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

Oh Dear is the all-in-one monitoring tool for your entire website. We monitor uptime, SSL certificates, broken links, scheduled tasks and more. You'll get a notifications for us when something's wrong. All that paired with a developer friendly API and kick-ass documentation. O, and you'll also be able to create a public status page under a minute. Start monitoring using our free trial now.

Pass Typescript-like Typed Objects and Arrays to Your Laravel Functions by Leveraging Data Transfer Objects

Link – Mar 4th 2020 – github.com

Leonel Elimpe explains how you can use our DTO package.

How to use a MySQL database on GitHub Actions

Original – Mar 4th 2020 by Freek Van der Herten – 2 minute read

Recently we started using GitHub Actions to test all our packages. You can read more about our general setup in this blog post.

For most of the packages, this works great. However, some of our packages, such as Laravel Tags, use JSON functions that are not available in SQLite. Luckily it's straightforward to use a database like MySQL in GitHub Actions.

Stay up to date with all things Laravel, PHP, and JavaScript.

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On all these platforms, regularly share programming tips, and what I myself have learned in ongoing projects.

Every month I send out a newsletter containing lots of interesting stuff for the modern PHP developer.

Expect quick tips & tricks, interesting tutorials, opinions and packages. Because I work with Laravel every day there is an emphasis on that framework.

Rest assured that I will only use your email address to send you the newsletter and will not use it for any other purposes.

How we identified clients with SSL certificates affected by Let's Encrypt mass-revocation

Link – Mar 4th 2020 – ohdear.app

On the Oh Dear blog, Mattias Geniar shares how he found all certificates that were affected by Let's Encrypt mass revocation of SSL certificates.

Using Custom Eloquent Casts in Laravel 7

Link – Mar 4th 2020 – atymic.dev

Atymic explains a cool new feature in Laravel 7

Lazy Collections in Laravel Excel

Link – Mar 3rd 2020 – stefanzweifel.io - submitted by Stefan Zweifel

Stefan Zweifel recently had to refactor an Excel export which deals with thousands of rows. Lazy Collections helped solve all performance problems.

Building and Deploying with Github Actions

Link – Mar 3rd 2020 – driesvints.com - submitted by Dries Vints

Dries Vints wrote a short piece on setting up a continuous delivery pipeline with Github Actions.

Behind the scenes of Flare (or How to structure big Laravel applications)

Original – Mar 2nd 2020 by Freek Van der Herten – 1 minute read

At Laracon AU, I gave a talk on how you can structure a big Laravel application. The codebases of both Flare and Oh Dear served as examples.

By watching this talk you'll gain some valuable insights that could be applicable to your projects as well. Enjoy!

Typescript is changing how I write code

Link – Feb 24th 2020 – evertpot.com

A nice example by Evert Pot on how you can make static analysers do their work better.

How to write exceptionally good exceptions in PHP

Original – Feb 24th 2020 by Freek Van der Herten – 1 minute read

In this video, which is part of the mailcoach video course, I show how I like to write my exceptions.

At the time of writing this post, we're running a contest where you can win a free mailcoach license.

Adding Commits to Someone Else's Pull Request

Link – Feb 21st 2020 – tighten.co - submitted by Matt Stauffer

When getting an open source pull request, sometimes you'll need to make a change before merging. Here's how to do that.

How to refactor complex if statements

Original – Feb 18th 2020 by Freek Van der Herten – 1 minute read

Have you every come across confusing if statements with complex conditionals such as this? I bet you did!

// please kill me 🤯 
if (!(($this->shipping_country == "GB" || (strcmp($this-status, "Valid") !== 0)) {

To me, this is completely unreadable.

In the video below I show how I deal with this situation. Spoiler: add some tests around it and break the conditionals apart.

This video is part of the Mailcoach video course. It contains many more videos on how to write clear code. You can use this coupon code to get a nice discount of $10.

YES-I-WANT-TO-WRITE-READABLE-CODE

Laravel Tail can now tail remote logs

Original – Feb 18th 2020 by Freek Van der Herten – 2 minute read

laravel-tail is one of my favourite packages. When installed in a Laravel app it can be used to tail the log file. To tail a log file locally, you just have to issue this command: php artisan tail and it'll start tailing the latest log file (so it works for both daily and single log files). Any line…

Using BetterTouchTool as a window manager

Original – Feb 17th 2020 by Freek Van der Herten – 2 minute read

In this short post, I'd like to share how I use BetterTouchTool in my daily work.

Migrating to PHPUnit 9

Link – Feb 13th 2020 – thephp.cc

Sebastian Bergmann, creator of PHPUnit, walks us through some history and design decisions for PHPUnit.

laravel-event-sourcing v3 has been released

Original – Feb 13th 2020 by Freek Van der Herten – 3 minute read

Our spatie/laravel-event-sourcing package is probably the best starting point for event sourcing in Laravel. It has excellent docs, that explain event sourcing from scratch, support for aggregates, projectors, and much more! It's all beautifully integrated in Laravel.

Recently we released v3 of the package. In this blogpost I'd like to walk you through the changes.

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