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A few week ago we released a new major version of laravel-permission. This package makes it easy to store permission and roles in the database. Our package plays nice with Laravel's Gate and has support for multiple guards.

In a new post on his blog Saqueib Ansari shows how you can create an interface to assign permissions and roles to a user using our package.

Laravel comes with Authentication and Authorization out of the box, I have implemented many role and permissions based system in the past, using laravel, it’s peace of cake. In this post, we are going to implement a fully working and extensible roles and permissions on laravel 5.4. When we finish we will have a starter kit which we can use for our any future project which needs roles and permissions based access control.

http://www.qcode.in/easy-roles-and-permissions-in-laravel-5-4

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Danny Van Kooten did an interesting experiment. He completely rewrote an Laravel app to a version in Go. In a post on his blog he shares some details about his project along with some benchmarks.

Earlier this year, I made an arguably bad business decision. I decided to rewrite the Laravel application powering Boxzilla in Go.

No regrets though.

Just a few weeks later I was deploying the Go application. Building it was the most fun I had in months, I learned a ton and the end result is a huge improvement over the old application. Better performance, easier deployments and higher test coverage.

https://dannyvankooten.com/laravel-to-golang/

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While working a little bit on laravel-sitemap I decided to refactor the tests to make use of our own snapshot assertions package. The snapshot package enables you to generate snapshots with the output of your tests. On subsequent runs of those tests it can assert if the output still matches the contents of the snapshot.

In this video I demonstrate how the refactor of the tests of laravel-sitemap was done. (double-click on it to view it full-screen)

If you want to know more about snapshot testing, then read this blog post written by my colleague Sebastian. The refactor of the tests can be viewed in this commit on GitHub.

(Little note on the video itself: this is my first tutorial video I ever made. After recording it I noticed that I used a wrong ratio resulting in those black bars on the side. Ah well, you live you learn. Next time it will be better. For those interested, I used a Blue Yeti Pro mic to record my voice and ScreenFlow to record and edit the video.)

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Jarek Tkaczyk demonstrates how you can use a helper relation to eager load specific models.

Have you ever needed to show only single related model from the hasMany relationship on a set of parents?

Being it latest, highest or just random, it’s not very clever to load whole collection using eager loading, just like running query per every parent.

Of course you can do that better, and now let me show you how.

https://softonsofa.com/tweaking-eloquent-relations-how-to-get-latest-related-model/

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On his blog Matt Stauffer published a new post explaining the steps required to deploy your app without any downtime.

The reason you're getting zero-downtime deploy from these tools is because the entire deploy process—clone, composer install, etc.—doesn't happen in the directory that is currently serving your site. Instead, each new release gets its own separate "release" directory, all while your site is still being served from its current "release" directory.

https://mattstauffer.co/blog/how-to-set-up-your-laravel-application-for-zero-downtime-envoyer-capistrano-deploys

In my own projects I handle these capistrano like deploys using a custom Envoy script: https://github.com/spatie/blender/blob/master/Envoy.blade.php

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Michael Dyrynda, one of the co-hosts of the Laravel News and the North Meets South podcasts, explains how to easily uptime your models with data coming from requests.

Instead of littering your controller method with multiple request()->has('field') checks, you can employ the request object's intersect method. The intersect method will return a new array containing only the keys that are present in both the specified list and the request itself.

Using intersect allows you to easily handle a PATCH request - one where you partially update a resource's data, rather than all of it as with a PUT - in a much more concise manner.

https://dyrynda.com.au/blog/partial-model-updates-in-laravel

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There are multiple good ways to pass data from Laravel to Vue. In a new blogpost Jesse Schutt covers all the options.

It has been helpful to think of my application as "layers" or separate sections of code each with varying responsibilities. I like to think of Laravel as the intermediary between the persistent data in the database, and the Vue components comprising the front-end of the app.

