The tools for improving developer experience continue to improve, which is great news. When it comes to debugging a Laravel application, as far as I know, there are still only two approaches: Xdebug, which offers step debugging based on "breaking points" and does not require modifying the source code "manual…

When developing a web application that sends email, you generally don’t want to actually send emails to live email addresses. Fortunately with Laravel it is easy to setup on your local environment a way to send email messages to a “dummy” mailbox. …

When you send critical messages to customers, you need to store a reachable email address. If a customer did pay for something you need to send him later like a gift card, you’ll be embarrassed to get an error like this: Client error: `POST https://api.mailgun.net/v3/mywebsite.com/messages.mime` resulted in a `400 Bad…

PHP 8.1 introduced long awaited support for built-in Enums. There is no more need for custom solutions in your Laravel projects since Laravel with its 8.69 release has your back. We’ll take a really simple example of a blogpost model with a publication state that can be draft or published…

When using Laravel, if you need to notify your users you can benefit from its built-in notification system. Laravel provides support for sending notifications across a variety of delivery channels, including email and SMS. It is a less-known feature but you can also store the notification information in a database…

If you need to manage queues in Laravel you probably use Horizon. Setting it up is pretty straightforward and once installed with a daemon you generally don’t have to care too much. …

In Laravel Horizon you can setup a notification system for being alerted when there is a too long wait time on your queues (and check if your queues need more workers). Once everything is setup, you’d generally like to test if everything is wired correctly. …

If you seed your local database with model factories, you probably use the fresh faker library (as the original faker library has been deprecated). And if you need some random images to populate you pages, the faker library has your back. <?php namespace Database\Factories; use App\Models\Media; use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Factories\Factory; class MediaFactory extends Factory {…

Most of modern websites have image-rich designs but handle images inefficiently. Here are some of the common mistakes when serving hosted images on an average Laravel app: unnecessarily large pixels size (especially on mobile) unnecessary high quality not optimized formats and retention of metadata bad cache policy (often as nginx’s…