Freek.dev

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php

All my posts about php.

laravel spatie best practices package testing

Visual Regression Testing with Laravel

– marcelpociot.de

Marcel Pociot, the mind behind BotMan, has released a cool package to create visual diff in your PHPUnit tests. Under the hood it uses our Browsershot package.

I'm not sure how you feel, but I consider myself a backend developer. Sure - I know my way around Vue.JS and really enjoy working with it, but writing CSS has never been my strong point. At one of our companies recent projects, we are working together with another development team, which is mostly taking care of frontend development. So we build controllers, repositories, services, etc. and hand it over to some basic views. They handle the rest. We introduced continuous integration to them and showed them our usual workflow, when I thought that it would be excellent to also have some kind of visual CI for frontend changes.

Read more [marcelpociot.de]

A package that makes event sourcing in Laravel a breeze ? original

by Freek Van der Herten – 11 minute read

In most applications you store the state of the application in the database. If something needs to be changed you simply update values in a table. When using event sourcing you'll take a different approach. All changes to application state are stored as a series of events. The key benefit here is…

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When empty is not empty original

by Freek Van der Herten – 2 minute read

Recently when I was working on a project I got some strange results when using the empty function. Here's what I was debugging. I've simplified the code a bit to share with you. var_dump( $person->firstName, empty($person->firstName) ); This was the result: string(5) "Freek"…

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PHP Versions Stats - 2018.1 Edition

Like he already did a few times in the past, Composer co-creator Jordi Boggiano published some interesting statistics on PHP version usage as measured by Packagist.

A few observations: PHP 7.1 is still on top but 7.2 is closing real quick with already 1/5th of users having upgraded. That's the biggest growth rate for a newly released version since I have started collecting those stats. Ubuntu 18.04 LTS ships with 7.2 so this number will likely grow even more in the coming months.

https://seld.be/notes/php-versions-stats-2018-1-edition

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Practicing symmetry

In a new video Jason McCreary, the creator of the wonderful Laravel Shift, demonstrates a few good tips to clean up code. In the video below Jason uses a code snippet taken from my side project Oh Dear!

If you're interested in more tips from Jason be sure to check out his upcoming BaseCode field guide.

Meanwhile I've cleaned up (and deployed) the code in the actual app. This is what I ended up with:

class Check
{
    public function needsToRun(): bool
    {
      if (!$this->belongsToTeamOnActiveSubscriptionOrOnGenericTrial()) {
          return false;
      }
			
      if ($this->disabled()) {
          return false;
      }
			
      if ($this->alreadyRunningOrScheduled()) {
          return false;
      }
			
      if ($this->didNotRunBefore()) {
          return true;
      }
			
      if ($this->checkType()->is(CheckType::UPTIME) && $this->latestRun()->failed()) {
          return true;
      }
			
      if ($this->previousRunCrashed()) {
          return true;
      }
      return $this->latestRun()->endedMoreThanMinutesAgo($this->checkType()->minutesBetweenRuns());
    }
		
    protected function checkType(): CheckType
    {
        return new CheckType($this->type);
    }  
}

use MyCLabs\Enum\Enum;

class CheckType extends Enum
{
    const UPTIME = 'uptime';
    const BROKEN_LINKS = 'broken_links';
    const MIXED_CONTENT = 'mixed_content';
    const CERTIFICATE_HEALTH = 'certificate_health';
    const CERTIFICATE_TRANSPARENCY = 'certificate_transparency';
    public function minutesBetweenRuns(): int
    {
        if ($this->getValue() === static::MIXED_CONTENT) {
            return 60 * 12;
        }
				
        if ($this->getValue() === static::BROKEN_LINKS) {
            return 60 * 12;
        }
				
        if ($this->getValue() === static::CERTIFICATE_HEALTH) {
            return 5;
        }
				
        if ($this->getValue() === static::UPTIME) {
            return 3;
        }
				
        throw new Exception("Minutes between runs not specified for type `{$this->getValue()}`");
    }
    public function is(string $type): bool
    {
        return $type === $this->getValue();
    }
}

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Tidy up your tests with class-based model factories

John Bonaccorsi, a developer from Tighten, wrote some good ways of structuring model factories in a Laravel app.

