuable.

Using Ray with your Pest tests

Nov 7th 2024 – myray.app - submitted by Spatie

Fake it till you make it: testing transactional emails with Mailcoach in Laravel

Oct 14th 2024 – www.mailcoach.app - submitted by Spatie

A Guide to Laravel Pipelines

Oct 1st 2024 – ashallendesign.co.uk - submitted by Ash Allen

Learn how to use the Pipeline class in Laravel to break complex workflows into smaller, isolated, focused processes. We'll then look at how to test our Laravel pipelines.

Testing Saloon API Integrations in Laravel

Jul 22nd 2024 – ashallendesign.co.uk - submitted by Ash Allen

Learn how to fake and record HTTP responses so you can test your Saloon API integration in your Laravel applications.

How to test all routes in your Laravel app by writing just a single Pest test

Jul 19th 2024 by Freek Van der Herten – 4 minute read

We’ve released a new package called spatie/pest-plugin-route-testing. This package can test all common routes in your Laravel app by writing a single test.

In this blog post, I’d like to tell you all about it.

Handling email testing in Laravel with Ray

Jun 3rd 2024 – myray.app - submitted by Spatie

Learn how to use Ray to test emails in Laravel!

Architecture Testing in Laravel with Pest

May 28th 2024 – ashallendesign.co.uk - submitted by Ash Allen

Read about how to use Pest to add architecture tests for your PHP application and enforce standards such as folder structures, naming conventions, and more.

Husky: How to automatically format, lint and test before you commit or push

Mar 29th 2024 – tighten.com - submitted by Jamison Valenta

Let's talk about Husky, a tool that automatically runs any number of commands whenever you commit or push. You'll never have to worry about forgetting to format, lint, or test before uploading code to the repo — Husky does it for you every time you run git commit or git push