Laravel Credentials Package for Encrypted Application Secrets

 

Trust me, erasing secret data from version control is open-heart surgery for your VCS you never want to perform. On the other hand, having secrets in version control is helpful to keep track of changes made, given that you do so carefully. Enter Laravel Credentials.

Laravel Credentials is a new package by Marcel Pociot (of Botman fame) to help you manage sensitive data securely in your Laravel project.

A couple of benefits include:

• Credentials are encrypted, so nobody can read them without the key (which you should not store in version control)
• Encrypted credentials are in version control, so you have a history of change
• You can deploy credential changes along with code changes
• Your secrets exist in one location

Since credentials are encrypted and require a key, how do you edit them with this package?

Editing Laravel Credentials

To edit your credentials, you use an artisan command provided by the Laravel Credentials package:

php artisan credentials:edit

Once you update the credentials, the new encrypted version gets stored in the credentials file (by default the file lives at config/credentials.php.enc. The credentials file is accessible via helpers.

Using Credentials

To access encrypted credentials, you use the provided credentials() helper function:

$credential = credentials('api-password');

Installation

To install this package and start using it, install it via composer with:

composer require beyondcode/laravel-credentials

You can optionally publish the config file with the following:

php artisan vendor:publish --provider="BeyondCode\Credentials\CredentialsServiceProvider" --tag="config"




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Eloquent Sluggable Package

Adding unique slugs to your eloquent models is made simple through the Eloquent Sluggable package by Colin Viebrock.

The gist of using this package is making your Eloquent models “sluggable” through the Sluggable trait provided by the package, which defines an abstract sluggable() method you use to configure your model-specific configuration.

For example, if you wanted to use the title field on a model with the slug column:

use Cviebrock\EloquentSluggable\Sluggable;

class Post extends Model
{
    use Sluggable;

    /**
     * Return the sluggable configuration array for this model.
     *
     * @return array
     */
    public function sluggable()
    {
        return [
            'slug' => [
                'source' => 'title'
            ]
        ];
    }
}

With the above model, an example usage from the README looks as follows:

$post = new Post([
    'title' => 'My Awesome Blog Post',
]);

$post->save();
$post->slug; // my-awesome-blog-post

$newPost = $post->replicate();
// $newPost->slug is "my-awesome-blog-post-1"

I find it very convenient that the package automatically takes care of making posts unique if they happen to have the same title.

This package also ships with thoughtful configuration options to customize how slugs work. Here are the defaults:

return [
    'source'             => null,
    'maxLength'          => null,
    'maxLengthKeepWords' => true,
    'method'             => null,
    'separator'          => '-',
    'unique'             => true,
    'uniqueSuffix'       => null,
    'includeTrashed'     => false,
    'reserved'           => null,
    'onUpdate'           => false,
];

Check out the full readme on GitHub for many other examples, including working with relationship attributes to generate slugs and many other options.

You can install this package with the following composer command:

# For Laravel 5.6, use v4.5 of this package
# Check the readme for version matching
composer require cviebrock/eloquent-sluggable:^4.5

Thanks for the excellent package, Colin!

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Use Laravel GeoIP to Determine Users’ Geographical Location

 

I recently needed a geographical check of users to determine default locales and currencies of users. The torann/geoip package by Daniel Stainback fit the bill nicely to provide GeoIP for Laravel 5 applications.

The Laravel GeoIP package supports a few services, including ip-api.com by default, a downloadable Maxmind Database, and the Maxmind API. You can also add a custom service easily through the configuration.

The basic usage of this package is calling the geoip() helper, optionally passing an IP address. The following is an example location object that is returned based on IP location:

\Torann\GeoIP\Location {

    #attributes:array [
        'ip'           => '232.223.11.11',
        'iso_code'     => 'US',
        'country'      => 'United States',
        'city'         => 'New Haven',
        'state'        => 'CT',
        'state_name'   => 'Connecticut',
        'postal_code'  => '06510',
        'lat'          => 41.28,
        'lon'          => -72.88,
        'timezone'     => 'America/New_York',
        'continent'    => 'NA',
        'currency'     => 'USD',
        'default'      => false,
    ]
}

As you can see, the Location object has some geo-specific data that is helpful in determining the currency of the user, his or her timezone, and country ISO code.

A configurable fallback location is also available in case the location is not found, and the default parameter will be set to true. You can override the default configuration, which looks like this:

'default_location' => [
    'ip' => '127.0.0.0',
    'iso_code' => 'US',
    'country' => 'United States',
    'city' => 'New Haven',
    'state' => 'CT',
    'state_name' => 'Connecticut',
    'postal_code' => '06510',
    'lat' => 41.31,
    'lon' => -72.92,
    'timezone' => 'America/New_York',
    'continent' => 'NA',
    'default' => true,
    'currency' => 'USD',
],




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A Stand-Alone Laravel Slack Package

 

The gpressutto5/laravel-slack composer package is a Slack notification library for Laravel 5.5 by Guilherme Pressutto:

Slack notification for Laravel as it should be. Easy, fast, simple and highly testable. Since it uses On-Demand Notifications, it requires Laravel 5.5 or higher.

You can install this dependency in your Laravel >= 5.5 application with the following:

composer require gpressutto5/laravel-slack

You can publish the configuration file with:

php artisan vendor:publish --provider="Pressutto\LaravelSlack\ServiceProvider"

You will also need to configure an incoming webhook integration for your Slack team.

