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

Using Laravel's Policies and Route Model Binding without Eloquent

Oct 21st 2020 – timacdonald.me

Another nice post by Tim who continues to share suprising, little nice features of Laravel.

Going deep

Oct 20th 2020 – sebastiandedeyne.com

Seb makes the case that subtracting things can be better than adding things.

Convert and store Base64 encoded files in Laravel

Oct 20th 2020 – protone.media

Pascal Baljet shares a nice way to handle Base64 encoded files in Laravel

Using Laravel's new Query Builder Upsert feature

Oct 20th 2020 – atymic.dev - submitted by atymic

Overview of the new upsert feature in Laravel 8.10, how to use it and some tips.

PHP8's Weak maps explained

Oct 19th 2020 – platform.sh

Larry Garlfriend explains how you can use PHP 8's weak maps to implement a self cleaning cache. Pretty sweet!

On Issue Bumping

Oct 19th 2020 – blog.sindresorhus.com

A nice, concise post by Sindre Sorhus on when to issue bump and when not to.

PHP be all like: that nonexistent class be cool

Oct 14th 2020 – timacdonald.me

In this blogpost, Tim MacDonald warns that PHP doesn't give you any warning when using ::class on a class that does not exist.

Selling digital products using Laravel part 10: Miscellaneous interesting tidbits + outro original

Oct 13th 2020 by Freek Van der Herten – 6 minute read

We've already covered a lot of ground in this series. Let's finish by highlighting some miscellaneous interesting tidbits.

Selling digital products using Laravel part 9: Serving ads on GitHub original

Oct 13th 2020 by Freek Van der Herten – 7 minute read

Our company has created a lot of open-source packages. At the moment of writing, we have over 200 packages, which have been downloaded nearly 100 million times. Because we think the package users might be interested in our paid offerings as well, we've put a small ad in the readme of each repo. In this blogpost I'll explain how we manage these ads using Laravel Nova and S3.

Selling digital products using Laravel part 8: Mailing updates and news using Mailcoach original

Oct 13th 2020 by Freek Van der Herten – 6 minute read

We'd like to stay in touch with the people interested in our products by sending them emails when we got some news on an upcoming product, or when we are running a promo for existing products. To handle subscriptions and send out emails, we use our home-grown Laravel package Mailcoach. Let's take a look at how we use Mailcoach ourselves.

Selling digital products using Laravel part 7: Importing package documentation from GitHub original

Oct 13th 2020 by Freek Van der Herten – 5 minute read

On our site you'll find the documentation of our bigger bigger packages, like laravel-medialibrary, laravel-backup, laravel-event-sourcing, ... Let's take a look at how that works.

Selling digital products using Laravel part 6: Building a video section using Vimeo original

Oct 13th 2020 by Freek Van der Herten – 5 minute read

On our website, we have a video section. All our videos uploaded to and handled via Vimeo where we have a Pro subscription. We chose Vimeo because it has an excellent widget to display videos, it converts our videos very fast, and it has a nice API to work with. Let's take a look at how Vimeo is integrated in our site.

Selling digital products using Laravel part 4: Making a sale using Paddle original

Oct 13th 2020 by Freek Van der Herten – 8 minute read

In this part of the series we'll explore how we use Paddle to actually sell products at spatie.be.

Selling digital products using Laravel part 3: Giving customers access to private repositories on Github original

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

Wouldn't it be great if we could automatically give customers access to the private repositories on GitHub for the products they bought? Let's take a look at how this is handled at spatie.be

Selling digital products using Laravel part 2: Logging in using GitHub original

Oct 13th 2020 by Freek Van der Herten – 4 minute read

Let's take a look at how people can log in to spatie.be in via GitHub. For this functionality, we use a wonderful Laravel first-party package called Socialite.

Selling digital products using Laravel part 1: Intro + a tour of spatie.be original

Oct 13th 2020 by Freek Van der Herten – 5 minute read

On our Laravel powered company website we sell digital products: video courses, e-books, and software packages. Behind the scenes we use Laravel, Paddle, Vimeo, the GitHub API and a couple of other things.

We've open-sourced our site. You'll find the actual code we have deployed in the spatie-be repo on GitHub. In this blog post, I'll guide you through the code.

Transpiling PHP code from 8.0 to 7.x via Rector

Oct 13th 2020 – blog.logrocket.com - submitted by Leonardo Losoviz

This is an intro to how transpiling works for PHP: Similar to how Babel compiles JS to make it compatible with older browsers, Rector can convert PHP code across versions. So we can use PHP 7.4 features (typed properties, arrow functions), and deploy it to PHP 7.1.

Selling digital products using Laravel part 5: Using Satis to install private packages original

Oct 13th 2020 by Freek Van der Herten – 7 minute read

Some of our products, like Mailcoach and Media Library Pro, are PHP packages for which people can buy a time-limited license. Of course, we want customers to be able to install our paid packages using Composer. Our paid packages are not registered on Packagist, because Packagist is meant to be used for free packages, and there's no way to handle licenses. Let's take a look at how we can solve this using Satis.

Gracefully deprecating foreign keys for a polymorphic relationship

Oct 12th 2020 – timacdonald.me - submitted by Tim Mac

Here's how to handle moving from a classic foreign key constrained relationship, to a polymorphic relationship in Eloquent, without impacting the end user.

How to run over 30k tests in under 5 minutes

Oct 9th 2020 – blog.mollie.com

Paratest is an extension on top of PhpUnit that adds support for parallel testing. For our unit tests, we could just add Paratest and it works without any configuration!