Blogify is a Laravel package that enables you to quickly and easily add a blog to your Laravel app.
Joren Van Hocht created this last year for his final school project and recently gave it an update to work with Laravel 5.2 and to fix issues with the installer.
Check out the Blogify site for more information and for installation instructions.
Marcel Pociot released a new package that will automatically generate API documentation from your existing routes.
What is neat is it automatically scans your Controller method docblocks to generate the table of contents and also hooks in with form request validation to show a list of requirements.
This generator uses Documentarian which is a port of the popular Slate API documentation tool.
It looks like a useful tool for quickly generating documentation for your project.
Laravel Angular Admin is an administration dashboard starter kit designed to give you a base to start working with. It uses Laravel, Angularjs, Bootstrap, and Gulp plus features Oauth and JWT authentication.
This could be a cool project to learn from or use a base on your next administration section.
Freek Van der Herten and Spatie.be recently released a new version of their popular Google Analytics package.
Since the first release of this package Google has changed the preferred way of authenticating for API usage and this new version accounts for that as well as cleaned up a lot of the code and made it only available for PHP 7.0+
The Google authentication is a pain and the readme does a great job of showing you the exact steps to take. Following along I was able to complete the setup without pulling out all my hair.
After the authentication is set working with the package is really nice. As an example, I wanted to see if I could generate a list of trending pages here on Laravel News for the past month. Here is all I needed to do:
$analytics->fetchMostVisitedPages(
Period::create(Carbon::now()->subMonth(), Carbon::now())
);
That returns a Laravel Collection with a “url” and “pageViews” attribute:
Collection {#364 ▼
#items: array:20 [▼
0 => array:2 [▼
"url" => "/"
"pageViews" => 126600
]
1 => array:2 [▼
"url" => "/2016/06/look-whats-coming-laravel-5-3/"
"pageViews" => 126599
]
2 => array:2 [▼
"url" => "/2016/06/laravel-and-elasticsearch/"
"pageViews" => 126598
]
Of course, it includes other useful methods for the most common stats you will need:
If you are needing to integrate with Google Analytics check out this package. Even you are not the market for analytics but still need to use Google API bookmark it as a guide for setting up API accounts.
Elasticsearch allows you to search & analyze data in real time. Even though it’s extremely powerful working with delta’s and querying data is not that simple.
If you are using Laravel here is a list of packages and tutorials to help you easily integrate this into your app.
Below are three packages that you can install via Composer and instantly add to any existing app:
Plastic is an Elasticsearch ODM and mapper for Laravel. It renders the developer experience more enjoyable while using Elasticsearch, by providing a fluent syntax for mapping, querying, and storing eloquent models.
This package allows you to interact with Elasticsearch as you interact with Eloquent models in Laravel.
A lightweight package built on top of the Elasticsearch PHP client. Its main goal is to allow for easy structuring of queries and indices in your application.
Elasticquent makes working with Elasticsearch and Eloquent models easier by mapping them to Elasticsearch types. You can use the default settings or define how Elasticsearch should index and search your Eloquent models right in the model.
This is an opinionated Laravel 5.1 package to store and retrieve objects from a search index. Currently, Elasticsearch and Algolia are supported.
Want to learn more about Elasticsearch? The following are great tutorials to get you started:
Install Elasticsearch on Laravel Homestead
If you are going to use Elasticsearch it’s a good idea to be able to test it locally. Mirza Pasic put together this guide to help you set it up on Homestead.
Integrating Elasticsearch with Your Laravel app
Tony Messias has a complete tutorial covering Elasticsearch plus a sample integration.
A video presentation from 2014 at Laracon EU by Ben Corlett.
As we all know technology changes fast and if you don’t stop and look around once in awhile, you could miss it. HTTP/2 is one area of our tech stack that I haven’t been keeping up with an honestly knew nothing about it until Laracon where Ben Ramsey gave a talk on the subject.
You can watch his talk here and his slide deck is available from his site to browse through. What amazed me is how easy it seemed to implement by utilizing server push or preload. Basically, you send a special “Link” header with all the pages assets and then if the server and browser support it they are pulled down in a more efficient use of the network.
