Freek.dev

Laravel / PHP / AI

php

All my posts about php.

laravel spatie best practices package testing

How to hack and win the May Mayhem blog contest

– alexvanderbist.com

Recently Taylor Otwell held a blogging competition. Entries could be submitted on a GitHub repo, the post with the highest amount of ? would win. My colleague Alex wrote a blogpost on how you could easily win the competition by hacking a bit. It's pretty awesome that Alex, without using any of the hacks described in the post, wound up winning the competition.

I feel like programmers are often as good at breaking things as they are at fixing things. Part of the thought process of programming anything new is figuring out its flaws, weaknesses and possible exploitations. As a web developer, I often find myself applying the same thought process to everything I see and read about online. Including Laravel's May Mayhem blog contest.

Read more [alexvanderbist.com]

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Serverless Laravel

– mnapoli.fr

A few weeks ago Matthieu Napoli released Bref, a tool to get any PHP project up and running in a serverless environment. Matthieu has managed to get working serverless too.

Serverless basically means “Running apps without worrying about servers”. The main difference with a traditional hosting is that you do not maintain the servers and reserve their capacity. They are scaled up or down automatically and you pay only for what you use. ... Today let’s try to deploy a Laravel application on AWS lambda using Bref.

Read more [mnapoli.fr]

The open source department at Spatie is doing overtime original

by Freek Van der Herten – 3 minute read

Bad title because we don't do overtime at Spatie, but our team has been very busy putting out new open source stuff. In the past weeks our team has released three new packages. In this post I'd like to quickly introduce them too you. sheets First up is spatie/sheets, created by Sebastian. This…

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Keeping your Laravel applications DRY with single action classes

– medium.com

Rémi Collin shares a cool approach on where to place code that doesn't really belong in a controller. He creates small, reusable, testable, decoratable classes, called Actions.

Using this approach can seems a lot of classes at first. And, of course the user registration is a simple example aimed to keep the reading short and clear. Real value starts to become clear once the complexity starts growing, because you know your code is in one place, and the boundaries are clearly defined.

Read more [medium.com]

How I Built The LaravelQuiz Chatbot With BotMan and Laravel

Christopher Rumpel created a cool BotMan powered quiz on Laravel take you can take via Telegram. In a new blogpost he shares how it was built.

Hey everyone. In this article, I want to show you how I built the LaravelQuiz Chatbot. If you haven't tried it yet, it is a good idea to check it out before reading this article. This will help to understand what I am talking about. Right now it only supports Telegram. The chatbot provides a quiz with all kinds of questions about the Laravel framework. Every question comes with up to three possible answers. You need to pick the right one to collect points and make it to the highscore. But besides the ranks, the quiz is about having a good time. Enjoy the questions and see what you know about Laravel. Have fun!

https://christoph-rumpel.com/2018/05/how-i-built-the-laravelquiz-chatbot-with-botman-and-laravel

I took the quiz and scored pretty good.

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Creating custom @requires annotations for PHPUnit

– mattstauffer.com

In an older but still relevant blogpost Matt Stauffer explains how you can extend PHPUnit's native @requires annotation. It's pretty handy if you want to only run certain tests in certain environments.

I was primarily interested in learning—how do PHPUnit annotations work? What does it look like to extend a pre-existing annotation? How do you not just check for the annotation, but also check its value? I'll show you what I found and then you can run willy-nilly with your own naming schemes.

Read more [mattstauffer.com]

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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