Imagine you want to have an Eloquent model hold a status. It's easily solved by just adding a status field to that model and be done with it. But in case you need a history of status changes or need to store some extra info on why a status changed, only adding a single field won't cut it. To handle…
Barry Van Veen shares how you can install a package from a local path into your project. This is extremely handy when developing a package because you can immediately toy with it in a full application.
This article explains how you can require a package from a local path into your project with Composer. This way you can run a local copy of a repository and test any changes you make. Because the local repo will be symlinked changes are shared in real-time, there is no need for intermediate committing and updating.
https://barryvanveen.nl/blog/44-package-development-run-a-package-from-a-local-directory
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."
Collin O' Dell, member of the PHP League, shares how he was able to significantly improve the performance his json5 package using Blackfire profiling.
Back in November I released colinodell/json5 - a JSON5 parser for PHP. It's essentially a drop-in replacement for PHP's json_decode() function, but it allows things like comments, trailing commas, and more.
...
I always knew that a PHP-based implementation would be slower than PHP's native C implementation, but execution time measured in minutes was completely unacceptable!
So I fired up Blackfire (which I've previously used to optimize league/commonmark) and got to work.
https://www.colinodell.com/blog/201801/optimizing-colinodelljson5-blackfire
My colleague Brent is currently creating a new package called spatie/async. This one will let you easily do some asynchronous parallel processing in PHP. In a new post on his blog Brent explains why we are creating the package and compares it to a few other solutions out there.
If you're into parallel PHP, you probably heard of Amp and ReactPHP. Our package aims not to compete with those two, as it only solves one tiny aspect of parallelism in PHP. We did however use both the packages to run some benchmarks against. Let's take a look at the results.
https://www.stitcher.io/blog/asynchronous-php
laravel-medialibrary is a package that can help handle media in a Laravel application. It can organise your files across multiple filesystems, generate thumbnails, optimize images and much much more. Like mentioned before on this blog my team and I are currently creating a new major version, v7,…
laravel-medialibrary is a powerhouse package that can help handle media in a Laravel application. It can organise your files across multiple filesystems, generate thumbnails, optimize images and much much more. My team and I are hard at work creating a new major version, v7, that adds a lot of…
Using regular UUIDs stored as a text-based primary key is very slow. Our newly released package spatie/laravel-binary-uuid aims to solve that by binary storing a slightly tweaked version of the UUID. My colleague Brent wrote a blogpost describing how it works behind the scenes. He also included some interesting benchmarks.
The binary encoding of UUIDs solved most of the issue. There's one extra step to take though, which allows MySQL to even better index this field. By switching some of the bits in the UUID, more specifically time related data, we're able to save them in a more ordered way. And it seems that MySQL is especially fond of ordered data when creating indices.
https://www.stitcher.io/blog/optimised-uuids-in-mysql
To convert html to a pdf or an image using wkhtmltopdf and wkhtmltoimage tends to be the popular option. Unfortunately those tools contain an outdated browser engine to do their thing, so you can't use any newish css syntax. A while ago Google added a headless mode to Chrome. They've also released a…
We recently released our newest package called macroable. It contains a trait that, when applied to class, can dynamically add methods to that class. This trait is basically a stand alone version of the macroable trait in Laravel. In this post I'd like to show you how you can use it, how it works…
laravel-medialibrary is probably one of our most powerful packages. It can associate files with Eloquent models. It can also generate derived images such as thumbnails. It has a very developer-friendly API to work with. Here's a quick example:…
A while ago we released image-optimizer. In short this package can make all kinds of images smaller by stripping out metadata and applying a little bit of compression. Read this blogpost to learn more about it. Although it's pretty easy to work with the package, we felt that we could deliver a more…
Let's have a little fun! Yitzchok Willroth, better know as Coderabbi, created a new package that can improve the output of PHPUnit.
Here's what the output of a testrun looks like with his package installed.
Browsershot is a package that can easily convert any webpage into a image. Under the hood the conversion is made possible new headless options in Chrome 59. In this post I'd like to show you how you can use Browsershot v2. Here's a quick example of how it can be used:…
In a new post on his blog Sebastian De Deyne, JavaScript (and all-round) wizard at Spatie, describes a technique to expose Vue components as a plugin.
We recently published a tabs package. Initially, users needed to register two components in order to create a tabular interface: Tabs, which acts as a container, and Tab, which defines a single tab and its contents in the interface.Since developers are most likely going to use both components together, and there's a fair chance that they'd want to register them globally like in the example, it made sense to provide some sort of auto-install option.
https://sebastiandedeyne.com/posts/2017/exposing-multiple-vue-components-as-a-plugin
On the Bugsnag blog, Graham Campbell, wrote a guest post on the basics of creating a Laravel package. If you've ever wanted to create a package, this is a good starting point.
Laravel is a massively influential PHP framework, and its simple but powerful design means that it’s easy to utilize packages in your application. In this blog post we will look at the basics of creating and installing Laravel packages.
Laravel's tinker command allows to run any code you want as if you are inside your Laravel app. But if you want to run a single line of code if can be a bit bothersome. You must start up tinker, type the code, press enter, and quit tinker. Our new spatie/laravel-artisan-dd package contains an…
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
Hi, how are you? I'm fine thanks! How are you? I saw you released another package last week. Yup yup, you mean laravel-html, right? It was actually coded up by my colleague Sebastian, who did an awesome job. But why put out yet another html generator? Html generation is a solved problem, right? Yes,…
My colleague Sebastian recently released a new package called phpunit-snapshot-assertions. In a new post on his blog he tells all about it.
The gist of snapshot testing is asserting that a set of data hasn’t changed compared to a previous version, which is a snapshot of the data, to prevent regressions. The difference between a classic assertEquals and an assertMatchesSnapshot is that you don't write the expectation yourself when snapshot testing. When a snapshot assertion happens for the first time, it creates a snapshot file with the actual output, and marks the test as incomplete. Every subsequent run will compare the output with the existing snapshot file to check for regressions.
https://medium.com/@sebdedeyne/a-package-for-snapshot-testing-in-phpunit-2e4558c07fe3
Last week our team released a new package called laravel-db-snapshots. It provides a few artisan commands to quickly dump and load a database. We've built this for is to help us develop features in an app that require the database to be in a specific state. With this package we can take a dump of…
