Go crazy with Blade directives
? Go crazy with Blade directives. The simplest things can abstract away tons of visual noise from your templates. pic.twitter.com/p5udGWJkhd
— David Hemphill (@davidhemphill) June 22, 2017
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Comparing model collections
Cool little Laravel 5.5 Eloquent Collection macro to assert two model collections are the same ?? pic.twitter.com/zzbkr1fL9T
— Adam Wathan (@adamwathan) June 14, 2017
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Using request()->query()
On Twitter I see a bunch of people regularly tweeting very nice code snippets. Instead of only retweeting those, I'm going to add them to my blog. I'll tag them with tweet.
Here's the first one:
request()->query() is a life saver when dealing with tables that store "sorts" and "filters" in a query string. pic.twitter.com/84P6xvTvSz
— Caleb Porzio (@calebporzio) June 21, 2017
Read more [twitter.com]
Building a realtime dashboard powered by Laravel and Vue (2017 edition) original
At Spatie we have a tv screen against the wall that displays a dashboard. This dashboard displays the tasks our team should be working on, important events in the near future, which music is playing at our office, and so on. Here's what it looks like: We've opensourced our dashboard, so you can view…
Performant Laravel
Chris Fideo, of Servers For Hackers and Shipping Docker, published a new free video serious on optimizing performance for Laravel apps. He shows how to use the built in artisan commands such as config:cache and route:cache,how to optimize queries, build up good indexes and how to add an object cache in a clean way.
There are some super common reasons your Laravel app might be slow. This course shows you how to avoid speed issues with simple changes you can implement immediately.
https://serversforhackers.com/laravel-perf
Chris is also a working on a paid course on how to scale Laravel apps. If you want to stay in the loop for that one, subscribe to his newsletter.
How to build screens for users, permissions and roles in a Laravel app
One of our more popular packages is laravel-permission. It enables you to easily save roles and permissions in the database. It hooks into Laravel's native authorization capabilities. Allthough it's quite powerful, the package doesn't come with any UI out of the box.
If you do need a UI for this in your projects you're in luck. On Scotch.io Caleb Oki wrote down an extensive tutorial on how you can build screens to manage users, permissions and roles that use our package.
When building an application, we often need to set up an access control list (ACL). An ACL specifies the level of permission granted to a user of an application. For example a user John may have the permission to read and write to a resource while another user Smith may have the permission only to read the resource.In this tutorial, I will teach you how to add access control to a Laravel app using laravel-permission package. For this tutorial we will build a simple blog application where users can be assigned different levels of permission.
https://scotch.io/tutorials/user-authorization-in-laravel-54-with-spatie-laravel-permission
Make your app fly with PHP OPcache
Recently this button to optimize PHP's OPcache was added to Laravel Forge.
If you were wondering what PHP OPcache is all about and what pressing this button does with your application, read this article Olav van Schie wrote on the subject a while ago.
Every time you execute a PHP script, the script needs to be compiled to byte code. OPcache leverages a cache for this bytecode, so the next time the same script is requested, it doesn’t have to recompile it. This can save some precious execution time, and thus make your app faster (and maybe save some server costs).
https://medium.com/appstract/make-your-laravel-app-fly-with-php-opcache-9948db2a5f93
Bootable Model Traits
On the Tighten co blog Caleb Porzio wrote a small post on how you can boot your model traits. It's a very handy feature that's being used a quite a few Spatie packages.
TL;DR Use bootNameOfTrait() instead of boot() in a model trait to avoid being overwritten by the base model’s boot() method.
Diving Laravel
Mohammed Said, Laravel employee number #1, recently announced that he published a new site where he shares stuff he learned while researching the Laravel code base. The site is called "Diving Laravel", which is kinda nice knowing that Mohammed is an incredible diver himself.
In this website I’m going to share notes on the internals of Laravel core, packages, as well as the technologies behind the different components. My goal is to help people understand how things work under the hood and also to be a reminder for me for when I need to look into something that I’ve already studied before.
