Laravel Code Tips

If your app has only a few models, consider creating helper functions for model factories

Helpers have perfect IDE support and can make your tests a lot cleaner

Pairs especially well with @pestphp 💅

🔥 #Laravel Tip: Make use of ‘orderByRaw’ when you need to sort records in a more complex manner than simply A-Z or Z-A. Here’s an example where I sort ‘roles’ based on their level of importance (rather than their alphabetical order).

⚡️ Database Tip

Extending a traditional database schema with NoSQL-like JSON columns can make the schema more understandable. But you should also ensure these JSON documents conform to an expected schema!

https://sqlfordevs.io/tips/json-schema-validation

This is old, but still a great feature. Eloquent is so smooth! Check if a record exists in Laravel with exists() and doesNotExists()

🔥 Laravel Tip: Default Models.

In your relationships, you can define default models.

That way if the relationship doesn't exist it will return a default model so you don't have to check if is null every time.

Laravel tip💡You can add a Temporary URL for the local storage driver #laravel

#Laravel Tip ⚡ Instead of using the controller in each route, consider using a route controller group.

#Laravel Tip 🔥 Few convenient methods to work with the output of scheduled tasks.

#Laravel #PHP Tip 🔥 You can use #faker to not only generate text values but also fake images.

💡 Just a quick tip: define every argument of commands as optional and ask for input if they are missing.

This way, you don’t need to think about the arguments when running a command.

Just run it, and it will ask everything:

Wait... what?! 🤯

https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2022/03/html-attributes-you-never-use/#the-form-attribute-for-form-fields

📝 #Laravel Tip | In some cases you don't want the updated_at field the change when updating small things. .. Did you know you could disable the timestamps while saving your data? Here is how... 🔥

#laraveltip #php #code #development #details

🔥 Laravel tip: Customizing Missing Model Behavior in route model bindings

By default, Laravel throws a 404 error when it can't bind the model, but you can change that behavior by passing a closure to the missing method.

🔥 Laravel Tip: Route model binding soft-deleted models

By default, when using route model binding will not retrieve models that have been soft-deleted. You can change that behavior by using withTrashed in your route.

🚀 You can now use the new "assertNothingSentTo" method in your Laravel tests.

You can use this to ensure that no notifications were sent to a given notifiable model (or models)!

#laravel #php

#PHP #Laravel Since todays Laravel 9.6 release a new newline() method was added to the Stringable Class.

Thanks to @paulandroshchuk who contributed this

🔥 #Laravel Tip: Eager loading a model’s relationships is a great way to improve performance / avoid the N+1 problem. However, you can go further… with constrained eager loading you can tell Laravel to only load the related records you actually need.

🔥 #Laravel Tip: Ever wondered what the differences are between an Eloquent model’s ‘fresh()’ and ‘refresh()’ methods? Let’s see what each of them do with this little cheatsheet.

#PestPHP #PHP Tip

If you have a mixed codebase with Pest and PHPUnit tests you can use almost all of the pest magic in your PHPUnit tests. It just works.

⚡️ Database Tip

When doing statistical aggregations by time, you may have gaps in your data. You don't have to fill them manually with code! You can generate a series of dates from a start to end time and use these days to join to your statistical data with gaps.

Just found out there's a single artisan command to clear out all Laravel caches, much less typing!

🔥 When you're testing your @LaravelLivewire components, one of the simplest tests you can add is a "can this component be mounted" test. This is one of the best ways to test your the mounting process in isolation and ensuring the component renders the view correctly.

Laravel Collections tip. To remove all falsy values from the collection, simply call filter without any arguments ✨

#Laravel Tip: Since todays Laravel 9.5 release you can now do partially queue faking.

Within your Pest / PHPUnit tests, you may use @laravelphp's "mock" method to instruct the container to use your mocked instance of the object instead of constructing the object itself. ✅

🔥 #Laravel Query Time Casting

We all know you can add casts to your eloquent models, but did you know you can add casts to a specific query?

⚡️ Database Tip

Your application will have bugs and any data stored may be corrupt forever. But with constraints on the data model, rules would have prevented saving incorrect data in the first place! Use them as a last frontier to make sure you always have valid data.

Calling pluck directly on a model is the most performant way to retrieve a single column from all models in Laravel. Calling get/all before pluck will read all models into memory before plucking the value.

💡 The 'attempt()' method of the RateLimiter that comes with @laravelphp has an optional fourth argument to specify the decay.

Both examples dispatch max 12 events per minute, but the latter spread the events throughout the minute. Incredible, isn't it? 🤩

#Laravel #PHP #webdev

⚡️ Database Tip

Creating indexes is a handcraft learned from experience, multiple-column indexes is a lot more complicated. But it doesn't have to be complicated!

