If you’ve worked with Laravel, you might be aware of the fact that all the multi-result sets returned by Eloquent are instances of the Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Collection object. So, for instance, if you have a User model, you can get all the users like so.

It would be useful sometimes when you’re not sure if you want to insert or update records and you’d let the system decide that. Laravel comes with one such feature that lets you do just that.

Laravel Envoy is a great tool if you want to create deployment flow for your application or even something as small as writing a script to pull the latest code and deploy the application right away.

You know if you want to pass data to the views, you can do it while defining routes or from controllers like so.

In one of my articles, I’ve explained how you can extend class behavior using macros in Laravel.

One of the standard ways to resolve dependencies in Laravel is by using service container. Essentially, if you want to inject something which can be swappable anytime, you can do this by “biding” that into the service container.

Laravel, as a framework, has grown slowly but strongly since its inception and so is its ecosystem. The ecosystem here is all the packages/products that are built by the Laravel team which revolves around the original Laravel framework. This includes open-source packages and premium/paid products.

One of the handiest features of Laravel is the ability to dispatch Closures to queues. This is because you don’t always need to create a job class for simple tasks such as sending emails.

Laravel 8’s class-based model factories are great and I’ve written an entire article about what they are and how they are more feature-rich and useful than the traditional factories that we used to write prior to Laravel 8.

One of the most prominent changes in Laravel 8 is the (kind of) new way of defining controller routes. Before Laravel 8, if you wanted to define a route, you could do it like so.

In the previous versions of Laravel, up to 7.x, when you wanted to rate limit certain routes, you could do it by assigning the throttle middleware to the route or group of routes like so.

The model factories in Laravel are a great way of seeding some fake data in the database for testing purposes which I’ve discussed in this article. While the previous implementation was great, Laravel 8 has given model factories a major overhaul and it makes them even better!

Apart from adding support for customizable maintenance mode views, Laravel 8 has also simplified the process of accessing the Laravel application in the maintenance mode.

When you put your Laravel application on maintenance mode using the php artisan down command, the default view for the same looks like following.

With the release of Laravel 8, you can now render Blade components dynamically using a built-in component called dynamic-component.

Recently, a prominent member of Laravel community, Dries Vints, has pre-released a pretty exciting open-source project called Blade UI Kit.

In one of my articles, I’ve described how you can add different behavior to some of the classes in Laravel using macros. To give you a primer, Laravel ships with this trait called Illuminate\Support\Traits\Macroable using which you can add additional methods to the class in hand (which is using the Macroable trait) at run time.

You know it’s always a good idea to have something at your disposal using which you can improve the performance of your applications. When it comes to web applications, one of the many things that power them is database queries and that’s why it’s no surprise that you may want to optimize those and make your application a little faster!

You might be aware of the typical way of defining model relationships in Laravel Eloquent. i.e inside of the models itself.

There comes a time when you want to fetch the number of records for a child relationship along with the main Eloquent query.

One of the many ways using which you can insert records (or seed your database) is by using the seeder classes which extend a base class called Illuminate\Database\Seeder in Laravel.

When writing MySQL queries, if there are more than two where conditions, you’d want to group certain constraints/conditions to avoid unexpected behavior. For instance, check the following query.

As I described in this article on how you can create anonymous components in Laravel, we can create an <x-alert> component with the following content.

Often you’d come across a scenario where you’d like to check the application environment and based on that you’d like to render things.

Laravel’s Blade template engine is great and ever-evolving. There are some features in Blade, which if used appropriately, can make your codebase look more organized and recognizable.

Sometimes, you want to load some stuff based on the fact that the certain service provider is loaded in the providers array of config/app.php or not.

Sometimes, it’s useful to know if somethig has been changed in the model since it’s been loaded. For instance, you would want to check if the is_published attribute of the Post model is set or not before publishing the post further.

It’s helpful sometimes when you have a file and it doesn’t have extension attached to it but you want to know the extension of the file regardless.

The usual way of validating request attributes in Laravel is by making Illuminate\Support\Facades\Validator instance with your static rules that never change like so.

Laravel comes with a multitude of ways to validate request parameters. For instance, you could use Illuminate\Http\Request’s validate method where you can specify all the fields that you would want to get validated inside controller’s action. You can do it like so.

Lately, if you’ve been working on some functionality and you want to extract it as a Laravel package, you’d like to first test it locally. And if everything is well and good, you’d then publish it to the packagist.org.

Facades, in Laravel, is basically a way of using Laravel’s classes without injecting them into the constructor of the class in which you want to use them.

