Freek.dev

A typical request on an dynamic PHP site can do a lot of things. It's highly likely that a bunch database queries are performed. On complex pages executing those queries and hydrating them can slow a site down.

The response time can be improved by caching the entire response. The idea is that when a user visits a certain page the app stores the rendered page. When a second request to the page is made, the app shouldn't bother with rendering the page from scratch but just serve the saved response.

I've made a Laravel package named "laravel-responsecache" that does just that. Installing it is very easy: just add the service provider and facade to the app's configuration. And step two is... there is no step two. In most cases you're done. All successful responses (that is a response with a statuscode in the 200 or 300 range) to a GET-requests will now be cached for a week. If the response of a specific route or controller should never be cached middleware can be added that prevents caching. Furthermore each logged in user will have have it's own separate cache. Cached responses can be stored in any configured repository in Laravel. You could easily share a cache between servers by using memcached.

I think that behaviour will suit a lot of use cases. If you need some other caching behaviour (eg. cache error responses, exempting redirects, using a common cache for users with the same role, changing the expiration time of the cache) you can easily write a custom caching profile.

The package isn't supposed to sweep performance troubles under the rug. All apps should be optimized so that they'll respond in an acceptable timeframe without using response caching. My rule of thumb is that typical pages in a cms should be able to render within a second (and preferably much less). Anything above that is unacceptable. That number is by no means scientific. Make up your own mind what an acceptable responsetime should be. Of course all of this depends on the type of site and the amount of visitors it has to handle. Also keep in mind that that there are a lot of other aspects that need to be considered when trying to deliver a speedy experience.

There are some great alternatives to cache responses. Two well known solutions are Varnish and Nginx caching. They take response caching one step further by not even invoking php when serving a cached request. Both options are very robust and can work on any scale. The benefits the Laravel package has over Varnish-like solutions is that it is easier to set up and that application logic can be used to determine what needs to be cached.

If you're interested in speeding up your Laravel app using the package, go take a look at it on GitHub:

https://github.com/spatie/laravel-responsecache

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It's very easy to port Laravel 5's way of handling environment files to Laravel 4.

You've got to require this package (it's that one that L5 uses): [code]composer require vlucas/phpdotenv```

And then you should update bootstrap/start.php:

...
$dotEnv = new Dotenv\Dotenv(__DIR__ . '/../');
$dotEnv->load();

$env = $app->detectEnvironment(function () {
    return getenv('APP_ENV') ?: 'production';
});
...

And boom, done! Now you can use an .env-file instead of .env.php.

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The sublime Laravel newsletter added a new section to spotlight a developer in a short interview. I had the honor of being the first interviewee.

https://laravel-news.com/2015/06/developer-spotlight-freek-van-der-herten/

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Alan Klein created a Laravel 5.1 package that leverages Nginx HTTP Pushstream module to broadcast events. The commenting platform Disqus uses that Nginx module to handle comments in realtime.

You can find Alan's package on GitHub: https://github.com/cmosguy/laravel-http-pushstream-broadcaster

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Lumen is Laravel, stripped down for speed. It doesn't bother with views and sessions and other consumer-facing conveniences--it's optimized for speedy, trim, microservices. Try it out. And check out the docs, too, for a ton of more information about how to use Lumen.

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Eric Barnes of Laravel News news demonstrates a nice way to loop over a collection in a Blade view using @each.

https://laravel-news.com/2014/09/laravel-blade/

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Socialite is a first party package that was introduced together with Laravel 5. It aims to provide a very convenient way to authenticate with OAuth providers. Natively it supports Facebook, Twitter, Google, GitHub and Bitbucket.

DraperStudio and Andy Wendt made a whole bunch of other Socialite providers.

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https://twitter.com/taylorotwell/status/573496234847027200

Achievement unlocked.

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The accepted solution thus far has been to install newer versions of PHP alongside Apple’s version using Homebrew or MacPorts. This would likely require you to compile the MCrypt extension manually. I also found that Homebrew could leave your system in disarray if things went wrong (more than once I had to do a complete restore because of this).

However, there’s another method I came across while research some non-related issues: install the latest version of PHP from a binary that includes the MCrypt extension. It will not bork up your system if you want to remove it, either.

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Middleware is a series of wrappers around your application that decorate the request and the response. By wrapping the app in decorators you can add new behavious from the outside. This image explains the idea more visually:

[caption id="attachment_475" align="alignnone" width="726"] source: StackPHP.com[/caption]

The concept isn't new, solutions already exists for many languages (eg. Ruby, Python, Node, ...)

The PHP equivalent is StackPHP. Here's an excellent post by Richard Bagshaw explaining it. There are a lot of StackPHP style middlewares available that you can use in your applications.

Laravel 5 uses middleware for putting an application in maintenance mode, CSRF protection, authentication and more. Unfortunately Laravel 5 middleware isn't compatible with StackPHP-style middleware. Barry vd. Heuvel created at package to convert StackPHP middleware to Laravel 5 middleware and explained the inner workings on his blog.

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Matt Stauffer shows how he built Gistlog in under two hours.

Gistlog is a blogging "platform" for people who want to quickly write and publish content, in Markdown, and don't want to bother with yet another platform and yet another login and yet another group hoarding their content. With Gistlog, you use your pre-existing Github login, you store the data in your own Github account, and you can publish with a single click.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g4BbeHYCR1E

Also make sure you check out his blogposts on the new features of Laravel 5.

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