Here are 3 simple rules for the column ordering of multiple column indexes, solving 80% of the perf problems.

💡If you have a many-to-many relationship with a pivot table and extra columns, you can use the updateExistingPivot to update the extra column's value.

In this example, I need to update the status of a given subscriber:

Over the past few years, I've worked on some large apps that deal with events in different timezones. This can end up being quite confusing, as best practice is always to store dates in UTC.

That's where Carbon's shiftTimezone() and setTimezone() methods can help you out! ⬇️

Encapsulating complex conditionals offering a "callable" API is sexy AF. 🍑

🌶️ #Laravel tip: Sometimes you may need to send a notification to someone who is not stored as a "user" of your application.

Welcome to On-Demand Notifications in Laravel 🔥

#PHP #Developers

Laravel tip: Use the "{action}_at" naming convention for your DATETIME and TIMESTAMP fields.

This helps you to instantly recognise in your code when you're using a datetime field 😄

#laravel #php

Did you know that you can create a "Subscriber" class in Laravel to handle multiple events with different methods in one Listener class?

This is very useful if you want to group certain actions with the same dependencies.

Documentation: https://laravel.com/docs/9.x/events#event-subscribers

I'm reading the Laravel 9 docs from scratch and TIL you can write your route restrictions in a more expressive way:

🔥 #Laravel the skip method in scheduler

A quick one that I always forget about -- Faker::numerify, allowing you to generate numeric data in a specific pattern 👌👏

🔥 In Laravel 9, you'll be able to use the cool new "checked" Blade directive.

This is going to be a nice addition that we can use to clean up our Blade views a little bit

#laravel #php

🔥Laravel 9 introduced enum route bindings!

You can type-hint your enum and Laravel will cast the string value from the URL:

🔥 Cool tidbit I learned during @LukeDowning19 ’s talk.

You can add a $bindings array to a service provider to bind things.

https://laravel.com/docs/9.x/providers#the-bindings-and-singletons-properties #laravel #php

🔥 #Laravel paginator tip: you can use getCollection and setCollection if you need to do something to the paginator underlying data. Trust me you'll know when you need this.

Fluent is a utility class provided by @laravelphp that lets us handle data fluently.

Out of the box it can be turned into an array or JSON, it can act as an array and it's serializable as a JSON.

It also gets and sets attributes dynamically and in a fluent way.

#Laravel #PHP

🔥 #Laravel Tip: Tracking logins and logouts for auditing or security purposes is incredibly easy thanks to Laravel’s login and logout events. Simply listen for them in a service provider and respond when they are fired.

Match offers such a compact and clean syntax compared to its PHP alternatives 🌈

It can make our code way more readable and concise 💅

#PHP

🔥 #Laravel Tip: Protect your database from the dangers of lazy loading by disabling it in your Laravel app. You can also customise how violations are handled, which is perfect for models outside of your control e.g. within packages.

Sometimes I forget about higher order collection messages in Laravel, but they're a great way to shorten and tidy up your code ✨

Here's a simplified (and not recommended) example.

✨Did you know Tailwind CSS has a shorthand syntax for background, border, and text opacity?

🔗 https://tailwindcss.com/docs/background-color#changing-the-opacity

🔥 Eloquent scopes pair very well with complex relation queries

Scopes should also have @method annotations. They make the model more self-documenting & better supported in IDEs

Since @laravelphp 8.79 it is possible to resolve variadic dependencies out of the IoC container.

This is quite useful for type-hinting and static analysis and allows us to bind a set of concrete implementations to an abstraction layer.

#Laravel #PHP

👨‍🔬 Cool MySQL hack:

🧐 If your staging env has a table that ideally doesn't have data in it (esp production data)

🕳 You can make it a BLACKHOLE table

😅 I used this to make sure a table with a list of emails to send never contains any rows. Because, you know....

Just got schooled in a Laravel feature I was unaware of:

Tell Laravel to always send to a specific address!

💪Power up your #Laravel requests

You can add very simple getters on the request, so: ✅You actually know what's on the request ✅You have types ✅You can do basic data transformation

Array destructuring is probably one of my favorite things in modern PHP and I don't think I use it enough

🔥 Epic Laravel Tip - Did you know that you don't necessarily have to use underscores for migrations names?

If you're creating custom exceptions inside your Laravel application, you can add a "context()" method to provide additional data to be printed in the log, as well as a "render()" method to allow the exception to display its own view to the user. Super cool! 🤩

Make use of the built-in "includeWhen" and "includeUnless" directives to get rid of those ugly if conditions.