Laravel Blade comes with many in-built directives such as @section, @yield, @parent, @json and several others, all of which have a certain purpose attached to them.

In this article, I’ve written about how to use event subscribers or observer pattern in Laravel.

The Observer design pattern is one of the twenty-three well-known “Gang of Four” design patterns that describe how to solve recurring design problems to design flexible and reusable object-oriented software, that is, objects that are easier to implement, change, test, and reuse.

Sending emails in Laravel is a breeze. All you have to do is, configure your default mail service in config/mail.php and it’s related configuration in config/services.php file.

The new Blade components in Laravel 7 are great. They provide an easy way of defining blade components in a Vue-like tag aliases. One of the nice features of Blade components are slots.

Blade component tags are a useful additions to the latest version of Laravel i.e. version 7. In Laravel 7, Blade components have been overhauled to allow tag based rendering, attribute management, component classes, inline view components, and more.

Often times, there comes a sceanrio where you’d want to alter the column through which you’ve setup your query to be sorted from. So, for instance, you’ve the following query.

If you want to validate request fields in Laravel, you could use Illuminate\Http\Request’s validate method where you can specify all the fields that you would want to get validated inside controller’s action. You can do it like so.

Artisan commands in Laravel are truly a blessing. I mean you could create just about any files be it controllers, models, middleware, provider by knocking a simple command from the CLI. For instance, if you want to create a model named Post you could just fire the following command…

Laravel 7 has been a major version that’s been released last week and it comes with the host of features and improvements to the Laravel framework. One of the improvements being the new fluent string operations API. The goal of these API is to provide more flexibility and readablity to the regular string operations in Laravel by chaining array of string manipulation methods.

I’ve discussed about Route Model Bindings of Laravel in length in this article previously. If you’re not aware about the feature, I’d recommend you check that article first and come back here again.

Working with Laravel Eloquent, we always had this ability to check null fields when builing queries on models. For instance, if you want to check if email_verified_at field is null or not, you’d check it like so.

Sometimes, you might want to convert some of the request parameters to boolean. For instance, take a checkbox field. Unless and until, it hasn’t been checked it won’t be passed through to the request. In such a case, it would be beneficial to convert such inputs to boolean.

Sometimes, all you need to do is to add a Blade view into an another view. For instance, when you want to add JavaScript and CSS files as a separate Blade files which will contain the related content respectively. So, maybe you’ve a JavaScript blade file called view-js.blade.php which wraps the JS code within <script> tag and a CSS blade file called view-css.blade.php which wraps the CSS code within <style> tag. And all you want to do is add these to an another blade file called view-show.blade.php.

Laravel’s Blade is a great templating system that blends with Laravel’s ecosystem very well. Setting some data to the view is a breeze and rendering those data into the template is ever so easy. For instance, if you would like to share some data from a controller’s action to a view, you’d do like so.

Sometimes, you might want to attach additional attributes to the original request that has made to the Laravel application. For instance, you want to put your own check in the middleware to see if the user is permitted to access the page or not, and pass that “check” by attaching it as an additional attribute to the request.

When designing UI elements such as zebra strips in the tables, you’d need to identify if the loop iteration is even or odd and based on that you’d set the backgroud color of the row.

There are basically two ways of using the auth middleware to authenticate the routes in Laravel.

Laravel’s Blade::if() method already comes with the following directives in order to check various conditions in blade template files.

Sometimes, it’s convenient when you could get to access class objects as arrays. For instance, the time when one of the class properties is of type array and you want to manipulate it just like you’d do with an array without exposing it during object creation. I’ve included a real world example of where this could be useful, at the end of the article. So, read on!

There comes a scenario in your app where there are some fields in your form that are dependent on an another field’s state.

The best thing about working with Laravel is finding an alternate way to do same old boring stuff every now and then. I came across something called as “Higher Order Messages” while working with Eloquent recently. The feature has been in Laravel since its v5.4.

There exists four types of relationship associated between models/entities. And they are: One To One, One To Many, Many To One and Many To Many. We’re specifically going to talk about Many To Many relationship and most importantly attach, detach and sync helper methods that are provided in Laravel in this article.

If you’re looking for a quick way to drop all the tables, their types and views and if you’re using Laravel 6.x, you can use this little artisan command called db:wipe in order to do the same.

In this article, I’m going to discuss about the feature in Laravel using which you can extend the functionality of certain Laravel’s core classes without even touching the original codebase. Or in other words, adding methods to the class dynamically.

