Freek.dev

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All my posts about php.

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A better dd() for your TDD

On the Tighten blog Keith Damiani wrote an article how you can mold the dd helper to your liking.

An important part of every Laravel developer's debugging arsenal is the humble dd() helper function—"dump and die"—to output the contents of a variable and terminate execution of your code. In the browser, dd() results in a structured, easy-to-read tree, complete with little arrow buttons that can be clicked to expand or hide children of nested structures. In the terminal, however, it's a different story. ... Fortunately, it's simple to build your very own customized version of dd() to help tame your unwieldly terminal output.

https://blog.tighten.co/a-better-dd-for-your-tdd

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The Laracon EU 2016 videos are now available

This year's Laracon EU was an amazing conference. The venue was astonishing, there were lots of cool talks and interesting people to talk to. If you're using Laravel or PHP going to this conference really is a no brainer.

If you were unable to attend or want to see the talk you missed during the conference you can now do so. The organisers have uploaded video's of all talks to their YouTube channel.

I had the honor speaking there as well. My talk was about managing backups with Laravel. Here's the video of my first ever conference talk:

At one point during my talk I show this slide on future plans for the package:screen-shot-2016-10-07-at-10-04-54

I'm proud to say that all that work is already done: version 3 of laravel-backup was made Laravel 5.3 compatible. Version 4 of the package uses Laravel 5.3's native notifications and uses PHP 7 features to keep the code clear. The db-dumper package, which is used under the hood, was rewritten and is now easier to use.

I'll definitely go to the next Laracon EU conference and hope to see you there too.

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A Sequel Pro bundle to generate Laravel migration files

Colin Viebrock, author of the well know laravel-sluggable package, created a new Sequel Pro bundle that can genenerate Laravel migration files.

Connect to a database, and select a table in the left-hand column. From the application menu, choose Bundles › Export › Export to Laravel Migration. The resulting Laravel migration file will be saved to your desktop. You can then move this file into your Laravel project (usually /database/migrations) and then run artisan migrate.

https://github.com/cviebrock/sequel-pro-laravel-export

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Sending a welcome mail with Laravel 5.3 original

by Freek Van der Herten – 7 minute read

Recently I was working an a project where, in order to use the webapp, users should first apply for an account. Potential users can fill in request form. After the request is approved by an admin they may use the app. Our client expected that the barrier to request an account should be very low.…

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Laravel-fractal v2 has been released original

by Freek Van der Herten – 1 minute read

Last week v2 of laravel-fractal was released. This package is a developer friendly wrapper around the League's Fractal package. It a Laravel context it can be used to transform your Eloquent models to JSON output for an API. Think of it as toJson (or toArray) on steroids. This is how you can work…

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Our packages have been downloaded one million times original

by Freek Van der Herten – 12 minute read

I'm very happy to announce that, as of today, our Laravel and PHP packages have been downloaded a million times. We now have more than 80 packages registered on Packagist. All combined they are downloaded around 150 000 times a month, and that number seems to be growing. Our GitHub organisation has…

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Creating a mail driver in Laravel

Over at Sitepoint, Younes Rafie wrote a tutorial on how to create a custom mail driver in Laravel 5.3. In the post he shows some code that can log all email to the database.

One of the many goodies Laravel offers is mailing. You can easily configure and send emails through multiple popular services. ... Laravel also provides a good starting point for sending mails during the development phase using the log driver, and in production using smtp, sparkpost, mailgun, etc. This seems fine in most cases, but it can’t cover all the available services! In this tutorial, we’re going to learn how to extend the existing mail driver system to add our own.

https://www.sitepoint.com/mail-logging-in-laravel-5-3-extending-the-mail-driver/

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A little library to deal with color conversions original

by Freek Van der Herten – 1 minute read

My colleague Seb needed to convert some color values in PHP. He looked around for some good packages, but there weren't any that fit the bill. So guess what he did? He just created a new package called spatie/color. Here's what it can do: $rgb = Rgb::fromString('rgb(55,155,255)'); echo…

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Using class_alias to maintain BC while moving/renaming classes

I've been using PHP for quite some time now, and I had never heard of class_alias before reading this post by Fabian Schmengler.

Sometimes you want to rename a class or move it to a different namespace. But as soon as it is used anywhere outside the package, this is breaking backwards compatibility and should not be done lightheartedly.

Luckily there is a way in PHP to have both, the old class and the new class, while deprecating the old one: class_alias().

https://www.schmengler-se.de/en/2016/09/php-using-class_alias-to-maintain-bc-while-move-rename-classes/

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How (not) to use accessors in Eloquent

Jarek Tkaczyk wrote a blogpost on the usage of accessors in Eloquent. He demonstrates what could go wrong when using accessors on certain fields.

The moral of the story is, that data handling and its presentation should not go into the same bucket. And the model is that bucket – instead of creating accessors, traits or god knows what for this task, better use decorator (like) pattern where you can do all the necessary work for preparing your data to be displayed in your view, without touching actual values anywhere else.

https://softonsofa.com/they-can-bite-how-not-to-use-accessors-in-eloquent/

Keep this in mind when you should use my pragmatic approach for presenters. Watch out for conflicting names.

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Simplifying presenters in Laravel original

by Freek Van der Herten – 3 minute read

In the Laravel template that we use to kickstart all our client projects at Spatie, I recently changed the way we handle presenters. Instead of using Jeffrey Way's popular presenter package we now use simple traits. In this post I want to give some background on that change. In case you've never…

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Taking care of backups with Laravel original

by Freek Van der Herten – 8 minute read

A new major version of laravel-backup was recently tagged. This package can backup files and databases of your Laravel app (or any PHP application really). The backup consists of a zipfile containing a dump of the databases and all files that are selected for backup. The package will copy over the…

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A retrospective on creating Laravel Shift

Laravel Shift is a paid service that can upgrade a Laravel project. I've used it a couple of times. Although some manually work is needed to complete the upgrade, it has saved me many hours. The service has recently shifted it's 1000th project, a major milestone. In a post on his blog Jason shares how he started the service and where it's going in the future.

In this post, I want to focus more on reaching the milestone of 1,000 Laravel applications upgraded. This may not sound like many, however for my first SaaS product it marks the achievement of my stretch goal. So allow me to share the most important decision, biggest challenge, and what the future holds for Laravel Shift.

http://jason.pureconcepts.net/2016/09/laravel-shift-1000-applications-upgraded/

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Building a search engine friendly sitemap XML with Laravel

Eric Barnes of Laravel News wrote a good tutorial on how to create a sitemap with Laravel.

A few years ago search engines recommended submitted sitemaps to help with indexing your website and now the importance of this is debatable.

I’m of the mindset creating and submitting can’t hurt, so I spent a little time putting one together and wanted to share how easy this is in Laravel.

https://laravel-news.com/2016/09/laravel-sitemap/

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Changes to the type system in PHP 7.1

PHP 7.1 is nearing completion. A few days ago Release Candidate 1 was released. One of the areas that got some love from the developers is the type system. Pascal Martin wrote a blogpost about those changes.

One of the most important changes PHP 7.0 brought us last year was about typing, with the introduction of scalar type-declarations for functions/methods parameters and their return value. PHP 7.1 adds to those type-declarations, with several points that were missing in the previous version of the language.

https://blog.pascal-martin.fr/post/php71-en-types.html

That new iterable pseudo-type will sure come in handy.

If you want to know what's changed regarding error handling, Pascal has got that covered as well.

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Hacking a PHP site

In the beginning of the summer the Belgian company PHPro held a cool hacking contest. The persons the could hack a special site that they had set up could win a prize. Yesterday they published an interesting article on how that site could be hacked. The site was also hacked in ways that the developers of the company did not anticipate.

Since this contest started out as an internal project, we've put a lot of focus on the flow on how to hack the website. It was just a little side project to inform our colleagues that some small mistakes can end up in a big catastrophe. By focussing on the flow of the hackme contest, we forgot to secure the application for malicious contestants. Off course, this was something that fired back to us on the first days of the competition. Here is a little write-up of the problems we've encountered and how we fixed them.

http://phpro.be/news/hackme-results

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A package to sync your .env file with .env.example

In a Laravel app most sensitive configuration values, like a db password, are being saved in an .env file. This file usually does not get committed in a git repo. In this way you can share the repo with collaborators without having them to know the sensitive values of your production environment.

The keys of the .env are often saved in an .env.example file that is saved in the repo. This helps you and your collaborators get up to speed quickly when installing the app locally. They can immediately see which environment variables are needed to run the app.

Over time however you might add a variable to .env and forgetting to add it to .env.example. It's a mistake that is easily made, and I have made that mistake many times in the past (sorry co-workers).

A couple of days ago Julien Tant released laravel-env-sync. This package makes sure the .env file is in sync with .env.example. After having installed the package you can run this artisan command to perform the sync:

php artisan env:sync

Thanks Julien for that awesome little package.

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