Basic Usage

Here’s an example of the API interface for the provided Slack service that ships with this package:

// Send a message to a channel
\Slack::to('#finance')->send('Hey, finance channel! A new order was created just now!');

// Send message to users
\Slack::to(['@zoe', '@amy', '@mia'])
    ->send('Here is an example message sent to multiple users');

You can mix it up sending a message to both users and channels at the same time:

\Slack::to('#support', '@bill', '#dev')
    ->send(':thinking_face:');

You can even send to a user by passing an Eloquent model that has a slack_channel property, or you can provide an accessor method:

class User extends Model
{
    public function getSlackChannelAttribute(): string
    {
        return $this->attributes['my_custom_slack_channel_column'];
    }
}
\Slack::to(User::where('verified', true))
    ->send('Sending message to all verified users!');

Here’s a reference to all the configuration values at the time of writing:

<?php

return [
    'slack_webhook_url' => env('SLACK_WEBHOOK_URL', ''),
    'default_channel' => '#general',
    'application_name' => env('APP_NAME', null),
    'application_image' => null,
];

Testing

You can easily mock the Slack service by calling Slack::fake() and messages will not be sent to Slack but will be stored in an array. The package ships with some testing helper methods to aid your tests, for example:

Slack::assertSent(function (SlackMessage $message) {
    return $message->content === 'fake';
});

Slack::assertSentCount(3);




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Plug and Play Avatars in Laravel with Laravolt

The Laravolt Avatar by Bayu Hendra Winata is a package that turns strings like names into avatars effortlessly. This package uses the Intervention Image package under the hood to generate base64 images on-the-fly, saving as an image, and SVG.

The basic usage looks like this in your Blade templates:

<img src="{{ Avatar::create('Joko Widodo')->toBase64() }}" />

<!-- SVG markup -->
{!! Avatar::create('Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono')->toSvg(); !!}

This package is highly configurable—you can even configure an individual image on-the-fly while rendering it:

// width = 100, height = 200
Avatar::create('Soekarno')->setDimension(100, 200);
Avatar::create('Soekarno')->setBackground('#001122');
Avatar::create('Soekarno')->setShape('square');

Here’s the full configuration at the time of writing so you can get a feel for all the ways you can customize avatar generation:

<?php

return [

    // Supported: "gd", "imagick"
    'driver'    => 'gd',

    // Initial generator class
    'generator' => \Laravolt\Avatar\Generator\DefaultGenerator::class,

    // Whether all characters supplied must be replaced with their closest ASCII counterparts
    'ascii'    => false,

    // Image shape: circle or square
    'shape' => 'circle',

    // Image width, in pixel
    'width'    => 100,

    // Image height, in pixel
    'height'   => 100,

    // Number of characters used as initials.
    'chars'    => 2,

    // font size
    'fontSize' => 48,

    // convert initial letter to uppercase
    'uppercase' => false,

    // Fonts used to render text.
    // If contains more than one fonts, randomly selected based on name supplied
    'fonts'    => ['path/to/OpenSans-Bold.ttf', 'path/to/rockwell.ttf'],

    // List of foreground colors to be used, randomly selected based on name supplied
    'foregrounds'   => [
        '#FFFFFF'
    ],

    // List of background colors to be used, randomly selected based on name supplied
    'backgrounds'   => [
        '#f44336',
        '#E91E63',
        '#9C27B0',
        '#673AB7',
        '#3F51B5',
        '#2196F3',
        '#03A9F4',
        '#00BCD4',
        '#009688',
        '#4CAF50',
        '#8BC34A',
        '#CDDC39',
        '#FFC107',
        '#FF9800',
        '#FF5722',
    ],

    'border'    => [
        'size'  => 1,

        // border color, available value are:
        // 'foreground' (same as foreground color)
        // 'background' (same as background color)
        // or any valid hex ('#aabbcc')
        'color' => 'foreground'
    ]
];

I would like to point out that at the time of writing I tried this package out with the GD extension and a base64 data URI and the image quality resulted in jagged edges. I would recommend experimenting with different configurations. I also tried the SVG output, and it worked well, with perhaps a little bit of font alignment in different browsers.

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Laravel JSON – A Simple Wrapper Around JSON for Catching Errors

 

When we wrote PHP 7.3: A Look at JSON Error Handling, Jan Östlund mentioned a package he wrote called Laravel JSON. Laravel JSON is a small package that makes encoding and decoding JSON a breeze with exceptions thrown on error immediately:

A simple wrapper around json_encode() and json_decode() for catching any errors without executing json_last_error().

Here’s the basic usage to encode JSON with this package:

use Eastwest\Json\Facades\Json;

$json = Json::encode(['key' => 'value]);

$array = Json::decode('{"key1":"value1","key2":"value2"}');
// Assoc = false
$array = Json::decode('{"key1":"value1","key2":"value2"}', false);

Returned objects are converted to an associative array by default.

The package immediately throws an exception when an error occurs, and you can catch them with EncodeDecode:

use Eastwest\Json\Exceptions\EncodeDecode;

try {
    Json::decode('{bad json');
} catch (EncodeDecode $e) {
    // Handle exception
}

Thank you, Jan, for this excellent package! Jan is also the author of F-Bar, an application for Mac OS and iOS, an app that enables you to manage your Laravel Forge servers on your Mac or your iPhone.

Learn More

You can check out Jan’s Laravel JSON package on GitHub for installation and usage instructions. I would also suggest reading our post on PHP 7.3: A Look at JSON Error Handling to learn how you can throw and handle JSON errors in PHP 7.3.

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