Freek.dev

For a site I was working on the admin should be able to switch on or off a form that's displayed on the homepage. Question: where's the best place to store the value of that switch? Creating a table and column for it in the database seems overkill. Putting it in a never expiring cache does not feel right. I think the best place to store such value is just write it to a simple file.

In the example above only one value needed to be stored, but for other projects there sometimes were two or three of them. Over the years I found myself writing the same code over and over again to store and work with such values.

Our intern Jolita and I whipped up a valuestore package. It only provides one class: Valuestore. The values will get written as JSON in a given file. The API mostly reflects Laravel's caching API. Here's how you can work with it:

$valuestore = Valuestore::make($pathToFile);

$valuestore->put('key', 'value');

$valuestore->get('key'); // Returns 'value'

$valuestore->has('key'); // Returns true

// Specify a default value for when the specified key does not exist
$valuestore->get('non existing key', 'default') // Returns 'default'

$valuestore->put('anotherKey', 'anotherValue');

// Put multiple items in one go
$valuestore->put(['ringo' => 'drums', 'paul' => 'bass']);

$valuestore->all(); // Returns an array with all items

$valuestore->forget('key'); // Removes the item

$valuestore->flush(); // Empty the entire valuestore

$valuestore->flushStartingWith('somekey'); // remove all items who's keys start with "somekey"

$valuestore->increment('number'); // $valuestore->get('key') will return 1 
$valuestore->increment('number'); // $valuestore->get('key') will return 2
$valuestore->increment('number', 3); // $valuestore->get('key') will return 5

// Valuestore implements ArrayAccess
$valuestore['key'] = 'value';
$valuestore['key']; // Returns 'value'
isset($valuestore['key']); // Return true
unset($valuestore['key']); // Equivalent to removing the value

// Valuestore impements Countable
count($valuestore); // Returns 0
$valuestore->put('key', 'value');
count($valuestore); // Returns 1

As you see it's quite a simple class, but I'm sure it'll come in handy in the future. The package can be found on GitHub.

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Imagine you are working on new app. Your client wants to see the progress that you've made. However your site isn't ready for prime time yet. Sure, you could create some login functionality and display the site only to logged in users. But why bother creating users when there is a more pragmatic approach?

At Spatie we often instruct a client to visit /demo. Visiting that url will unlock access to the entire front site. Because creating packages has many benefits we decided to open source our solution.

Our newly released laravel-demo-mode package blocks your work in progress from prying eyes. After it is installed you can use a route macro to register a route that grants access to the protected routes:

Route::demoAccess('/demo');

Routes can be protected by using the demoMode-middleware on them:

Route::group(['middleware' => 'demoMode'], function () {
    Route::get('/secret-route', 'SecretController@index');
});

Unless a user has first visited /demo first, he or she will be redirected to /under-construction. This url can be changed in the config file.

A word to the wise: do not use this package to restrict access to sensitive data or to protect an admin section. For those cases you should use proper authentication.

You can take a look at the package on GitHub. If you like it, you might like some of our other Laravel packages as well.

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Mohamed Said created a package that saves all mails sent out by a Laravel application to html files on disk. This can be incredibly useful when designing and debugging mails. It's implemented as a Laravel mail driver. Once installed you'll only have to change your driver to preview.

Take a look at the package on GitHub.

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Glide is an easy to use image manipulation library by Jonathan Reinink. It was bumped to version 1.0.0 a few days ago. Glide can created optimized images on the fly by levering url's such as /img/users/1.jpg?w=300&h=400&fit=crop. Take a look at the example in the Glide documentation to know more.

I think Glide provides a very nice API to create image manipulations. Unfortunately it isn't very easy to use the API to generate an image using code. So I created a little package for that called laravel-glide. All new major versions of Spatie packages will require PHP 7, laravel-glide is no exception to this.

Here's an example of how to create a greyscale version image with a maximum width of 50 pixels.

GlideImage::create($pathToImage)
    ->modify(['filt'=>'greyscale', 'w'=> 50])
    ->save($pathToWhereToSaveTheManipulatedImage);

Take a look at Glide's image API to see which parameters you can pass to the modify-method.

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One of the main questions when doing a major release is which minimum PHP version to support going forward. Last summer I decided I wanted to do a big jump from 5.3 and directly target PHP 7. It provides a lot of nice features as well as performance improvements, and as Monolog is one of the most installed packages on Packagist I wanted to help nudge everyone towards PHP 7.

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Climb checks your composer files to see which packages are outdated, regardless of your version constraints. Without Climb, there's no way of knowing if a package has a new major release unless you use a notification system like Gemnasium. Climb is one of those tools you just need to get on your tool belt.

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