Freek.dev

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php

All my posts about php.

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How to use Laravel with Socket.IO

Most of the UI in my sideproject Oh Dear! is realtime. Because there is a vast amout of events being broadcasted using Pusher would be too expensive at this stage. So for our broadcasting we use socket.io and laravel-echo-server mentioned in the article below.

I had this challenge where I needed it to show a list of people who are currently viewing a specific URL in Laravel. So I started thinking. Part of me wanted to do a quick hack (luckily that’s not the strongest side of mine), whilst the other wanted to build something cool, reusable and long-lasting.

https://medium.com/@adnanxteam/how-to-use-laravel-with-socket-io-e7c7565cc19d

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Creating custom stream filters in PHP

In this post we will see how to create a custom stream filter. Streams, first introduced in PHP 4.3, provide an abstration layer for file access. A number of different resources besides files – like network connections, compression protocols etc. can be regarded as “streams” of data which can be serially read and written to.

https://www.codediesel.com/php/creating-custom-stream-filters/

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Learn to create an RSS Feed from scratch in Laravel

Over at Laravel News Paul Redmond, author of Docker for PHP developers, wrote a good post on how to use our RSS package to add a feed to a Laravel app.

Creating an RSS feed in Laravel isn’t the most challenging task, but using a package and a few tips can help you create an RSS feed relatively quick.

We are going to use the spatie/laravel-feed package to walk through going from a brand new Laravel 5.6 project to serving RSS feeds.

https://laravel-news.com/learn-to-create-an-rss-feeds-from-scratch-in-laravel

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Uploading avatar Images with Spatie’s medialibrary

Over at Laravel News Povilas Korop wrote a nice tutorial on how to use our medialibrary (we released a new major version a couple of days ago).

By default, the Laravel registration form contains only the name, email, and password, but often it’s useful to allow the user to upload a photo or an avatar. In this tutorial we will show you an easy way to add it, using Spatie’s Media Library package.

https://laravel-news.com/uploading-avatar-images

It's a good tutorial but there's a few things not mentioned. At the end of the post you'll see this line of code:

Auth::user()->getMedia('avatars')->first()->getUrl('thumb');

That can be written a bit shorter as :

Auth::user()->getFirstMediaUrl('avatars', 'thumb');

The new v7 of the medialibrary has a new feature called "single file collections", which is just perfect for this example. Take a look at the docs: https://docs.spatie.be/laravel-medialibrary/v7/working-with-media-collections/defining-media-collections#single-file-collections

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Separate Interactive Test Suites

If you find yourself having a bunch of slow tests that don't need to execute every time you run the tests, take a look at PHPUnit's defaultTestSuite setting. TJ Miller explains it in a blog post he wrote last year.

To avoid running the interactive test suite with the rest of my tests, manually or via a CI job, I had to explicitly include all the other suites using phpunit --testsuite Api,Feature,Unit. This felt a bit grim and I would rather exclude just that one suite. So I did some digging and found the defaultTestSuite configuration for phpunit.

https://medium.com/@sixlive/separate-interactive-test-suites-f6fd59316ec2

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Laravel Excel — Lessons Learned

Last week Laravel Excel v3 was released. In a post on his company blog Patrick Brouwers writes the story of why and how v3 was released.

Laravel Excel (https://github.com/Maatwebsite/Laravel-Excel) turned 4 years last November and has reached almost 6 million Packagist downloads. A good time to reflect on 4,5 years of open source development.

https://medium.com/@maatwebsite/laravel-excel-lessons-learned-7fee2812551

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Server side rendering JavaScript from PHP

My colleague Seb did some amazing work with the creation of two packages that make it easy to get started with server side rendering in PHP. In a new post on his blog he'll tell you all about it.

Server side rendering is a hot topic when it comes to client side applications. Unfortunately, it's not an easy thing to do, especially if you're not building things in a Node.js environment.

I published two libraries to enable server side rendering JavaScript from PHP: spatie/server-side-rendering and spatie/laravel-server-side-rendering for Laravel apps.

Let's review some server side rendering concepts, benefits and tradeoffs, and build a server renderer in PHP from first principles.

https://sebastiandedeyne.com/posts/2018/server-side-rendering-javascript-from-php

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Today we hit 10 million PHP package downloads original

by Freek Van der Herten – 2 minute read

For the past few years Spatie, the company where I work, has released many Laravel and PHP packages. Those packages are primarily built to be used in our own projects. We do not operate in a void. We have a community around us. They use our work. They help to make our packages better by submitting…

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Build a newsletter chatbot in PHP

On his blog Christoph Rumpel explains how you, using BotMan, can create a bot where users can subscribe to content updates.

Email has been a great channel for staying in touch with your audience for years. But times are changing and messengers are taking over communication. Let's see how I used Facebook Messenger to build a little newsletter bot for my upcoming book "Build Chatbots with PHP".

https://christoph-rumpel.com/2018/02/build-a-newsletter-chatbot-in-php-part-1

Pretty cool! I might add a bot to this very blog soon.

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Value objects like a pro

On the Hackernoon site Nicolò Pignatelli wrote a good guide on how to write Value objects in a good way.

This is the list you must always check it against:

  • it is immutable and no setters defined;
  • it reflects the semantics of the domain;
  • it shows how information flows and is transformed during runtime;
  • it hasn’t default or useless getter methods;
  • it can be compared to other Value Objects of the - - same class by reading private properties directly

https://hackernoon.com/value-objects-like-a-pro-f1bfc1548c72

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Enabling PHP method chaining with a makeshift pipe operator

Sebastiaan Luca, a freelance Laravel developer from Antwerp, coded up a couple of functions that mimic a pipe operator.

An interesting RFC proposal by Sara Golemon submitted in April 2016 suggested the use of a pipe operator to enable method chaining for any value and method. Yet as of today, it's still being discussed and there's no saying if it will ever make its way into PHP. So in the meantime, here's a solution!

https://blog.sebastiaanluca.com/enabling-php-method-chaining-with-a-makeshift-pipe-operator

Let's hope a real pipe operator will land someday in PHP.

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Using Content Security Policy headers in a Laravel app original

by Freek Van der Herten – 5 minute read

By default all scripts on a webpage are allowed to send and fetch data from and to any site they want. If you think about it, that's kinda scary. Imagine that one of your JavaScript dependencies would send all keystrokes, including passwords, to a third party website. That would be pretty bad. In…

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Use the same controller to serve multiple formats

– twitter.com

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