During Ben’s talk he gave an example usage of how this could work in Laravel and here is one way:
return response($content, $status)
->header('Link', '; rel=preload; as=style', false)
->header('Link', '; rel=preload; as=script', false);
Of course doing this for every single asset is kind of a pain. Luckily we have two Laravel packages available that will automatically handle this through the Middleware.
The first is by Tom Schlick and the second by Jacob Bennett. Both packages do basically the same thing but each have a different idea on how you would want to integrate it.
Tom’s automatically includes the resources in your elixir /build/rev-manifest.json file. Then to add a resource manually you use
pushStyle($pathOfCssFile);
pushScript($pathOfJsFile);
pushImage($pathOfImageFile);
Jacob’s, on the other hand, is more automated because it scans the DOM and automatically adds any script, style, or image into the headers.
Which one you choose is going to be dependent on your project and your ideal workflow. Jacob’s is set it and forget it style but the view must be scanned to grab all the assets out. Where Tom’s is more manual but you can control every aspect.
If you are looking to improve the performance of your Laravel app give these a try.
MailThief is a new package by Tighten Co. that provides a fake mailer for your Laravel application. This makes it easy to test email without actually sending any.
To better explain how this package works take a look at the following example from the project.
First, pretend you have a registration route that sends the user a welcome email:
Route::post('register', function () {
// <snip> Validation, create account, etc. </snip>
Mail::send('emails.welcome', [], function ($m) {
$email = request('email');
$m->to($email),
$m->subject('Welcome to my app!');
$m->from('noreply@example.com');
$m->bcc('notifications@example.com');
});
// <snip> Return response </snip>
});
Typically testing this would be pretty difficult, but with MailThief it’s simple:
use MailThief\Facades\MailThief;
class RegistrationTest extends TestCase
{
public function test_new_users_are_sent_a_welcome_email()
{
// Block and intercept outgoing mail, important!
MailThief::hijack();
$this->post('register', [
'name' => 'John Doe',
'email' => 'john@example.com',
'password' => 'secret',
]);
// Check that an email was sent to this email address
$this->assertTrue(MailThief::hasMessageFor('john@example.com'));
// BCC addresses are included too
$this->assertTrue(MailThief::hasMessageFor('notifications@example.com'));
// Make sure the email has the correct subject
$this->assertEquals('Welcome to my app!', MailThief::lastMessage()->subject);
// Make sure the email was sent from the correct address
// (`from` can be a list, so we return it as a collection)
$this->assertEquals('noreply@example.com', MailThief::lastMessage()->from->first());
}
}
Laravel 5.3 will ship with a notification system that includes a Nexmo SMS driver, a Mail driver, and the ability to include custom drivers. Now that we have this system built-in we can use the new Pusher service from inside our Laravel applications.
All we need to do is to create a custom driver and that’s it, we’ll be able to send Push notifications to our Mobile devices right away.
With the help of Freek Van der Herten and Marcel Pociot we managed to build an easy to use driver for Pusher Push Notifications.
Pusher, a real-time communication platform, has recently introduced an all-new FREE service for application developers, it’s a unified API to send native Push Notifications to iOS and Android devices.
Using native Push Notifications allows you to communicate with your users even when the app is closed or inactive, this has a great effect on user engagement.
Being able to send iOS and Android Push Notifications using a unified API saves the hassle of having to apply multiple setup procedures. All you have to do is to upload your APNS certificate for iOS devices or add your GCM API key for android devices, and that’s it.
Using this driver you’ll be able to send push notifications like this:
class AccountApproved extends Notification
{
public function via($notifiable)
{
return [Channel::class];
}
public function toPushNotification($notifiable)
{
return (new Message())
->iOS()
->badge(1)
->sound('success')
->body("Your {$notifiable->service} account was approved!");
}
}
This driver will allow you to send Push Notifications with a fluent expressive Laravel-style syntax.
You may check it out here.
There are many platforms that send notifications, and with the new system in Laravel 5.3 we believe that it’s a good idea to collect all the custom drivers in a single place, just as socialiteproviders.github.io is a one-stop-shop for all Socialite Providers, for that we created a GitHub organization where we’ll collect and host all custom drivers.
It’s still in the making but contributions are most welcomed if you have an idea for a custom channel, please check this skeleton repo where you can use as boilerplate.
