Freek.dev

Over at the excellent dotdev.co Amo Chohan wrote an article on how to structure code when you need many filters on an Eloquent model.

I recently needed to implement a search feature in an events management project I was building. What begun as a few simple options (searching by name, e-mail etc), turned into a pretty large set of parameters. Today, I’ll go over the process I went through and how I built a flexible and scalable search system. For those of you who are eager to see the final code, head over to the Git repository to see the code.

https://dotdev.co/writing-advanced-eloquent-search-query-filters-de8b6c2598db

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The release of Laravel 5.3 is just around the corner. Over at Laravel News Eric L. Barnes made a nice overview of the new stuff coming in the framework.

Laravel 5.3 is currently in development and with all new Laravel releases, new features are being teased out as they are added. Here is a quick look at some of these new features.

https://laravel-news.com/2016/06/look-whats-coming-laravel-5-3/

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Matt Stauffer has been working on a book titled "Laravel: Up and Running" which will be released soon. In a post on his blog Matt shares a few hidden Laravel gems that he discovered while writing his book.

No blog post could contain all of the new things I learned from writing this book. I've been using—and teaching about—Laravel for years, and I was still shocked by how many tools and helpers and features I discovered.

Here are a few that stand out to me that I had never seen prior to writing the book.

https://mattstauffer.co/blog/things-i-didnt-know-laravel-could-do

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Sebastian De Deyne, developer at Spatie and creator of several Spatie packages, has written a post on how to override Laravel's default translation provider.

When building a website for a client that wants to be able to manage content, Laravel's language files aren't ideal since you can't edit them without diving into a bundle of text files. We recently decided to drop all the lang files in our custom CMS in favor of persisting translations in the database, which allows us to build a custom interface for managing them.

This post is a quick overview on overwriting Laravel's default translation loader, which means you can keep using the lang method while fetching the translations from a database. Writing a custom loader is easier than it sounds. First we'll set up our translation models, then we'll write our loader, and finally register it in our application.

https://sebastiandedeyne.com/posts/2016/using-a-database-for-localization-in-laravel

Seb implemented the described functionality in Blender, our Laravel template we use to kickstart nearly all our projects.

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Mohammed Said did some research on how run acceptance test for a javascript driven interface.

If you’re testing non-javascript driven interfaces then you may use Laravel’s built-in PHP Browser based testing library, it’s very powerful and the API is very readable as well. However if you need to test javascript driven interfaces then selenium is what you should be using.

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The Query Tracer package can help you find out where a specific database query is being called. It works with both Clockwork and the Laravel Debugbar. Here's a screenshot taken from the readme:

https://github.com/fitztrev/query-tracer

EDIT: turns out that Laravel Debugbar can do this out of the box:

https://twitter.com/barryvdh/status/732570607058046977

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Mohamed Said peeked behind the curtains and explains on his blog how Laravel Valet works behind the scenes.

The idea behind Valet is that it configures PHP's built-in web server to always run in the background when the operating system starts, then it proxies all requests to a given domain to point to your localhost 127.0.0.1

If you want to keep Homestead around for some projects, know that your can also use dnsmasq to point an entire domain to your Homestead installation.

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Chances are that if you've been following the news in the Laravel ecosystem that you've heard of Laravel Valent. If not: Laravel Valet is a super easy way to serve your sites in a development environment. It's dead simple to setup and use. Here's the intro video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H3Z4Gk9Wc0s

I think it's kinda amazing that it was built in just four days. Not everybody is a fan of the Valet approach be I sure do like it. At Spatie, we're going use Valet instead of Vagrant for most of our projects.

Need to know more about Valet? Check out this post on dotdev.co and the official documentation.

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Our team is currently working on a Spark app. Spark makes is real easy to add an API that can be consumed by the users of the app. The generation of API tokens and authentication middleware comes out of the box. It all works really great.

In our API the a team owner can fetch information on every member on the team and himself. The url to fetch info of a user looks something like this: /users/<id-of-user>. Nothing too special. But we also want to make fetching a user's own information as easy as possible. Sure, the user could look op his own userid and then call the aforementioned url, but using something like /users/me is much nicer. In this way the user doesn't have to look op his own id. Let's make that possible.

In our app we use these functions to get the the current user and team:

/**
 * @return \App\Models\User|null
 */
function currentUser()
{
    return request()->user();
}

/**
 * @return \App\Models\Team|null
 */
function currentTeam()
{
    if (!request()->user()) {
        return;
    }

    return request()->user()->currentTeam();
}

The route look something to get the user data looks something like this:

Route::post('/users/{userId}', 'UserController@show');

My first stab to get /users/me working was to leverage route model binding. In the RouteServiceProvider I put this code:

$router->bind('userId', function ($userId) {
   if ($userId === "me") {
      return currentUser();
   }

   $user = currentTeam()->users->where('id', $userId)->first();

   abort_unless($user, 404, "There's no user on your team with id `{$id}`");

   return $user;
});

Unfortunately this does not work. When Laravel is binding route parameters the authentication has not started up yet. At this point currentUser and currentTeam will always return null.

