Freek.dev

Laravel / PHP / AI

php

All my posts about php.

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Dynamic relationships in Laravel using subqueries

– reinink.ca

Jonathan Reininck wrote a cool article on how you can create dynamic releationships. This technique will keep the number of queries and the memory used to a minimum.

I hope that gives you a good overview of how you can use subqueries to create dynamic relationships in Laravel. This is a powerful technique that allows you to push more work into the database layer of your app. This can have a huge impact on performance by allowing you to drastically reduce the number of database queries executed and overall memory used.

Read more [reinink.ca]

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Configuring PhpStorms code generation original

by Freek Van der Herten – 4 minute read

I've been using PhpStorm for quite some time now, but never took the effort to fix a few minor annoyances I had with it. Getting rid of the default comment for new PHP files First up, when creating a new PHP file or class you PhpStorm will add this comment block like this by default: /** * Created…

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A better way to register routes in Laravel original

by Freek Van der Herten – 3 minute read

Let's take a look at how you can define routes to controllers in Laravel. By default you can do it like this: Route::get('my-route', 'MyController@index'); This will look for the MyController class in the App\Http\Controllers namespace. This default namespace is set up in Laravel's…

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How PHP conferences can be improved original

by Freek Van der Herten – 10 minute read

The past few years I visited and spoke at a lot of PHP conferences. PHP Benelux, Laracon EU and US, PHP UK Conference, PHP World are only a few of the conferences I thoroughly enjoyed. Visiting those conferences can be recommended to anyone interested in PHP. Regardless of which level you're at…

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Loading Eloquent relationship counts

– timacdonald.me

There are three ways of loading relationships in Laravel. Tim MacDonald, a freelance dev based in Sydney, explains them all.

It is often useful to show the number of related models a given instance has, but not actually need any specific information about the related models, just how many exist. In this scenario you do not want to load all of the related models into memory to count them, we want our database to do the heavy lifting for us. Laravel offers a number of ways to retrieve relationship counts.

Read more [timacdonald.me]

Calling an invokable in an instance variable original

by Freek Van der Herten – 2 minute read

Invokables in PHP are classes that you can use as a function. They have been around since PHP 5.3 and have many interesting use cases. Here's a quick example. class Invokable { public function __invoke() { echo 'I have been invoked'; } } You can use it like this: // outputs 'I have been…

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Fixing Imagick's “not authorized” exception

– alexvanderbist.com

The last couple of weeks soem strange Imagick errors popped up across all our servers. In a new blogpost my colleague Alex explains the cause and the fix.

Over the last few days we've had a couple of issues with Imagick and processing PDFs on our servers. As it turns out, these issues are caused by automatic security updates. Let's look into the issue and its solution.

Read more [alexvanderbist.com]

Laravel Telescope: Data too long for column ‘content’

– ma.ttias.be

Mattias explains a problem we recently encountered at Oh Dear with Telescope.

For Oh Dear!, we're using Laravel Telescope as a convenient way of tracking/displaying exceptions, runs, ... It stores its exceptions in the database, so you can easily view them again. It stores those in a TEXT field in MySQL, which is limited to 2^16 bytes, or 65536 bytes. Some of our exceptions tend to be pretty long, and they were hitting this limit.

Read more [ma.ttias.be]

Our packages have been downloaded 20 million times original

by Freek Van der Herten – 3 minute read

At Spatie we do a lot of open source work. You can find a list of our packages on the open source section of our website. I'm proud to share that, according to Packagist, the Spatie packages have now been downloaded over 20 million times. The rate at which they are being downloaded is growing too.…

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Replacing a built-in PHP function

– akrabat.com

Rob Allen performs a cool test.

Recently I needed to test part of Slim that uses the built-in PHP functions header() and headers_sent(). To do this, I took advantage of PHP’s namespace resolution rules where it will find a function within the same namespace first before finding one with the same name in the global namespace.

Read more [akrabat.com]

Building something new

– assertchris.io

Christopher Pitt has built his own new blog. Of course he uses lots of preprocessing goodness.

In fact, this whole blog is built on preprocessed code. Why? Because I want to see what I can build, using a technology that 99% of vocal PHP developers (read: people on Reddit and Twitter) scoff at. I want to show that preprocessing works well and is popular in other languages.

Read more [assertchris.io]

Easily switch PHP versions in Laravel Valet original

by Freek Van der Herten – 2 minute read

Besides enjoying some greenfield work, we often have to work on legacy projects at Spatie too. Sometimes those projects don't run on the latest PHP version. I this blogpost I'd like to show you a way to switch PHP version easily when using Laravel Valet. (I know you could also use Docker or…

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