Welcome to the first episode of a new "Creator Spotlight" video series where we interview Laravel developers about the things they are creating. Today we talk with Matt Stenson who created a Laravel Advanced String package that adds extra advanced string manipulation methods to the built-in Str class. This package provides extended functionality on strings, such as advanced password generation, data redaction, and more. Available Methods The String methods this package includes are: advPassword Generates a random, secure password. public static function advPassword( $length = 32, $le ..read more

The annual State of Laravel survey is open for 2024, and you can participate to help identify trends in how the ecosystem has changed over the last twelve months. The State of Laravel survey is "an attempt to gain insight into the representation of the diverse technologies and behaviors of this outstanding community." The survey continues to build on surfacing long-term trends in Laravel and surrounding ecosystems over the last four years. The survey collects statistics about developer demographics, tech stack usage, development tools, production, and opinion categories. Let's highlight a few ..read more

Filepond is a JavaScript package that allows you to upload anything, with popular integrations for React, Vue, Svelte, and more. If you're using Livewire, now you can easily use Filepond to upload files within Livewire components using Spatie's livewire-filepond package. This package contains a Livewire component that allows you to start using it in your Laravel projects easily: use Livewire\Component; use Spatie\LivewireFilepond\WithFilePond; class MyLivewireComponent extends Component { use WithFilePond; public $file; } // <x-filepond::upload wire:model="file" /> You ..read more

Today I'm excited to share a new resource I've built for the Laravel community: BuiltWithLaravel.com, a list of companies and organizations using Laravel in the non-Laravel world. This is the list to use when you want to show someone how widespread Laravel's adoption is. The Back Story At Tighten, I spend a lot of my time meeting with potential clients. Some of our prospective partners have already committed to Laravel, so the conversation is easier. But many folks considering working with us are just kicking the tires because someone in their organization has recommended Laravel. Inevitably ..read more

The MySQL Visual Explain tool by Tobias Petry helps users analyze slow queries by providing an easy-to-understand visual representation of MySQL’s EXPLAIN output. This tool enables you to decipher MySQL’s default, often cryptic EXPLAIN output, making it accessible even for those without deep database expertise, providing an excellent visualization of query performance: MySQL Explain example visualization The MySQL Visual Explain website has an accompanying API and an integration for laravel. The Laravel package adds methods to the query builder with various options such as automatically runni ..read more

VS Code - as many code editors do - includes a feature called "snippets". The feature allows you to configure shortcuts for pieces of code that you use often. For example, you could set up a snippet so that you type a few characters like fun, press tab, and it'll expand into a whole function declaration. I've recently been making another round at optimizing my VS Code setup, so I skimmed through Caleb Porzio's Make VS Code Awesome course again. It reminded me how useful and powerful these snippets can be, so I started thinking about new ones I could add that would make my life easier. Today ..read more

Model events are a really handy feature in Laravel that can help you to automatically run logic when certain actions are performed on your Eloquent models. But they can sometimes lead to weird side effects if they're not used correctly. In this article, we're going to look at what model events are and how to use them in your Laravel application. We'll also look at how to test your model events and some of the gotchas to be aware of when using them. Finally, we'll take a look at some alternative approaches to model events that you might want to consider using. What are Events and Listeners? Yo ..read more

With the release of Laravel 11, the application skeleton was slimmed down to remove extra files that aren't required on every project. Part of that change removed all service providers from the application source code except the AppServiceProvider. Another part of the updated application skeleton is removing API routes in the default installation. Suppose you plan on adding an API to your application or exclusively writing an API with Laravel. In that case, you can set up the api middleware group and routes with an Artisan command: php artisan install:api The install:api sets up the api.php ..read more

Caleb Porzio, creator of Alpine.js, just released a resize plugin that allows you to react easily when an element changes. This plugin is a wrapper around the Resize Observer API, and the impressive part, in my opinion, is how this plugin went from idea to publish in just over an hour! [The resize plugin] is useful for: custom size-based animations, intelligent sticky positioning, conditionally adding attributes based on the element's size, etc. Here's an example of using the x-resize attribute to handle size changes: <div x-data="{ width: 0, height: 0 }" x-resize="width = $widt ..read more

Ever since Laravel Herd Pro was launched with the ability to manage database and cache services like MySQL, Postgres, and Redis, I've been wanting to switch from DBngin to Herd's MySQL and Redis. Recently, with a little help from Marcel Pociot, I was able to figure out an easy way to move all my local databases over to Herd's MySQL service without losing any data. Warning before getting started, if you have any databases that are really important and you can't risk losing them, make a backup before following any of these instructions. I'm not responsible if something goes wrong and you lose s ..read more