Laravel Code Tips

🔥 #Laravel Tip:

The default encryption cast for Eloquent models uses the app key, making rotation difficult and allowing anyone with key to decrypt all the DB. To address this, consider creating a custom cast that uses the model to create its own unique key.

Yay! In Laravel 9.18 you can finally eager load ("with") using a nested array.

⚡️ Database Tip

In most applications, all rows are physically sorted in the database file by their insertion order. By sorting them instead optimally for your application a huge databases will still be amazingly fast.

https://sqlfordevs.io/sorted-table-faster-range-scan

Enjoying the little things: the new fake() helper we introduced to Laravel.

Because it is a singleton, you can get unique values across multiple calls / boundaries.

Super useful for tests, factories, seeders, and for quickly prototyping a design with fake data ✌️

💡 Create single-use traits to split up long classes into smaller parts

This way, all e.g. link-related logic can be contained within a single trait

🔥 Namespaced functions are a good way to make use of helper functions, while avoiding conflicts in the global namespace

🔥 You can import entire namespaces in PHP

This is useful when you're interacting with many classes from a single namespace

💡🟰 Quick #Laravel Eloquent tip for comparing database columns to each other within a query.

You don't have to use any raw statements to do this - whereColumn() has got you covered! 😊

🔥 Did you know that Laravel has a handy Blade directive to only render stuff in a given environment?

Here is @laravelphp tip that makes your code more expressive. 💅

"Return to route profile". ✨

⚡️ Database Tip

Sometimes you want to get e.g. the last three orders for every customer. Normal joins can't do that. You have to execute n+1 queries in code, which is slow!

But with lateral joins, you can do one for-each loop join in SQL 🤯 https://sqlfordevs.io/for-each-loop-lateral-join

TIL that you can use your own blade file for the maintenance mode screen in #Laravel by using the render option

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 💅

⚡️ Database Tip

Sometimes you want to make columns unique but you can't because e.g. there are still soft-deleted rows in the table witht the same value. By only including relevant rows (partial index) you can still enforce uniqueness, and you can even simulate it for MySQL!

⚡️ 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

🔥 Did you know you can dynamically create and/or extend interfaces in #PHP?

Example from the @pestphp codebase: https://github.com/pestphp/pest/blob/1.x/src/Contracts/HasPrintableTestCaseName.php

🔥 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

Always forget about the modelKeys method on Eloquent Collections for getting the ID's from a collection of models 👌

🔥 Laravel Tip: You can specify what to do if a scheduled task fails or succeeds.

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

🔥 Laravel Tip: Accessor Caching

As of Laravel 9.6, if you have a computationally intensive accessor, you can use the shouldCache method.

Wait... what?! 🤯

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

🔥 Did you know that you can create Storage disks on the fly in @laravelphp? This is super useful when you want your user to provide their own filesystem credentials, e.g. a user can bring their own S3 bucket to your app.

🔥 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

How to retrieve records between two timestamps in Laravel 🗓 Use whereBetween with a from and to date. If you need to provide fallback you can do so with the nullish coalescing operator ❔❔

🔥 #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.

Pest tip: Use the dd method to dump the current expectation value and end the test suite. 🔦

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.

It's a minor thing but the PHP isset function can accept multiple vars. https://www.instagram.com/p/CbctwMxgPv4/

#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:

#Laravel Tip 🔥 If you want to return a file content without initiating a download, you can use the stream() method. It will display the file in the browser.

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

💡 As of @laravelphp v8.36.0, you can skip 'TransformRequests' middlewares by registering a callback.

For example, you can use it on 'TrimStrings' and 'ConvertEmptyStringsToNull'.

#Laravel #PHP #webdev

🔥 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

Pretty cool string helper method https://laravel-news.com/laravel-8-82-0 #laravel #php

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

⚡️ Database Tip

Every database performance guide is repeating the false statement stating WHERE LIKE '%search%' queries can't use an index. That is just not true! Most probably your database can't, but PostgreSQL implements trigram indexes which will make this really fast!

👨‍🔬 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!

🌶️ #Laravel tip: You can select the columns to run when using the Model::all() method. No need for an additional select() method.

A tiny tip to always keep in mind 💡

#PHP #Developers

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.

Just learned about the Eloquent "value()" method from @amaelftah 💪. Eloquent make things so easy. Seems like there's shortcuts hiding everywhere, I love it! 💅🤩

🔥 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

🔥 Did you know that @laravelphp can cast model columns into instances an enum in PHP 8.1?

The example below will create an instance of OrderStatus based on variant value. If the status column has the value shipped, it will return the OrderStatus::Shipped variant.

🔥 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.

⚡ ️Database Tip

Some applications want to periodically deleted old historic data (or have to because of regulations). Deleting billions of rows is a very slow task which could take several minutes and may take your application down. Use partitions for efficient deleting!

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.

🔥 Tip: Compare models using ->is() instead of doing direct attribute value comparisons

This is a simpler version of the tip below https://twitter.com/archtechx/status/1465334771349811219

🔥 Composer has a why-not command that will tell you why it won’t install a particular version of a package #php

#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

Does your @laravelphp application have 0 tests? Here is one test you can easily add to get started. It's probably the most important test — in web projects — and it has an enormous value.

✓ Ensures your application boots. ✅ ✓ Ensures the home page can be loaded. 💨

⚡️ 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

Most of the times I've used contextual binding in Laravel, it's been to share config values.

TIL there's a more succinct giveConfig method for that

🔥 In an Eloquent model can define a relation that will get the newest (or oldest) item of another relation. Very nice!

📘 Docs: https://laravel.com/docs/8.x/eloquent-relationships#has-one-of-many

#laravel #php

🔥 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" 🚀

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.

✔ You can validate fields even within a middleware in Laravel.

This would help when you need to constantly validate the same field(s) on your requests:

💡#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.

💡#Laravel Tip: Dealing with deeply-nested arrays can result in missing key / value exceptions. Fortunately, Laravel's data_get() helper makes this easy to avoid. It also supports deeply-nested objects.

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.

A quick and easy way to check if @LaravelLivewire components are re-rendering when you don't want/need them to.

Add now() or now()->timestamp to your component template. The time value will increment if there's a re-render side effect!

🔥#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! 🙌

Happy Monday 🙌 Let's start the week with a Laravel tip: You can use the Prunable trait to automatically remove models from your database. For example, you can permanently remove soft deleted models after a few days.

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

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

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! 🤩

Did you know that you don't have to pass a function to Laravel's "where" method when using the Rule class?

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();

Example: Default value set on creation.

$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

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

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.

https://twitter.com/LiamHammett/status/1260252814158282752

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

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.

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

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.

If you want to retrieve some data from a model, create an accessor.

Keep methods for things that change the model in some way.

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.

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

Creating custom collections can be a great way to achieve more expressive syntax. Consider this example with order totals.

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.

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

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.

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.

The code will be cleaner & more readable and you will see understandable exceptions if something goes wrong. No half-passing edge cases.

Custom collections got you sorted. Love these methods.