Talking about Laravel, Oh Dear, and AI
In this interview, I talk about Laravel, application monitoring, and how AI is changing the way developers work.
In this interview, I talk about Laravel, application monitoring, and how AI is changing the way developers work.
At Flare, we track errors and monitor performance for your applications. Until now, that meant opening the Flare dashboard in your browser whenever you wanted to check on things.
We just released the Flare CLI, a command-line tool that lets you manage your errors, projects, and performance monitoring data directly from the terminal. It also ships with an agent skill that lets AI coding agents like Claude Code and Cursor use Flare on your behalf. And the fun part: the entire CLI was built with almost no hand-written code, generated from our OpenAPI spec.

Let me walk you through how to install and use the CLI.
Join 9,500+ smart developers
Get my monthly newsletter with what I learn from running Spatie, building Oh Dear, and maintaining 300+ open source packages. Practical takes on Laravel, PHP, and AI that you can actually use.
No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. You can also follow me on X.
"Freek’s newsletter is one of the best ways to stay updated with the Laravel and PHP ecosystem. It consistently highlights useful packages, tools, and ideas from the community, especially the amazing work coming from Spatie. As a Laravel developer building SaaS and web platforms, I find it extremely helpful to discover practical tools and insights that improve my development workflow."
My Oh Dear co-founder Mattias Geniar was a guest on the WP Legends podcast. They talked about how we built Oh Dear over the past eight years, common misconceptions about monitoring, and how AI is changing developer workflows.
Mattias shares his insights into what we saw during the outage and our lessons learned.
Read more [ohdear.app]
Performance monitoring gives you a complete view of what's happening in your Laravel app. The dashboard tracks everything: HTTP routes, queued jobs, Artisan commands, and database queries.
Read more [flareapp.io]
At Oh Dear, my colleague Mattias recently vastly increased the performance of our service. Here's how he did it.
Read more [ohdear.app]
A critical security vulnerability was just disclosed for Livewire v3, as Stephen Rees-Carter wrote about on Securing Laravel. The vulnerability (CVE-2025-54068) allows unauthenticated attackers to achieve remote code execution in specific scenarios. What makes this particularly concerning is that exploitation doesn't require authentication or user interaction - just a component mounted and configured in a particular way.
This vulnerability affects all Livewire v3 versions up to 3.6.3. If you're running any version in that range, attackers could potentially run arbitrary PHP code on your server. Stephan warns us the open-source nature of the fix means attackers may already be reverse-engineering the patch to identify and abuse the exploit.
Many production apps are probably running vulnerable versions right now, with their developers completely unaware. This is where automated security monitoring becomes invaluable - using Laravel Health to check for vulnerabilities, and optionally services like Oh Dear to send you notifications when issues are detected.
We just tagged stable release for two new spatie packages: spatie/ping and spatie/simple-tcp-client. In this blogpost, I'd like to share why these were developed and how you can use them.
Recently, people started talking about a malware called “Androxgh0st” specifically targeting Laravel apps. In a recent edition of Securing Laravel, Stephen Rees-Carter wrote a good explanation of how it works. The malware targets apps with APP_DEBUG set to true. When enabled, Laravel will give…
Read more [ohdear.app]
– flareapp.io - submitted by Spatie
An introduction to the Flare GitLab integration!
Read more [flareapp.io]
Today, we released the ohdearapp/ohdear-pulse package, which contains Laravel Pulse cards to show you the status of your scheduled jobs, any broken links you have in your Laravel app, and uptime / HTTP performance stats.
Here’s what the scheduled jobs card looks like.

In this blog post, I'd like to tell you more about these cards.
– flareapp.io - submitted by Spatie
Alex and Christoph explain why error tracking is crucial for your application.
Read more [flareapp.io]
I'm proud to announce that we've released a new package called spatie/laravel-prometheus. Using this package, you can send all sorts of metrics (user counts, subscription counts, queue workloads) around your Laravel to Prometheus and visualize the historical trends using Grafana.
– fly.io - submitted by Chris Fidao
You can instrument your Laravel apps by having it publish Prometheus metrics. With the help of Prometheus, you can use Grafana to create dashboards and alerts to monitor your apps.
Read more [fly.io]
Here's how you can use Oh Dear to show the server status of your app right on your landing page.
Read more [blog.helpspace.com]
Our friends at Digital With You wrote a detailed case study on how they helped us redesign @OhDearApp They cover rewriting marketing text, choosing new colours, redesigning all pages.
Read more [digitalwithyou.com]
I'm very proud that we have added a new check to Oh Dear.
Read more [ohdear.app]
– tighten.com - submitted by Jamison Valenta
Using queues in @laravelphp is great ... unless the queue has silently failed and you didn't even know about it 🚨 I'm going to show you a simple and lightweight strategy to notify you when a queue isn't processing jobs.
Read more [tighten.com]
I'm proud to announce that we have launched a redesigned Oh Dear. If you're unfamiliar with Oh Dear, it's the best all-in-one monitoring tool for your entire website. You can register for a 10-day free trial.
You can help us spread the good news by upvoting us on Product Hunt, or retweeting our launch tweet.
In this blog post, I'd like to share what Oh Dear can do for you, how we've rebuilt various parts, and give you an overview of the technology behind the service.

Here's a recap of everything we did in 2021 to make Oh Dear the best all-in-one monitoring service.
Read more [ohdear.app]