Middleware comes to the rescue. Route-middleware is processed at a moment when authentication has started up. To make /users/me work this middleware can be used:

namespace App\Http\Middleware;

use Closure;

class BindRouteParameters
{
    public function handle($request, Closure $next)
    {
        if ($request->route()->hasParameter('userId')) {
            $id = $request->route()->parameter('userId');

            $user = $this->getUser($id);

            abort_unless($user, 404, "There's no user on your team with id `{$id}`");

            $request->route()->setParameter('userId', $user);
        }

        return $next($request);
    }

    public function getUser(string $id)
    {
        if ($id === 'me') {
            return currentUser();
        }

        return currentTeam()->users->where('id', $id)->first();
    }
}

There are two things you must do to use this middleware. First: it's route middleware so you such register it as such at the http-kernel.

// app/Http/Kernel.php

...
/**
 * The application's route middleware.
 *
 * These middleware may be assigned to groups or used individually.
 *
 * @var array
 */
protected $routeMiddleware = [
...
'bindRouteParameters' => \App\Http\Middleware\BindRouteParameters::class,
]

Second: you must apply the middleware to certain routes. In a default Spark app you'll find all api-routes in a file at app/Http/api.php. That file starts with this line:

Route::group(['prefix' => 'api', 'middleware' => ['auth:api']], function () {
...

Just add the bindRouteParameters middleware to the group:

Route::group(['prefix' => 'api', 'middleware' => ['auth:api', 'bindRouteParameters']], function () {
...

I'm currently using the above solution in my app. You could make a solution that's more generic by checking if the parameters ends with orMe. Here's an example how that might work:

namespace App\Http\Middleware;

use Closure;

class BindCurrentUserRouteParameter
{
    public function handle($request, Closure $next)
    {
        collect($request->route()->parameters())
            ->each(function ($value, $parameterName) use ($request) {
                if (!ends_with($parameterName, 'orMe')) {
                    return;
                }

                if ($value === 'me') {
                    $request->route()->setParameter($parameterName, currentUser());
                }
            });

        return $next($request);
    }

If you have any questions about this approach or have any ideas how to make it better, let me know in the comments below.

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In our framework agnostic packages we sometimes pull in illuminate/support. This package that's part of the core of Laravel provides some nice string and collection functions. But unfortunately a lot of other stuff gets pulled in as well. In a post on his blog Matthew Allen explains the downsides of requiring illuminate/support.

A lot of framework agnostic Composer packages (PHP) pull in illuminate/support, which contains helper functions and general purpose code used by the Laravel framework. Usually it’s because the support package has nice helper functions like array_get, or because of the nice collection class.

The helpers functions are nice, but I don’t think developers appreciate the ramifications of choosing to pull that package in. Everyone is afraid to get criticized for reinventing the wheel, so packages are pulling in 6000+ lines of code to avoid writing isset($arr[$k]) ? $arr[$k] : null themselves.

http://mattallan.org/2016/dont-use-illuminate-support/

One of the most useful functions of illuminate/support is the Collection class. In a thread on Reddit Taylor Otwell, the creator of Laravel, seems to agree that requiring illuminate/support isn't a good idea and that the Collection class could be extracted to it's own package. Let's hope that'll happen in the near future.

In the new major versions of our framework agnostic packages we'll swap out illuminate/support in favor of packages like the ones mentioned at the end of Matthew's post.

EDIT: Meanwhile Tighten has released a Collections-only split from Laravel's Illuminate Support.

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Christopher Pitt is starting a new business with Spark. Over at the Sitepoint blog he has posted a tutorial on how to get started with Taylor's latest creation.

I am really excited about Laravel Spark. By the time you read this, there will probably be a multitude of posts explaining how you can set it up. That’s not as interesting to me as the journey I’m about to take in creating an actual business with Spark!

I have often wanted a way to quickly and painlessly transfer this application state from one server to another, and make automated offsite backups. So I’m going to set that up for myself, and perhaps others will find it useful enough to pay for it.

At Spatie, we're also in the process of creating or first SaaS based on Spark. That's why our package output will slow down a bit. It's too early to give any specifics on what we're building but I can already tell you that it's something very simple that we need at the company ourselves. Thanks to Spark we can open our solution up to other users. You'll hear more about it in a month or so.

Still on the topic of Spatie, maybe you've noticed that our company website is in Dutch. So most of you can't understand a single word on it. That's going to change in the near future: besides building a SaaS our team is in the process of creating a new website. This time there will be an English version.

Exciting times!

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Cloudflare pushes forward! Read the entire article for a good explanation on http2 and server push.

Today, we’re happy to announce HTTP/2 Server Push support for all of our customers. Server Push enables websites and APIs to speculatively deliver content to the web browser before the browser sends a request for it. This behavior is opportunistic, since in some cases, the content might already be in the client’s cache or not required at all.

In semi-related news: Laravel Forge recently made a nice change as well. If you install an ssl certificate on a Froge provisioned server, http2 will be enabled by default.

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