PHP | A Northwoods Cabin

Parsing ENV Boolean Values in Laravel

How do we ensure boolean values are parsed as such when using a .env file in Laravel?

Feb 1, 2022

Upgrading Laravel Homestead

Upgrading Laravel Homestead on my system requires a few additional steps not outlined in the official documentation. Instead of recreating them from memory each time I wanted to collect the items here.

Apr 27, 2021

For When Things Get Gnarly in Eloquent

Jonathan Reinink has written some excellent content around Eloquent and this article is one that I reference frequently. Jonathan walks us through handling sticky situations when we need to get a single record back from a relationship without causing N+1 issues.

Dynamic Relationships in Laravel using Subqueries →

May 20, 2020

Changing CLI PHP Versions on Laravel Homestead

A quick and easy way to change the working CLI PHP version in Laravel Homestead.

Mar 25, 2020

Troubleshooting NFS Shared Folders in Homestead

Every now and then I will attempt to start Laravel Homestead on my mac and will get an error indicating a problem with mounting the NFS shared folders.After entering the password into the command line the console will output:
...

Nov 27, 2019

Importing a PG Dump from the Command Line

Similar to the time formats I wrote about here, I can not seem to remember the syntax for importing a PostgreSQL dump file into a database from the command line!...

Jun 13, 2019

Common PHP/Carbon Date Formats

For some reason I can never seem to remember the specific syntax for formatting dates either in PHP or Carbon! So instead of continually referencing the php docs I thought I'd start compiling a list of formats I frequently use:...

Apr 7, 2019

Mocking Fluent Laravel Facade Chains

Laravel offers a few different ways to test facades but the documentation doesn't cover testing individual calls within a fluent chain. As is normally the case with Laravel, testing in this fashion is totally doable... I wrote about the process over...

Mar 21, 2019

Sorting Parent Eloquent Models by a Child Relationship

Recently I had a situation in a Laravel app where I needed to sort a collection of parent models by a particular value in a BelongsTo() relationship field.

It’s fairly simple to sort the opposite direction, meaning, to sort all the related models that belong to a parent model.

Read the entire article on the Zaengle blog →

Oct 6, 2016

Simplifying Conditional Expressions

As I’ve been reading through Refactoring by Martin Fowler, I’ve found it helpful to rewrite some of the examples from the book in PHP in order to cement the concepts into my mind. While Martin’s examples are primarily in Java, I’ve found an overwhelming majority of the concepts apply to PHP, which is where I spend most of my programming time.

In today’s article, I will attempt to rework the Simplifying Conditional Expressions (pp. 237-270) section into a handful of PHP-based examples.

Read the entire article on the Zaengle blog →

Apr 16, 2016