A TALL (Tailwind CSS, Alpine.js, Laravel, and Livewire) Preset for Laravel

 There is a newly available frontend preset for Laravel that can get you up-and-running quickly with the TALL stack. If you’re not familiar with the name, it’s an acronym that describes the main technologies involved in the stack:

• TailwindCSS
• Alpine.js
• Laravel
• Livewire

This stack was popularised by Matt Stauffer as he created tallstack.dev to promote its benefits and showcase novapackages.com, which was built with these tools.

This preset takes all of the pain of setting up a new application out of the way by providing some well-thought-out boilerplate. Here are some notable features:

• Frontend assets like TailwindCSS and AlpineJS are set up with Laravel Mix
• Tailwind UI and Tailwind’s Custom Forms extensions are available out-of-the-box
• Views extend a default layout

To install the preset in a fresh Laravel application:

1composer require livewire/livewire laravel-frontend-presets/tall
2php artisan ui tall
3npm install
4npm run dev

If you want authentication in your application, make sure to use the --auth flag on the preset command to get all the relevant routes, controllers, components and views:

1composer require livewire/livewire laravel-frontend-presets/tall
2php artisan ui tall --auth
3npm install
4npm run dev

There are some notable things about the authentication scaffolding, too:

• Most of the auth scaffolding comes as Livewire components
• The parts that can’t be components are set up as single-action controllers
• The auth components come with full tests

All routes, components, controllers, and tests are published to your application. The idea behind this is that you can then take full control over every aspect of the scaffolding in your own app and not need to dig around in the vendor folder to figure out how things are working.

This preset was put together by Dan Harrin, Ryan Chandler and Liam Hammett.

If you’re keen to get started on a new project with these technologies, check out the preset’s readme for installation instructions and more information.

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Sub-Minute and Cron-less Scheduled Tasks in Laravel

 The Spatie team released two new packages around scheduled tasks: the laravel-cronless-schedule package and laravel-short-schedule. While these packages have different use-cases, we thought they were related enough to share them in one post.

Typically the native Laravel scheduling gives you enough flexibility for most apps; however, these packages provide both an excellent development flow and advanced features when you need to run scheduled tasks more often than every minute.

Scheduled Tasks without Cron

The laravel-cronless-schedule package uses a ReactPHP loop to run the scheduler without relying on cron. If you’re developing locally, the “cron-less” scheduler could come in handy to run scheduled tasks without setting up cron:

1php artisan schedule:run-cronless

According to the documentation, “This command will never end. Behind the scenes, it will execute php artisan schedule every minute.”

Freek Van der Herten explains in his blog post, A package to run the Laravel scheduler without relying on cron, why you should consider using this package in your development workflow:

If you want to run the scheduler every minute in a local environment, using cron can be cumbersome. I bet most developers will never have touched their local crontab. There’s also launchd, which can work great, but it’s not as easy as just running the artisan command that spatie/laravel-cronless-schedule provides.

On Windows, cron doesn’t even exist (I’m not an expert, but there you should use the Windows Scheduler). And on Docker containers, cron mostly isn’t available.

This package avoids all the platform-specific scheduling issues, and also includes some useful flags:

1# Run the scheduler every five seconds
2php artisan schedule:run-cronless --frequency=5
3
4# Run a custom command
5php artisan cronless-schedule:run --command=your-favorite-artisan-command
6
7# Stop running the scheduler after x seconds
8php artisan cronless-schedule:run --stop-after-seconds=5

As an aside, I wrote about Running the Laravel Scheduler and Queue with Docker that runs the scheduler command in a separate container. However, it can be a pain if you want to run the scheduler docker container in development selectively.

You can find the source code for laravel-cronless-schedule on GitHub at spatie/laravel-cronless-schedule.

Laravel Short Schedule

The second package Spatie released is laravel-short-schedule, which enables running the Laravel scheduler at sub-minute frequencies. Similar to the cronless-schedule package, it uses a ReactPHP event loop.

Here’s an example of what you can do with this package by defining a shortSchedule() method on an app’s console Kernel class:

 1use \Spatie\ShortSchedule\ShortSchedule;
 2protected function shortSchedule(ShortSchedule $shortSchedule)
 3{
 4    // this command will run every second
 5    $shortSchedule->command('artisan-command')->everySecond();
 6 
 7    // this command will run every 30 seconds
 8    $shortSchedule->command('another-artisan-command')->everySeconds(30);
 9 
10    // this command will run every half a second
11    $shortSchedule->command('another-artisan-command')->everySeconds(0.5);
12}

Like the native Laravel scheduler, you can schedule commands to run between two times and avoid overlapping tasks if a task is still running.

You can learn more about this package by checking out Freek’s blog post: A package to schedule Artisan commands at sub-minute frequencies. You can find the source code on GitHub at spatie/laravel-short-schedule.

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