Laravel Code Tips

👨‍🔬 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

💡#Laravel Eloquent Tip

Laravel 8 introduced the Prunable trait. You can use it to delete old models on a scheduled basis.

You don't need to write custom commands anymore:

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

🌶️ #PHP tip: Did you know that you can use the spread operator to merge arrays, just like you do it in #javascript?

Available since PHP 7.4+

#Laravel

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.

😲 TIL: You can hide an image when it is broken so you don't get that ugly broken image icon from the browser.

🌶️ #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!

This pattern is brilliant and can make your code much more clean and consistent

The tweet is from last year, but it's still very relevant

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

🔥 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.

When you're counting related models in @laravelphp, opt for aggregates!

👎 Using the count() method on a collection of related models is a tad slower.

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.

💡#Laravel Tip: Here's a useful little helper for when you need to run some code, but don't really need to handle any exceptions it might generate.

Had to revisit a #Laravel project from 3 years ago, and found out I did append a mutator in the toArray method 😂, there is no need for that, we can use the "$appends" and it does the same job ✅

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

💡#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 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:

This release of Laravel also includes a "--requests" flag when making models via Artisan. This option will create a "Store{Model}Request" and "Update{Model}Request" form request + update the controller to use those requests on their respective methods. 🔥

Thanks @PovilasKorop!

⚡️ 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.

I really love using Laravel's Eloquent factories for generating fake test data. Did you know that you can also use them to generate fake API response data by using "Fluent" as the model name? Super cool! 🤯

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.

#Laravel Livewire Tip: If you want to remove property values at once and make your code cleaner, you can use $this->reset method.

Here is an example:

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! 🤩

When using Laravel morphs, you can eek out some extra performance by using small integers instead of strings for your morph types.

Smaller, faster indexes for the database to manage!

Especially useful for tables like comments or audits, which can be many millions of rows.

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. ✅

Had no idea you could have PHP throw a built-in exception when decoding JSON -- I've always done this manually until today 😭

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

Custom collections got you sorted. Love these methods.