Make your Laravel code cleaner, faster, and safer.
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Out of the box, @pestphp has amazing IDE support for the expect()->toBe() syntax, but sometimes you need to use $this — usually for things like HTTP calls.
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For example:
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They're a great way to make your components safer and faster.
Say you have a component for editing some resource.
You enforce the ACL in mount().
But if the user could change the currently edited resource, you'd need to enforce ACL on all requests!
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Imagine that you have a nested component that depends on the parent state. You don't need to sync child state into parent, you just want to replace the child when the parent state changes.
You can use my custom directive for that.
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If you have two components that share some state, and you'd like to keep them in sync in a more effective way than dispatching listeners back and forth, check out Sprucewire.
It works almost like Vuex for Livewire.
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It's good to get into the habit of using $wire, since it provides a full communication layer for your Livewire component.
It also doesn't run into issues when you use it inside single quoted attributes.
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This trait allows dispatching notifications:
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Let's look at the same trait again. It does two interesting things.
Livewire::listen() is superior to hydrate* and dehydrate* when you need access to specific parts of the lifecycle
The instanceof self check scopes the listener to the component
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You can add custom data to response effects. Those are separate from component data, and act more like events.
You can use them when you have some JS code that looks at Livewire responses, and when you want more control than dispatching browser events
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Traits are a powerful way to reuse functionality between Livewire components.
They're generally better than component nesting, since that comes with more complexity and worse performance.
Next up: Advanced trait examples
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Livewire's properties are extremely powerful, which often makes us forget that we can also call methods from the frontend.
Livewire gives you a full component API. Use it!
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As you know, Livewire sometimes runs into painful DOM diffing issues. They can usually be solved with simple workarounds, but sometimes those workarounds get quite complex.
So I built a package that adds a wire:replace directive, telling Livewire to replace an entire chunk of the DOM, instead of trying to diff individual changes.
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I developed this habit when I was building a lot of data conversion scripts in Python, but it's 100% applicable in PHP as well.
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This example is from Tenancy v2 when we had an ActiveRecord-style custom Tenant object.
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The $loop variable.
It greatly complements Tailwind-styled tables.
Striped tables done easily 🎉
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Very useful if you want to tag jobs with things like the user/tenant id.
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You DON'T have to go raw SQL when you hit a performance issue with Eloquent. There's so many "secret" techniques.
Example: You can create scopes to add specific selects to your queries.
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And so much more.
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This is similar to how I was throwing an exception based on certain things in the example with order locking.
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I didn't know about this for so long.
Instead of: $table->unsignedBigInteger('user_id'); $table->foreign('user_id')->references('id')->on('users');
You do: $table->foreignId('user_id')->constrained();
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Such as, checking if an Order is locked inside an OrderProduct.
OrderProducts cannot be added to/changed in a locked order.
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Example: Default value set on creation.
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$model->getOriginal()
in Eloquent event listeners can be very useful.
One such use case is checking whether an order is locked. If it is, the only write action we permit is unlocking it. Only then can changes be made.
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You can use ddd() instead of dd().
I tend to forget about this one, but it's super useful.
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Not recommended in most cases, but interesting.
(image stolen from the internet)
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In the example below, the value reaches the middleware, where you can do some stuff, and then is REMOVED from the route parameters before being passed to the action.
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One of them is examining sent emails ✉️
You usually don't need a service like Mailtrap. Just use the log mail driver and install Telescope.
(image stolen from the internet)
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Except...
It's multi-tenant!
Tip 7: It's incredibly easy to use http://tenancyforlaravel.com with Tinker 😎
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It's IMO better to use static properties and have "self-contained" behavior & configuration. Than to have a billion config keys. Especially when building large packages.
Makes the package more extensible, by consisting of atomic parts
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Create a class if it's used on multiple places or way too complex.
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Extremely handy when you have multiple admin panels in a single app.
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$domain->refresh(); to refresh its attributes
$tenant->load('primary_domain'); to update the primary_domain relationship on the $tenant instance
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For example, use $model->is($anotherModel) to check if they refer to the same row.
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Great for debugging/tweaking the design.
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You can tell the app what response to return when a specific exception is encountered.
This is the simplest example. There's many more use cases.
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Left: double nesting Right: arrow function
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Functional code can both clean things up and make them impossible to understand. Refactor common loops into functional calls, but don't write stupidly complex reduce()s just to avoid writing a loop. There's a use case for both.
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Above I said that moving business logic to action/service classes is good. But context matters
Here's code design advice from a popular "Laravel best practices" repo. There's absolutely no reason to put a 3-line check into a class. That's just overengineered
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Don't turn all arrays into collections just because Laravel offers them, but DO turn arrays into collections when you can make use of collection syntax to clean up your code.
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Many people will disagree with this, because they do it. But it makes no sense.
There's no point in using docblocks when they don't give any extra information. If the typehint is enough, don't add a docblock.
That's just noise.
