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A great feature of Laravel Spark is it's ability to impersonate other users. As an admin you can view all screens as if you are logged in as another user. This allows you to easily spot a problem that your user might be reporting. Laravel-impersonate is a package, made by MarceauKa and Thibault Chazottes that can add this behaviour to any Laravel app.

Here are some code examples taken from the readme.

Auth::user()->impersonate($otherUser); // You're now logged as the $otherUser.

Auth::user()->leaveImpersonation(); // You're now logged as your original user.

$manager = app('impersonate');

// Find an user by its ID
$manager->findUserById($id);

// TRUE if your are impersonating an user.
$manager->isImpersonating();

// Impersonate an user. Pass the original user and the user you want to impersonate
$manager->take($from, $to);

// Leave current impersonation
$manager->leave();

// Get the impersonator ID
$manager->getImpersonatorId();

It even includes some handy blade directives:

@canImpersonate
    <a href="{{ route('impersonate', $user->id) }}">Impersonate this user</a>
@endCanImpersonate

@impersonating
    <a href="{{ route('impersonate.leave') }}">Leave impersonation</a>
@endImpersonating

Want to know more, take a look at the package on GitHub.

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If you want to know how a visitor got on your site you can check the referer request header. Yeah, it's misspelled. That header contains the url of the previously visited page. Unfortunately browsers will fill that header regardless of the previous url was an internal or external one. So after the first click on an internal link you won't know anymore on which site a visitor was on previously.

Our new laravel-referer package aims to fix that problem. Once the package is installed it will remember the original referer in session. So even after a users clicks around on your site, you are still able to detect which site he or she visited previously.

Because users are also often tracked using UTM Codes the package will also remember the utm_source query parameter.

The easiest way to retrieve the referer is by just resolving it out of the container:

use App\Spatie\Referer\Referer;

$referer = app(Referer::class)->get(); // 'google.com'

Or you could opt to use Laravel's 5.4 fancy new automatic facades:

use Facades\Spatie\Referer\Referer;

$referer = Referer::get(); // 'google.com'

To know more take a look at the readme of the package on GitHub.

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

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Jordi Boggiano and Nils Adermann, creators of Composer, have recently released a paid version of Packagist. The service aims to make managing private packages a breeze.

Private Packagist aims to remove all these hurdles for businesses to finally make working with Composer as convenient as it should be. Being a hosted service, setting up your own Composer package repository on Private Packagist is done with a few clicks. No matter if your private source code is hosted on GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, any of their on-premise solutions, or in any other Git, Mercurial, or Subversion repository, Private Packagist can immediately access your code after setting up your credentials to make it available for installation through Composer.

https://medium.com/packagist/introducing-private-packagist-492553d10660

If you're not afraid to get your hands dirty you could, instead of using Private Packagist, choose to use Satis. This tool is also written by Jordi & Nils. Laravelista has posted this great tutorial to get you started with the tool.

At Spatie we have set up a satis server to register packages that are intended to only be used in our own projects.

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Fractal is an amazing package to transform data before using it in an API. Unfortunately working with Fractal can be a bit verbose. That's why we created a wrapper called Fractalistic around it, that makes working with Fractal a bit more developer friendly. It's framework agnostic so you can use it in any PHP project.

Using the vanilla Fractal package data can be transformed like this:

use League\Fractal\Manager;
use League\Fractal\Resource\Collection;

$books = [
   ['id'=>1, 'title'=>'Hogfather', 'characters' => [...]], 
   ['id'=>2, 'title'=>'Game Of Kill Everyone', 'characters' => [...]]
];

$manager = new Manager();

$resource = new Collection($books, new BookTransformer());

$manager->parseIncludes('characters');

$manager->createData($resource)->toArray();

Our Fractalistic wrapper package makes that process a tad easier:

Fractal::create()
   ->collection($books)
   ->transformWith(new BookTransformer())
   ->includeCharacters()
   ->toArray();

There's also a very short syntax available to quickly transform data:

Fractal::create($books, new BookTransformer())->toArray();

If you want to use this package inside Laravel, it's recommend to use laravel-fractal instead. That package contains a few more bells and whistles specifically targetted at Laravel users.

To learn all the options Fractalistic has to offer, head over to the readme on GitHub. If you like it, take a look at our previous open source work as well. There's a list of framework agnostic packages we made on our company site.

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You might not know this but Forge already has an API, it's just not a documented and feature complete one. Open up your dev tools and inspect the web requests being sent while you do various stuff on Forge.

Marcel Pociot published a new package called Blacksmith (great name Marcel) that can make calls to that API. Here are a few code examples taken from the readme:

$activeServers = $blacksmith->getActiveServers();

$server = $blacksmith->getServer(1);

$sites = $server->getSites();

$newSite = $server->addSite($site_name, $project_type = 'php', $directory = '/public', $wildcards = false);

$jobs = $server->getScheduledJobs();

$newJob = $server->addScheduledJob($command, $user = 'forge', $frequency = 'minutely');

Very cool stuff. Because the Forge API doesn't include a method to login, the package will under the hood just submit a filled in login form.

An official API for Forge has been on my wishlist for quite some time. Because Forge's code base already includes an API my guess is that it wouldn't be too work to grow it in to a full, publicly available one. Though I surely cannot read Taylors mind, I think that if there were some more indications that a Forge API would be used by enough people, there's a higher chance that an official API would be built. I think the only reason why the API hasn't been built yet is because not enough people are asking for it. It makes sense for Taylor to only work on things that would actually be used. So if you are using Forge and do want an official API go ahead and star the BlackSmith package on GitHub and make some noise about it.

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On his blog Barry van Veen listed some examples of things you can do within a Laravel service provider.

Currently, I'm working on my first Laravel package. So, it was time to dive into the wonderful world of the service container and service providers.

Laravel has some great docs about, but I wanted to see some real-world examples for myself. And what better way than to have a look at the packages that you already depend on?

This post details the different things that a service provider can be used for, each taken from a real open-source project. I've linked to the source of each example.

https://barryvanveen.nl/blog/34-laravel-service-provider-examples

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In a Laravel app most sensitive configuration values, like a db password, are being saved in an .env file. This file usually does not get committed in a git repo. In this way you can share the repo with collaborators without having them to know the sensitive values of your production environment.

The keys of the .env are often saved in an .env.example file that is saved in the repo. This helps you and your collaborators get up to speed quickly when installing the app locally. They can immediately see which environment variables are needed to run the app.

Over time however you might add a variable to .env and forgetting to add it to .env.example. It's a mistake that is easily made, and I have made that mistake many times in the past (sorry co-workers).

A couple of days ago Julien Tant released laravel-env-sync. This package makes sure the .env file is in sync with .env.example. After having installed the package you can run this artisan command to perform the sync:

php artisan env:sync

Thanks Julien for that awesome little package.

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