The @.production blade directive makes it super easy to load e.g. Google Analytics or other stuff when your Laravel app is in production mode

🔥 Custom collections pair very well with higher order proxies

When you have some repetitive low level logic that you'd like to abstract into more readable methods that follow your business terminology, custom collections can be a great choice

🔥 In #mysql you can compare strings by how they sound rather than how they have been typed using SOUNDEX() function

#laravelframework #laravel #mysql #sql

This is how you can hint that a function returns an instance of the class of which you passed the class name.

Cool stuff!

Hat tip to @enunomaduro

https://github.com/spatie/laravel-route-discovery/blob/7fa88922aa693b03b4763eda870867075ab44999/src/PendingRoutes/PendingRouteAction.php#L100-L107

🔥 Did you know that you can supply default values for route parameters in @laravelphp?

In the screenshot below, we use the current user's account as the default value for {account}. This means we don't have to provide it when generating the users.index route.

Laravel Tip 💡 You can use the 'Blade::stringable' method to convert objects into their string representation. For example, automatically convert a Money object and show the amount in a specific currency.

🌶️ #Laravel #pestphp tip

If you like to plan your tests ahead of time and implement them one by one, you can always make use of a handy method skip() to tell the test runner to ignore those empty tests.

skip() accepts a callback too!

🔥 You can use first class callables for routes in PHP 8.1

The caveat is that the methods need to be static because there's no syntax for referencing instance methods on classes

I don't use constructor DI in my apps, so static methods are fine despite feeling a bit non-standard

#WeirdDevReadsDocs

Did you know?

You can add a --refresh flag to the artisan down command to send a refresh header to the browser. I think that's helpful for well visited apps where you trying to keep perceived downtime as low as possible!

https://laravel.com/docs/8.x/configuration#maintenance-mode

@laravelphp

Remembered this great tip recently, and it's nice to see how fast PHP evolves

The exact same behavior can be implemented using match () with a default value, which also removes the need for the second callback ⚡️ https://twitter.com/reinink/status/1233017064492761088

🔥 You can use array spreading to pass an array as arguments to another function. #php

Here’s a self-contained example where we spread the array output of sys_getloadavg. That function returns an array with three elements.

https://github.com/spatie/cpu-load-health-check/blob/70f387d5167c24d4000d825a5bddab2504d557fb/src/CpuLoad.php#L17

#php

❌ To customise a validation message for a request in @laravelphp , you can add a message function to a form request. Very handy! #laravel #php

🔥Another amazing #Laravel feature!🔥

We often write if statements to check if a value is present on a request or not.

You can simplify it with the whenFilled() helper.

👋If you find this useful, consider clicking the button that says Retweet. It's a very cool button!

⚡️ Database Tip

You don't have to execute multiple queries to calculate different aggregates. With the filter clause you can narrow the rows which should be included for the calculation. So you may need to scan the table only once, the performance impact can be massive 🔥

🔥 Simple typehints and annotations go a long way

Even without any docblocks, this code is perfectly understandable by both developers and IDEs

Writing code like this: 👉 Prevents bugs using type safety 👉 Makes the code self-documenting 👉 Takes only a few seconds to implement

💡#Laravel Tip: Database model factories have handy 'afterMaking' and 'afterCreating' callback methods that you can use to perform additional tasks on newly-created objects.

🔥When you add an array{} return docblock, IDEs are able to autocomplete the keys when reaching into that array.

Sweet! #php

A quick reminder about a not-so-often used #PHP feature.

We have the spread operator, and it works just like the one in JavaScript.

🔥 Use the "terminating" hook on your @laravelphp app instance to perform tasks after the response was already sent to the browser.

That's also what's powering "dispatchAfterResponse" 🚀

🔥 Remember that you can pass parameters to your custom @laravelphp middleware classes

This simple middleware allows me to inject onboarding screens in an Inertia app.

💡#Laravel Tip: Did you know that any commands you schedule in the console kernel can automatically email their output if something goes wrong.

💡 Since @laravelphp v8.19, there is a ShouldBeEncrypted interface that jobs can implement. This encrypts the payload, for example, in case the properties hold sensitive data.

As of v8.25, this works for Listeners, Mailables, and Notifications as well 💫

#Laravel #PHP #webdev https://twitter.com/pascalbaljet/status/1462711618329055232

A tiny tip about #laravel eloquent.

To retrieve the Query Builder after filtering the results: you can use ->toQuery().

The method internally use the first model of the collection and a whereKey comparison on the Collection models.

To boost perceived speed in your @LaravelLivewire apps when loading data, make use of prefetching.