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If you validate some resource's attributes on multiple places, you definitely want to centralize these validation rules, so that you don't change them in one place but forget about the other places.
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You can make your Blade templates more expressive by creating custom directives. For example, rather than checking if the user has the admin role, you could use @admin.
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ALWAYS use strict comparison (=== and !==). If needed, cast things go the correct type before comparing. Better than weird == results
Also consider enabling strict types in your code. This will prevent passing variables of wrong data types to functions
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Sometimes you may want to execute DB queries in blade. There are some ok use cases for this, such as in layout files.
But if it's a view returned by a controller, pass the data in the view data instead.
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This is largely a matter of personal preference, but calling a global function instead of having to import a class and statically call a method feels nicer to me.
Bonus points for session('key') syntax.
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PHP has many great operators that can replace ugly if checks. Memorize them.
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Install extensions, write annotations, use typehints. Your IDE will help you with getting your code working correctly, which lets you spend more energy on writing code that's also readable.
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If you have a complex route action, consider moving it to a separate controller.
For OrderController::create, you'd create CreateOrderController.
Another solution is to move that logic to an action class — do what works best in your case.
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Instead of writing controller actions like [email protected], use the callable array syntax [PostController::class, 'index'].
You will be able to navigate to the class by clicking PostController.
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You can store things like "results per page" in config files. Don't add them to the app config file though. Create your own. In my e-commerce project, I use config/shop.php.
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If you want to retrieve some data from a model, create an accessor.
Keep methods for things that change the model in some way.
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Similar to single-use traits.
This tactic is great when you have a very long template and you want to make it more manageable.
There's nothing wrong with @including headers and footers in layouts, or things like complex forms in page views.
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Rather than writing complex where() clauses, create query scopes with expressive names.
This will make your e.g. controllers have to know less about the database structure and your code will be cleaner.
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Sometimes you may have multiple classes with the same name. Rather than importing them with an alias, import the namespaces.
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Adding methods to classes where they belong is cleaner than creating action classes for everything, but it can make the classes grow big
Consider using traits. They're meant primarily for code reuse, but there's nothing wrong with single-use traits
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Rather than thinking "what can this object do", think about "what can be done with this object". Exceptions apply, such as with action classes, but this is a good rule of thumb.
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Creating custom collections can be a great way to achieve more expressive syntax. Consider this example with order totals.
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Don't think that long variable/method names are wrong. They're not. They're expressive.
Better to call a longer method than a short one and check the docblock to understand what it does
Same with variables. Don't use nonsense 3-letters abbreviations
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Rather than passing a huge amount of arguments in a specific order, consider creating an object with properties to store this data.
Bonus points if you can find that some behavior can be moved into to this object.
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You can also create objects with fluent APIs. Gradually add data by with separate calls, and only require the absolute minimum in the constructor.
Each method will return $this, so you can stop at any call.
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This ties the previous tweet with the other tips here. OOP exists to make your code more readable, use it. Don't just write 400 line long procedural code in controller actions.
Here's code from my first Laravel project 😬
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Know the difference between static/instance methods & variables and private/protected/public visibility. Also learn how Laravel uses magic methods.
You don't need this as a beginner, but as your code grows, it's crucial.
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Sometimes people put helpers into a class.
Beware, it can get messy. This is a class with only static methods used as helper functions. It's usually better to put these methods into classes with related logic or just keep them as global functions.
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If you repeat some code a lot, consider if extracting it to a helper function would make the code cleaner.
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They're a great place to hide complex validation logic.
But beware of exactly that — hiding things. When your validation logic is simple, there's nothing wrong with doing it in the controller. Moving it to a form request makes it less explicit
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If some method is too long or complex, and it's hard to understand what exactly is happening, split the logic into multiple methods.
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Consider offloading some logic from controllers to events. For example, when creating models.
The benefit is that creating these models will work the same everywhere (controllers, jobs, ...) and the controller has one less worry about the details of the DB schema
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Let's expand on the previous example. Sometimes, creating a class for a single action can clean things up.
Models should encapsulate the business logic related to them, but they shouldn't be too big.
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Your controllers should be simple. They should say things like "create invoice for order". They shouldn't be concerned with the details of how your database is structured.
Leave that to the model.
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The opposite of the previous tip. Sometimes the value comes from a complex call and as such, creating a variable improves readability & removes the need for a comment.
Remember that context matters & your end goal is readability
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The code will be cleaner & more readable and you will see understandable exceptions if something goes wrong. No half-passing edge cases.
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Opening an array with [ and indenting the values tends to work well. Same with long function parameter values.
Other good places to split lines are chained calls and closures.
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Too much nesting & else statements tend to make code harder to read.
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Using some "macro" philosophy for structuring your code, like hexagonal architecture or DDD won't save you.
A clean codebase is the result of constant good decisions at the micro level.
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Custom collections got you sorted. Love these methods.
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What you may not realize is that the when() method also accepts a second callback for the falsy case. This is really helpful for setting a sort default. 🤩