Freek Van der Herten's blog on Laravel, PHP and AI

Statements Vs. Expressions in JavaScript

Jul 14th 2022 – www.joshwcomeau.com

In this blog post, Josh Comeau shares some of the epiphanies he's had about this distinction, and how you can use this information in day-to-day work.

How to install PHP 8.2 RC on Mac

Jul 14th 2022 – nunomaduro.com

PHP 8.2 is scheduled to be released on the 24th of Nov, 2022. Of course, meanwhile, you may test the new features, syntax changes, and other improvements in your local environment.

Things You Should Know About Databases

Jul 12th 2022 – architecturenotes.co

Let's explain the two most important topics when working with RDBMSs: indexes and transactions.

What is complexity? Write Better Laravel, Part 1

Jul 11th 2022 – arunas.dev - submitted by Arunas

Before we learn strategies for better software design, we must understand our enemy - complexity. Let’s define complexity, how to spot it, and what causes it.

New composer audit Command and security audits in Composer 2.4

Jul 8th 2022 – php.watch

Composer 2.4 features scanning the installed and new packages for known security vulnerabilities. When a new package is installed, or an existing package is updated, Composer looks up the package version numbers on known security vulnerability announcements, and reports if there are any known vulnerabilities in the list of packages.

Introducing our new Laravel Options package original

Jul 8th 2022 by Ruben Van Assche – 2 minute read

When developing web applications, you probably encounter a lot of places where someone needs to select one or more options in a select or multi-select. These select boxes always need a list of options with labels and values.

In one of our projects, we had options being generated in lots of places. Sometimes these lists of options were the same, leading to a lot of code duplication. Even worse, in some cases, different formats were used to output the same options.

That's why we've created a new package called spatie/laravel-options. It will take a resource which can create options such as an enum, a list of models or even a plain array. And will always create a standardized array of options you can use within your frontend application.

Why DRY is the most over-rated programming principle

Jul 7th 2022 – gordonc.bearblog.dev

DRY is just like every other principle out there - it has its place, but it's best taken in moderation.

Auto-Refresh Livewire Components While Keeping States With Vite

Jul 7th 2022 – christoph-rumpel.com

Let's check out how we can improve working with Livewire and Vite together, by using the Vite Livewire Plugin by Fabio Ivona.

My Wonderful HTML Email Workflow

Jul 7th 2022 – www.joshwcomeau.com

Lots of things to be learned in this detailed post by Josh Comeau

An Engineer’s Best Tips for Writing Documentation Devs Love

Jul 6th 2022 – thenewstack.io

Some good tips for writing effictive, human-friendly documentation.

Effective immutability with PHPStan

Jul 5th 2022 – matthiasnoback.nl

Did you know that DateImmutable isn't really immutable?

Add comments to SQL queries made by Laravel

Jul 4th 2022

We've released a new package called spatie/laravel-sql-commenter. This one can add comments to SQL queries. These comments allow you to easily pinpoint the origin of a query when looking at your query log.

Encrypting Laravel Eloquent models with CipherSweet

Jul 1st 2022 – rias.be

We've just released laravel-ciphersweet. This package is a wrapper over CipherSweet, which allows you to easily use it with Laravel's Eloquent models.

Linked Lists explained in PHP

Jun 30th 2022 – doeken.org - submitted by Doeke Norg

Linked lists are a linear data structure that provides quick insertion and deletion.

Introducing sidecar-browsershot

Jun 30th 2022 – stefanzweifel.io - submitted by Stefan Zweifel

A short introduction to sidecar-browsershot package: How it works and for what it can be used for.

Using Laravel Vite to automatically refresh your browser when changing a Blade file original

Jun 29th 2022 by Freek Van der Herten – 2 minute read

Yesterday, the Laravel team released the vite-plugin. Going forward, Vite will become the standard build tool for Laravel apps.

One of the cool features of this Vite integration is that you'll get hot reloading by default. Whenever you run Vite with npm dev and modify a JS or CSS file, Vite will automatically recompile the assets and refresh your browser. This way, you won't have to refresh your browser manually after making a change.

Wouldn't it be cool if this automatic refresh would work when we're changing a Blade file?

Making Vite and Valet play nice together original

Jun 29th 2022 by Freek Van der Herten – 3 minute read

Yesterday, the Laravel team launched the official vite-plugin. From now on, Vite will be the standard build tool for Laravel. The main benefits are vastly improved build times and a more straightforward API. Want to know more about it? Head over to the official docs. There's also a migration guide to go from Mix to Vite.

When I followed that guide to upgrade the freek.dev codebase from Mix to Vite , npm dev could successfully start-up Vite, but in the browser the JS / CSS did not load. Let's review how I could fix that.

Building social images with Browsershot and AWS

Jun 27th 2022 – yoeri.me - submitted by Yoeri

Creating social images for your website is super simple using Browsershot and AWS Lambda.

Using the `Attachable` interface to attach any kind of object to a mail in a Laravel app original

Jun 26th 2022 by Freek Van der Herten – 4 minute read

Laravel 9 has gained a excellent new way to attach files in mails. Using the Attachable interface, you can specify what should happen when an object gets used as an attachment.

Using our media library package you can easily associate any file with an Eloquent model. We've added support for Laravel's Attachable in the latest version of the package.

In this blog post, I'd like to tell you all about it.

Highlighting code using Sidecar & Shiki

Jun 26th 2022 – rias.be

Shiki is a beautiful syntax highlighter powered by the same language engine that many code editors use. We've just released a package that allows you to run Shiki on AWS Lambda through Sidecar.