Freek.dev

Sometimes you need to access a private property or method on an object that isn't yours. Maybe you're writing a test and need to assert some internal state. Maybe you're building a package that needs to reach into another object's internals. Whatever the reason, PHP's visibility rules are standing in your way.

Our spatie/invade package provides a tiny invade function that lets you read, write, and call private members on any object.

You probably shouldn't reach for this package often. It's most useful in tests or when you're building a package that needs to integrate deeply with objects you don't control.

Let me walk you through how it works.

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We just released v10 of laravel-backup, our package that creates backups of your Laravel app. The backup is a zip file containing all files in the directories you specify, along with a dump of your database. You can store it on any of the filesystems Laravel supports, and you can even back up to…

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We just released v8 of Laravel Sitemap. This package that can generate sitemaps by crawling your entire site or by manually adding URLs. This version upgrades the underlying crawler to v9, adds a couple of nice new features, and cleans up the internals.

Let me walk you through what the package can do and what's new in v8.

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Our spatie/crawler. package is one of the first one I created. It allows you to crawl a website with PHP. It is used extensively in Oh Dear and our laravel-sitemap package.

Throughout the years, the API had accumulated some rough edges. With v9, we cleaned all of that up and added a bunch of features we've wanted for a long time.

Let me walk you through all of it!

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When you share a link on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn, the platform shows a preview image. Getting those Open Graph images right usually means either using an external service or setting up a separate rendering pipeline. We just released laravel-og-image, a package that lets you define your OG image as HTML right inside your Blade views. The package takes a screenshot of that HTML and serves it as the OG image. No external API needed, everything runs on your own server.

Let me walk you through what the package can do.

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We recently released the Flare CLI, a command-line tool to manage your errors and performance data. It also ships with an agent skill that lets AI coding agents use Flare on your behalf.

The CLI has dozens of commands and hundreds of options, yet we only wrote four commands by hand. Our laravel-openapi-cli package made this possible: point it at an OpenAPI spec, and it generates fully typed artisan commands for every endpoint automatically.

Here's how we put it all together.

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The Flare CLI lets you manage errors and performance monitoring from the terminal. It was built with almost no hand-written code, generated from our OpenAPI spec. Having a CLI is useful on its own, but where it gets really interesting is when you let an AI coding agent use it.

The Flare CLI ships with an agent skill that teaches AI agents like Claude Code, Cursor, and Codex how to interact with Flare on your behalf. Let me show you how it works.

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PHP 8.0 introduced attributes, and they're a great way to add structured metadata to classes, methods, properties, constants, and parameters. The concept is solid, but the reflection API you need to actually read them is surprisingly verbose. What should be a simple one-liner ends up being multiple lines of boilerplate every time. And if you want to find all usages of an attribute across an entire class, you're looking at deeply nested loops.

We just released spatie/php-attribute-reader, a package that gives you a clean, static API for all of that. Let me walk you through what it can do.

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We just published a new package called Laravel OpenAPI CLI that turns any OpenAPI spec into dedicated Laravel artisan commands. Each endpoint gets its own command with typed options for path parameters, query parameters and request bodies.

Let me walk you through what the package can do.

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I only switched to Zed last week (you can see my full setup on my uses page), so I'm still learning the ropes. One thing I ran into is that its external formatter configuration is global. You configure one formatter command for PHP, and that's what gets used in every project you open.

The problem is that not all of my projects use the same formatter. Some use Pint, some use PHP-CS-Fixer directly. My Zed config originally pointed to ./vendor/bin/pint, which meant it silently did nothing in projects that don't have Pint installed.

Let me walk you through how I solved this.

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Our laravel-responsecache package speeds up your app by caching entire responses on the server. When the same page is requested again, the cached response is served without hitting your controller at all.

We just released v8, a new major version with a powerful new feature: flexible caching. It uses a stale-while-revalidate strategy, so that every visitor gets a fast response, even when the cache is being refreshed.

Let me walk you through it.

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After posting a screenshot, I often get questions about which editor, font or tools I'm using. Instead of replying to those questions individually I've decided to just write down the settings and apps that I'm using.

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We just released laravel-screenshot, a new package to take screenshots of web pages in Laravel apps.

It uses a driver-based architecture, so you can choose between Browsershot (which requires you to install Chromium) and Cloudflare Browser Rendering (which can be used on environments like Laravel Cloud).

Let me walk you through the package.

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