Though the boundaries between Laravel and Vue may appear unclear at the outset, the only way one can know about the other's data is if it is explicitly passed. Blade templates implicitly know a lot about the application, but Vue operates on a different layer, so it only knows what we tell it. Fortunately, there are a number of ways to provide Vue with the data it needs.

https://zaengle.com/blog/layers-of-a-laravel-vue-application

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One of my favourite features that was introduced in Laravel 5.4 are the higher order collection functions. It allows you to rewrite

collect($models)->filter(function(Model $model) {
   $model->passesFilter();
});

to:

collect($models)->filter->passesFilter();

This works with the filter method an a bunch of other collection methods.

In a new post on his blog Nicola Malizia explains how these methods work under the hood.

A new version of Laravel is available from 24 January 2017 and, as usual, it comes with a lot of new features. Among them, there is one that takes advantage of the dynamic nature of PHP. Some out of there will contempt this, but I find it awesome!

https://unnikked.ga/understanding-laravels-highorder-collections-ee4f65a3029e

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Andrew Welch of the New York based agency nystudio107 wrote a good overview of the options agencies & freelancers have regarding hosting.

Web hosting is something that many agencies and freelancers don’t give a whole lot of thought to. They just use whomever they’ve had a long-standing relationship with, and call it a day.

However, choosing the right host—and the right type of host—can be crucial to the success of a project. And the hosting world has changed a whole lot in the past few years, so let’s dive in.

https://nystudio107.com/blog/web-hosting-for-agencies-freelancers

At my company Spatie we're pretty happy with our choice to hosts our client projects on VPSes. We provision them using Laravel Forge and some custom ansible scripts.

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Sebastian De Deyne, author of many Spatie packages, posted a new blog article on how to generate SEO Friendly Urls in Laravel.

When admins create or update an news item—or any other entity—in our homegrown CMS, a url slug is generated based on it's title. The downside here is that when the title changes, the old url would break. On the other hand, if we wouldn't regenerate the url on updates, titles that were edited later on would still have an old slug in the url, which isn't an ideal situation either.

https://sebastiandedeyne.com/posts/2017/non-breaking-seo-friendly-urls-in-laravel

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A great feature of Laravel Spark is it's ability to impersonate other users. As an admin you can view all screens as if you are logged in as another user. This allows you to easily spot a problem that your user might be reporting. Laravel-impersonate is a package, made by MarceauKa and Thibault Chazottes that can add this behaviour to any Laravel app.

Here are some code examples taken from the readme.

Auth::user()->impersonate($otherUser); // You're now logged as the $otherUser.

Auth::user()->leaveImpersonation(); // You're now logged as your original user.

$manager = app('impersonate');

// Find an user by its ID
$manager->findUserById($id);

// TRUE if your are impersonating an user.
$manager->isImpersonating();

// Impersonate an user. Pass the original user and the user you want to impersonate
$manager->take($from, $to);

// Leave current impersonation
$manager->leave();

// Get the impersonator ID
$manager->getImpersonatorId();

It even includes some handy blade directives:

@canImpersonate
    <a href="{{ route('impersonate', $user->id) }}">Impersonate this user</a>
@endCanImpersonate

@impersonating
    <a href="{{ route('impersonate.leave') }}">Leave impersonation</a>
@endImpersonating

Want to know more, take a look at the package on GitHub.

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In a short blogpost Michael Dyrynda gives some good advice on why you should cache your routes and config values.

As part of the recommended production deploy process it is important to run the caching commands that Laravel affords us via Artisan. This means running config:cache and route:cache, which will compile the config and route files down into a single file each.

In doing so, Laravel aims to speed up parsing of these files by only needing to read a single, rather than multiple files.

https://dyrynda.com.au/blog/environment-variables-config-caching-and-laravel

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Nicola Malizia wrote a short blog post on how Laravel's handy Macroable trait can be used and how it works under the hood.

If you check the Laravel codebase I’m sure that you can observe that Laravel makes use of traits.There is one trait in the source code that pulls my attention. I’m talking about the Macroable trait. ... The purpose of this trait is to extend (not in an OOP sense) a class at run-time. This way, you can add behavior without editing the original class source code.

https://unnikked.ga/understanding-the-laravel-macroable-trait-dab051f09172

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