If you’ve used some well creafted web application, such as GitHub for instance, you might’ve noticed that upon saving sensitive information such as settings or payment details, it asks for the password confirmation before performing the action. This adds the extra layer of security and certainly a nice-to-have feature.

If you love the Laravel as a framework or more specifically its Eloquent ORM like I do then there’s a great chance that you’d like to use this great ORM in your non-Laravel PHP apps as well. And the good news is it’s rather easier than you might think. Laravel provides a standalone pacakge called Capsule which you can use in your own project. It’s a full database toolkit for PHP, providing an expressive query builder, ActiveRecord style ORM, and schema builder. It currently supports MySQL, Postgres, SQL Server, and SQLite.

Laravel team has recently released v6.0 of the framework and with this they have added a bunch of exciting new features. Among which, I’m going to talk about Lazy Collections in this article. In Laravel, Illuminate\Support\Collection class provides a fluent, convenient wrapper for working with arrays of data. In face, all the Eloquent queries are always returned as Collection instances. LazyCollection essentially extends the features of the Collection class. Let’s talk about them in detail.

As backend developers, to make our web application full proof we need to make sure our application is running as efficiently as possible all the time. Otherwise, everyone using your database will suffer from slow performance. API limiting, which is also known as rate limiting, is an essential component of Internet security, as DoS attacks can tank a server with unlimited API requests.

To understand, how dependency injection works in Laravel, let’s just get to know what dependency injection actually is, in software engineering.

It’s widely known that PHP can’t serialize closures directly. If you try to serialize a closure in PHP, it will result in a fatal error. Take below for example.

If you want to check if the eloquoent model has certain relationship or not and fetch the results accordingly while querying upon it, you can do this by two approaches in the Laravel Eloquent.

When you’re building an Laravel application which uses APIs at some point, it’s no brainer to use Laravel’s resource classes as it provides the transformation layer that sits between your Eloquent models and the JSON responses that are actually returned to your application’s users.

Laravel’s Eloquent ORM comes with this unique set of features called “Scopes” which can be used to re-use some of the query constraints onto all the queries of a certain model. This can be useful to minimize the code while writing the query and is an easy way to make sure every query for a given model receives certain constraints.

Every robust web app has this feature where you’re provided with a setting through which you can choose to logout from all the devices you’ve been logged in from previously, except the current one. This is certainly a nice security feature that you can provide to your user without them even asking for it and if your app is built on top of Laravel 5.6, this comes out-of-the-box.

There’s this neat feature in Laravel where you can validate model IDs that have been injected into the route by injecting model instances directly at route level.

Laravel’s Eloquent is without a doubt a great ORM exists right now. It has some of the features which makes it ahead of its competitions. One such feature the ORM provides is called “Attribute casting”.

A sometime ago I tried my hands on implementing some of the PHP’s native functions in native JavaScript. The result is quite interesting list of JavaScript functions you’ve never asked about.

There comes a time when you want URLs which are public but still you want some kind of authentication onto the same. For instance, you’d want such kind of URLs to enable invite-only registrations for your applications, where you’d send a URL to the user which that specific person only can access and register. In such scenarios, signed URLs can come in handy which are the special kind of URLs that have a “signature” hash appended to the query string to verify that the URL has not been modified since it was created.

There exist this neat feature in Laravel using which you can add attributes in the models that do not have a respective column in your database.

While developing applications(not necessarily with Laravel), you come across the situation where you need to implement certain functionality. In such cases you shouldn’t want to reinvent the wheel if the functionality is been implemented by someone as a package, accepted well by the community and is ready to be consumed. It’s a no-brainer. I use to follow the same approach and today in this article, I’m going to list out some of my favorite Laravel packages which have made my experience with development in Laravel delicious.

When working on a project, there comes a time when you need to automate certain tasks. In such cases, it is better to use a CLI tool which can be run from the command prompt because using a web APIs for certain tasks is cumbersome.

There comes times when you wouldn’t want your end users staring at white screens or that intimidating loaders for a long time. For instance when user registers to your site, you must have configured your website to send a welcome email or a confirmation email upon registering. So, that operation should be snappy and for that purpose you’d actually want to reduce the amount of time your app takes while sending the email to the user. Laravel Queues comes to the recue for achieving such kind of time consuming tasks.

Accessors and mutators allow you to format Eloquent attribute values when you retrieve or set them on model instances. I’ll explain how you can you use them into your app.

Today, while working with one of my projects(which is built on top Laravel) I bumped into the situation where I needed to get associated model’s data for one of the models. So here, I had two approaches in Laravel to accomplish this which are basically called Eager Loading: