spatie

All my posts about spatie.

Laravel Site Search v3 is here: crawl and search your entire site using just your database original

by Freek Van der Herten – 5 minute read

We're proud to release v3 of laravel-site-search, a package that crawls and indexes your entire site. Think of it as your own private Google. Point it at a URL, let it crawl every page, and get full-text search results back.

Previous versions required Meilisearch as the search engine. That works well, but it means running a separate service.

With v3, your application's own database is all you need. It supports SQLite, MySQL, PostgreSQL, and MariaDB out of the box, and it's the new default.

Let me walk you through it.

Read more

Join 9,500+ smart developers

Get my monthly newsletter with what I learn from running Spatie, building Oh Dear, and maintaining 300+ open source packages. Practical takes on Laravel, PHP, and AI that you can actually use.

No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. You can also follow me on X.

Generate OG images for your Laravel app original

by Freek Van der Herten – 5 minute read

When you share a link on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn, the platform shows a preview image. Getting those Open Graph images right usually means either using an external service or setting up a separate rendering pipeline. We just released laravel-og-image, a package that lets you define your OG image as HTML right inside your Blade views. The package takes a screenshot of that HTML and serves it as the OG image. No external API needed, everything runs on your own server.

Let me walk you through what the package can do.

Read more

Introducing the Flare CLI original

by Freek Van der Herten – 4 minute read

At Flare, we track errors and monitor performance for your applications. Until now, that meant opening the Flare dashboard in your browser whenever you wanted to check on things.

We just released the Flare CLI, a command-line tool that lets you manage your errors, projects, and performance monitoring data directly from the terminal. It also ships with an agent skill that lets AI coding agents like Claude Code and Cursor use Flare on your behalf. And the fun part: the entire CLI was built with almost no hand-written code, generated from our OpenAPI spec.

Let me walk you through how to install and use the CLI.

Read more

A clean API for reading PHP attributes original

by Freek Van der Herten – 3 minute read

PHP 8.0 introduced attributes, and they're a great way to add structured metadata to classes, methods, properties, constants, and parameters. The concept is solid, but the reflection API you need to actually read them is surprisingly verbose. What should be a simple one-liner ends up being multiple lines of boilerplate every time. And if you want to find all usages of an attribute across an entire class, you're looking at deeply nested loops.

We just released spatie/php-attribute-reader, a package that gives you a clean, static API for all of that. Let me walk you through what it can do.

Read more

Laravel Response Cache v8 is here: now offers flexible caching original

by Freek Van der Herten – 6 minute read

Our laravel-responsecache package speeds up your app by caching entire responses on the server. When the same page is requested again, the cached response is served without hitting your controller at all.

We just released v8, a new major version with a powerful new feature: flexible caching. It uses a stale-while-revalidate strategy, so that every visitor gets a fast response, even when the cache is being refreshed.

Let me walk you through it.

Read more

Laravel Permission v7 has been launched original

by Freek Van der Herten – 3 minute read

Laravel's built-in authorization is great when permissions are defined in code. With gates and policies, you can write logic like this:

// Defined in code, requires a deploy to change
Gate::define('edit-posts', function (User $user) {
    return $user->is_admin;
});

But in some projects roles and permissions are dynamic: created by users, managed through an admin panel, or changed at runtime without deploying code. Our Laravel Permission package can help you dynamically create roles and permissions.

We just released v7 which doesn't bring any new features, but cleans up the internal code and modernizes it. Let me walk you through what the package can do.

Read more

Laravel PDF v2 has been released: adds support for Laravel Cloud and easy queuing original

by Freek Van der Herten – 6 minute read

A while ago, we released laravel-pdf, a package to generate PDFs in Laravel apps.

Under the hood, it used Browsershot (and therefore Puppeteer/Chrome) to convert HTML to PDF. That approach works great, but it does require Node.js and a headless Chrome binary on your server.

Last week, my buddy Dries shared on X how to generate PDFs using Cloudflare services. This way doesn’t require Node or any binaries. Very neat! This unlocks PDF generation for environments where Node or Chrome cannot be installed easily, like Laravel Cloud.

To support this way of rendering a PDF, we’ve released a new major release (v2) of Laravel PDF. The package now ships with three drivers: Browsershot, Cloudflare Browser Rendering, and DOMPDF. You can also create your own driver. On top of that, we've added queued PDF generation and the ability to set PDF metadata. And to let your AI understand our package, we've added a Laravel Boost skill.

Let me walk you through all of it.

Read more

Introducing Spatie Guidelines for Laravel Boost original

by Freek Van der Herten – 2 minute read

If you're using AI tools like Claude Code to help write code, you've probably noticed they don't automatically know your team's coding conventions. The AI might write perfectly valid PHP, but it won't follow your specific style guide unless you tell it to. That's the problem Laravel Boost solves. It…

Read more

Introducing Rich Text Laravel - Part 2

tighten.com - submitted by Kayla Helmick

This article continues the series on integrating Trix with Laravel by focusing on user mentions using the Rich Text Laravel package. It walks through adding a Tribute.js-powered mention picker in the editor, implementing back-end support via an AttachableContract and Signed Global IDs, and even scaffolds a notification system to email mentioned users.

Read more [tighten.com]

How to monitor your Laravel app for critical vulnerabilities original

by Freek Van der Herten – 6 minute read

A critical security vulnerability was just disclosed for Livewire v3, as Stephen Rees-Carter wrote about on Securing Laravel. The vulnerability (CVE-2025-54068) allows unauthenticated attackers to achieve remote code execution in specific scenarios. What makes this particularly concerning is that exploitation doesn't require authentication or user interaction - just a component mounted and configured in a particular way.

This vulnerability affects all Livewire v3 versions up to 3.6.3. If you're running any version in that range, attackers could potentially run arbitrary PHP code on your server. Stephan warns us the open-source nature of the fix means attackers may already be reverse-engineering the patch to identify and abuse the exploit.

Many production apps are probably running vulnerable versions right now, with their developers completely unaware. This is where automated security monitoring becomes invaluable - using Laravel Health to check for vulnerabilities, and optionally services like Oh Dear to send you notifications when issues are detected.

Read more