The .prefetch modifier tells Livewire to fetch the result in the background on hover, and then displays the result when the button is actually clicked ✨

⚡️ Database Tip

Comparing anything to a null value is always null too (meaning false). Simple operations like searching for rows with an unequal value will be more complicated. But null safe operators are making those queries dead simple again.

A handy $loop object is available in Laravel Blade foreach loops. Super useful for controlling output based on the loop position ➰

Source dive for reference: https://github.com/laravel/framework/blob/8.x/src/Illuminate/View/Concerns/ManagesLoops.php

I don't do it very often, but you can use Laravel's Schema builder anywhere you want, not just in migrations!

If you ever need to make a temp table to help you mass process data more quickly, it's a great solution.

🔥 I sometimes forget you can use form="form-name" on input types to hook fields inside one form to another. This makes it as if those fields were inside that <form>-tag.

This is super useful if the fields are rendered in the wrong form, but UI wise it makes sense.

🔥#Laravel Migration tip🔥

Do you have a relationship that is nullable?

You can use the nullOnDelete() function. It achieves ON DELETE SET NULL behavior:

#Laravel Updates:

In Laravel 8.7 you can now validate enum columns!

An Example:

#Laravel Tip: If you are running Laravel v8.70, you can chain can() method directly instead of middleware('can:..')

Here is and example:

⚡️ Database Tip

Sometimes you have very complex queries involving multiple calculation steps. Instead of nesting queries or doing it in application code you can use Common Table Expressions (CTE) to refine your data in every step and even reuse former steps.

💡It's refactor time!

Laravel 8.65 introduces the Str::headline() method, this method converts a string into studly words!

A small change like this results in less noise in my code.

Thanks @SteveTheBauman for this implementation! 🙌

💡 A little #Laravel tip from the latest blog post to get the week started!

Under the hood, the withAvg/withCount/withSum and other methods in Eloquent use the 'withAggregate' method. You can use this method to add a subselect based on a relationship 💫

#PHP #webdev #OpenSource

When using Jetstream Fortify, If you would like to take the user to a different page after registration instead of the email verifying page. Then you could add an array inside config/fortify.php like shown below #Laravel

If you ever need to generate text-based tables for sending in text messages, outputting in console, or in logs, @symfony provides an awesome "Table" class, just for that! 💅 Such a cool utility! 🤩

Do you hate re-writing short closures just to add temporary debugging code?

In the next blog posts, I'll cover Database and Eloquent improvements and new features in #Laravel 8.x.

Here's a great little feature that got added in v8.60 🔥

PR: https://github.com/laravel/framework/pull/38707

Yesterday's post about Collections: https://protone.media/en/blog/a-look-at-new-features-and-improvements-since-the-original-laravel-80-release-collections

#PHP #webdev #opensource

Laravel Tip: Abstract relations you commonly use to a trait. It’s a DRY approach that keeps your models thin.

PHP reminder: you can define your class properties directly on the constructor. ✅

PHP reminder: you can use the method "__toString()" to specify the string representation of an object. ✅

🔥 A way to check if a string contains valid JSON: just decode it, encode it again, and check if it matches the original value #php

Testing Tip: use a test class or spec file as a place to gather all of your thoughts about how a particular feature should behave. Then, write each as a pending test.

Here's an example from our upcoming "Feed" section.

💡 By default, the @laravelphp HTTP client doesn't throw exceptions on client and server errors.

However, you can make it do that by using the 'throw' method, and this method is chainable 🔥

Documentation: https://laravel.com/docs/8.x/http-client#throwing-exceptions

#Laravel #PHP #webdev #webdevelopment

For example:

• invoice() to create an Invoice model
• product() to create a Product model

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.

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.

Let's look at the same trait again. It does two interesting things.

1. Livewire::listen() is superior to hydrate* and dehydrate* when you need access to specific parts of the lifecycle

2. The instanceof self check scopes the listener to the component

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

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.

This example is from Tenancy v2 when we had an ActiveRecord-style custom Tenant object.

Very useful if you want to tag jobs with things like the user/tenant id.

And so much more.

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();

$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.

Not recommended in most cases, but interesting.

(image stolen from the internet)

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)

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

Extremely handy when you have multiple admin panels in a single app.

Great for debugging/tweaking the design.

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.

Left: double nesting Right: arrow function

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.

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.

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.

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

PHP has many great operators that can replace ugly if checks. Memorize them.

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.

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.

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.

Sometimes you may have multiple classes with the same name. Rather than importing them with an alias, import the namespaces.

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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dfgtKb-VpRk

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Too much nesting & else statements tend to make code harder to read.

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.

Custom collections got you sorted. Love these methods.