Taylor Otwell on Laravel and Symfony
In a recent interview published on the Cloudways blog Taylor Otwell shares his thoughts on the similarities differences between Laravel and Symfony.
Both Laravel and Symfony are more rapid than building an entire PHP application from scratch. So, in that sense, they both allow rapid application development. However, Laravel does make strong efforts to have a very clean and productive working environment for building applications of all sizes. I think Symfony has also made efforts in this direction over the last few years with their “DX” initiatives and some of the more opinionated things they are doing with Symfony Flex.
Elegant form handling in Laravel
Michael Dyrynda, co-host of both the excellent North Meets South podcast and Laravel News podcast, wrote a short article on how he pragmatically manages forms in a Laravel app.
I personally feel that I'm not gaining anything by bringing in another package just to handle generating HTML on my behalf when it's just as fast to use the tools available to me in my editor. It also means there's no implied knowledge of a now non-standard external package, should a new developer be brought on to the projects that I've worked on. HTML is HTML, after all.
https://dyrynda.com.au/blog/elegant-form-handling-in-laravel
Supercharge Your Laravel Tinker Workflow
I ❤️ Laravel's tinker command and use it everyday. Caleb Porzio, an engineer at Tighten Co, wrote a good post on the that command, containing lots of cool stuff I didn't knew tinker could do.
Although some of the value Tinker provides is clear at first glance, it also has loads of hidden and exciting features available out-of-the-box. Let’s walk through and take a look at some ways you can super-charge your Tinker workflow.
https://blog.tighten.co/supercharge-your-laravel-tinker-workflow
TypeScript With Laravel Mix
In a new post on his blog Sebastian De Deyne, multi disciplinary wizard at Spatie, explains how to set up TypeScript in a typical Laravel app.
In a recent Spatie project we decided to give TypeScript a shot for the business critical part of a new application. TypeScript provides static analysis to reduce the chance of introducing bugs, to have self-documenting code, and to improve our tooling (autocompletion!)Adding TypeScript support is pretty straight forward and is done in three steps: install the necessary dependencies, configure TypeScript, and finally configure Laravel Mix.
https://sebastiandedeyne.com/posts/2017/typescript-with-laravel-mix
A package to enable short class names in an Artisan tinker session
Tinker is probably one of my most used Artisan commands. A minor annoyance is that it can be quite bothersome having to type the fully qualified classname to do something simple.
Today we release a new package called laravel-tinker-tools. When fully installed let's you use the short class names in a tinker session:
This magic does not only work with models but with every class in your Laravel app.
Installing the package
There are a few non standard steps you need to take in order to install the package.
First, pull in the package like you normally would:
composer require spatie/laravel-tinker-tools
Next, create a file named .psysh.php in the root of your Laravel app with this content:
<?php
\Spatie\TinkerTools\ShortClassNames::register();
Finally, dump the optimized version of the autoloader so autoload_classmap.php gets created.
composer dump-autoload -o
And with that all out of the way you can use short class names in your tinker session.
A peek behind the curtains
When you use a class that hasn't been loaded in yet, PHP will call the registered autoloader functions. Such autoloader functions are responsible for loading up the requested class. In a typical project Composer will register an autoloader function that can include the file where the class is stored in.
Composer has a few ways to locate the right files. In most cases it will convert the fully qualified class name to a path. For example, when using a class App\Models\NewsItem Composer will load the file in app/Models/NewsItem.php. It's a bit more complicated behind the scenes but that's the gist of it. To make the process of finding a class fast, Composer caches all the fully qualified classnames and their paths in the generated autoload_classmap.php, which can be found in vendor/composer.
Now, to make this package work, \Spatie\TinkerTools\ShortClassNames will read Composer's autoload_classmap.php and convert the fully qualified class names to short class names. The result is a collection that's being kept in the $classes property
Our class will also register an autoloader. When you use NewsItem in your code. PHP will first call Composer's autoloader. But of course that autoloader can't find the class. So the autoloader from this package comes next. Our autoloader will use the aforementioned $classes collection to find to fully qualified class name. It will then use class_alias to alias NewsItem to App\Models\NewsItem.