Thanks to class-based model factories, our test setup went from being a bloated mess to simple and succinct. The optional fluent methods give us flexibility and make it obvious when we are intentionally changing our world. Should you read this blog post and immediately go and update all of your model factories to be class-based instead? Of course not! But if you begin to notice your tests feeling top heavy, class-based model factories may be the tool to reach for.

https://tighten.co/blog/tidy-up-your-tests-with-class-based-model-factories

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Improving the performance of spatie/laravel-permission

Barry van Veen recently fixed an interesting performance issue at our permissions package.

Recently I was investigating the performance of an application we have built at SWIS. To my surprise, one of the most excellent costly methods was part of the spatie/laravel-permission package. After reading some more it was clearly a performance issue that could be improved upon. Since the solution was already clearly outlined it was quite easy to code it and submit a pull request.

https://barryvanveen.nl/blog/46-improving-the-performance-of-spatie-laravel-permission

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Automatically close stale issues and pull requests original

by Freek Van der Herten – 5 minute read

At Spatie we have over 180 public repositories. Some of our packages have become quite popular. We're very grateful that many of our users open up issues and PRs to ask questions, notify us of problems and try to solve those problems, ... Most of these issues and PRs are handled by our team. But…

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Registering macro's in Laravel using a mixin

Rachid Laasri explains how to easily register multiple macros at once using the mixin function present on the Macroable trait.

Laravel Macros are a clean way to add pieces of functionality to classes you don’t own (core Laravel components) and re-use them in your projects. It was first introduced in the 4.2 version but it was only recently that I discovered the ability to define class-based macros. So, this is what this article is going to be about.

http://rachidlaasri.com/php/laravel/macro/2018/04/28/class-based-macros.html

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Array destructuring in PHP

Frank de Jonge, author of the great EventSauce and Flysytem packages, wrote a blopost on how to use array destructuring in PHP.

In PHP 7.1 the array type has become even more powerful! An RFC was accepted (and implemented) to provide square bracket syntax for array destructuring assignment. This change to the language made it possible to extract values from array more easily.

https://blog.frankdejonge.nl/array-destructuring-in-php/

Not mentioned in Frank's excellent post is PHP's ability to destructure arrays in foreach loops.

$members = [
	[1, 'Seb'],
	[2, 'Alex'],
	[3, 'Brent'],
];

foreach ($members as [$id, $name]) {
   // do stuff with $id and $name
}

You can even specify in which variable a value of a specific key should go:

	$members = [
	['id' => 1, 'name'=> 'Seb', 'twitter' => '@sebdedeyne' ],
	['id' => 2, 'name'=> 'Alex', 'twitter' => '@alexvanderbist'],
	['id' => 3, 'name'=> 'Brent', 'twitter' => '@brendt_gd'],
];

foreach ($members as ['twitter' => $twitterHandle, 'name' => $firstName]) {
	// do stuff with $twitterHandle and $firstName
}

Very neat!

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What's new and changing in PHP 7.3

Ayesh Karunaratne made a good summary of the new stuff coming in PHP 7.3 which will be released by the end of the year.

This is a live document (until PHP 7.3 is released as generally available) on changes and new features to expect in PHP 7.3, with code examples, relevant RFCs, and the rationale behind them, in their chronological order.

https://ayesh.me/Upgrade-PHP-7.3

The trailing comma in function and method calls seems nice!

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Combing legacy code string by string

Mattias Noback gives some good tips for refactoring legacy code.

"Combing" legacy code by untangling the strings is a good way to improve it and take back control over it. In existing legacy code, you should stop (re)using existing methods, making them ever more generic. Instead, you create new methods, and copy code from existing ones, allowing you to simplify this copied code and end up with a manageable class.

https://matthiasnoback.nl/2018/04/combing-legacy-code-string-by-string/

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What PHP can be

My colleague Brent shares some interesting thoughts on which direction PHP could go forward.

Let's take, for example, the debate about strong types in PHP. A lot of people, including myself, would like a better type system. Strong types in PHP would definitely have an impact on my daily work. Not just strong types, I also want generics, better variance and variable types. Improvements to PHP's type system in general would have quite the impact on my programming life. So what's stopping us from reaching a solution?

https://www.stitcher.io/blog/what-php-can-be

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