What happens if there are multiple classes with same name?
Now you might wonder what'll happen it there are more classes with the same name in different namespaces? E.g. App\Models\NewsItem, Vendor\PackageName\NewsItem. Well, autoload_classmap.php is sorted alphabetically on the fully qualified namespace. So App\Models\NewsItem will be used and not Vendor\PackageName\NewsItem.
Because App starts with an "A" there's a high chance that, in case of a collision, a class inside your application will get picked. Currently there are no ways to alter this. I'd accept PRs that make this behaviour customizable.
Need more tinker magic?
There are a lot of other options that can be set in tinker.config.php. Learn all the options by reading the official psysh configuration documentation. Caleb Porzio's excellent blogpost "Supercharge Your Laravel Tinker Workflow" is an excellent read as well. This package was inspired by that blogpost
Maybe you don't need tinker...
If you want to run a single line of code tinker can be a bit of overkill. You must start up tinker, type the code, press enter, and quit tinker. Our laravel-artisan-dd package contains an Artisan command that can dump anything from the commandline. No need to start and quit tinker anymore.
We've updated the package so you can make use of short class names too. Here's how you can dump a model using a minimal amount of keystrokes:
In closing
laravel-tinker-tools and laravel-artisan-dd aren't the only packages we've made that make developing Laravel apps easier.
Be sure to take a look at these ones at well:
Need even more stuff? The open source section on our company website lists everything we've released previously: https://spatie.be/en/opensource
Videos of the talks at Laravel Nigeria’s first meetup
On April 22nd Laravel Nigeria held its first meetup. It was a big success with over 150 developers showing up.
Here's a recap written by Neo Ighodaro, the organiser of the meetup: https://blog.devcenter.co/building-the-laravel-nigeria-community-with-over-150-attending-the-first-meetup-c919d5ca373c
The talks of the meetup were recorded, you can watch them here:
Quickly dd anything from the commandline original
Laravel's tinker command allows to run any code you want as if you are inside your Laravel app. But if you want to run a single line of code if can be a bit bothersome. You must start up tinker, type the code, press enter, and quit tinker. Our new spatie/laravel-artisan-dd package contains an…
Expressive Code & Real Time Facades
In a new post on his blog Taylor Otwell gives a nice example on how real time facades can make code more testable.
Recently, I worked on some code that surfaced my most common use-case for Laravel 5.4’s “real-time” facades. If you’re not familiar with this feature, it allows you to use any of your application’s classes as a Laravel “facade” on-demand by prefixingFacades to the namespace when importing the class. This is not a feature that is littered throughout my code, but I find it occasionally provides a clean, testable approach to writing expressive object APIs.
https://medium.com/@taylorotwell/expressive-code-real-time-facades-41c442914291
Conditionally pushing event listeners to queue
Mohammed Said, Laravel employee #1 and diver, explains how you can avoid pushing unnecessary jobs to a queue.
How many customers will reach the 10K purchase milestone? does it make sense to push a Job to queue for every single purchase while there's a huge chance that this job will just do nothing at all? IMHO this is a waste of resources, you might end up filling your queue with thousands of unnecessary jobs.It might be a good thing if we can check for that condition before queueing the listener.
http://themsaid.com/conditionally-queue-listeners-laravel-20170505/
Generate markdown email themes for a Laravel application
Bobby Bouwmann, a very helpful guy, created a new free service that can generate email markdown themes for use in a Laravel application.
Using Guzzle 6 Middleware in a Laravel Application
Paul Redmond explains how you can use Guzzle 6' middleware to add a HMAC authorization header.
I prefer to keep my dependencies as up-to-date as possible so I decided to learn Guzzle 6 and become more familiar with the middleware. The concepts are pretty straightforward and I have a few patterns that I like to use when building out middleware within my Laravel applications.
https://medium.com/@paulredmond/using-guzzle-6-middleware-in-a-laravel-application-7fbd6d966235
