Generate pdfs with Google Chrome on a Forge provisioned server
This week I needed to export some charts generated with HTML & JavaScript as a pdf file. I already had implemented the charts on a webpage so I wanted a solution that allowed me to use my existing code for the pdfs.
Headless Chrome to the rescue! Chrome can run as a cli tool, and print a pdf file from a url. All I had to do was make some layout tweaks to make everything printer-friendly.
Information Overload newsletter
I occasionally send out a dispatch with personal stories, things I'm working on, and interesting links I come across.
Using registered event listeners as conditionals in Vue
Today I was writing a form component that needed an optional back button. Since the form component is generic, the back button could point to anything.
Is snapshot testing viable in PHP?
Christopher Pitt wrote a pretty comprehensive article on one of our latest packages, which is one of my favorite packages I’ve written at Spatie to date, phpunit-snapshot-assertions.
Ah-ha moments are beautiful and rare in programming. Every so often, we’re fortunate enough to discover some trick or facet of a system that forever changes how we think of it. For me, that’s what snapshot testing is.
Read the full article on SitePoint, or check out phpunit-snapshot-assertions on GitHub.
Fragmentation is fabulous
In a recent Twitter thread, Sebastian McKenzie (Yarn and Babel author) shared his thoughts on the current state of open source. This tweet stood out for me (and he later ironically dubbed it his “most thoughtleader tweet ever”):
Revel in fragmentation and duplication because without it there’s stagnation and it stifles innovation.
When someone shares their latest pet project library, it’s often met with responses like “What a waste of time, you can already do this with library X!”.
There’s no need for justification here. Maybe the author wants something that fully matches their use case instead of the 80% that library X does, maybe they want a different internal architecture. Maybe they have bigger future plans in mind, or most importantly, maybe they just want to experiment, learn, and have fun.
Read the entire thread on @sebmck’s Twitter.
Exposing multiple Vue components as a plugin
Quick Vue tip for package authors! If you publish a package that exposes multiple Vue components, you can write a small plugin to install them all at once.
TypeScript with Laravel Mix
Since writing this post, TypeScript has become officially supported in Laravel Mix (version 0.12 and up). There’s still some informative stuff in here if you’re new to TypeScript, but use the official method if you’re on a newer version of Mix!
In a recent Spatie project we decided to give TypeScript a shot for the business critical part of a new application. TypeScript provides static analysis to reduce the chance of introducing bugs, to have self-documenting code, and to improve our tooling (autocompletion!)
The list function & practical uses of array destructuring in PHP
PHP 7.1 introduced a new syntax for the list() function. I’ve never really seen too much list() calls in the wild, but it enables you to write some pretty neat stuff.
This post is a primer of list() and it’s PHP 7.1 short notation, and an overview of some use cases I’ve been applying them to.
Automatically running PHPUnit with Watchman
A little bash script to run tests when a file has been changed.
A package for snapshot testing in PHPUnit
The gist of snapshot testing is asserting that a set of data hasn’t changed compared to a previous version, which is a snapshot of the data, to prevent regressions. The difference between a classic and an is that you don’t write the expectation yourself when snapshot testing.
When a snapshot assertion happens for the first time, it creates a snapshot file with the actual output, and marks the test as incomplete. Every subsequent run will compare the output with the existing snapshot file to check for regressions.
Snapshot testing is most useful larger datasets that can change over time, like serializing an object for an XML export or a JSON API endpoint.
Non-breaking, SEO friendly urls in Laravel
When admins create or update a news item—or any other entity—in our homegrown CMS, a url slug is generated based on it’s title. The downside here is that when the title changes, the old url would break. If we wouldn’t regenerate the url on updates, edited titles would still have an old slug in the url, which isn’t an ideal situation either.
Our solution: add a unique identifier to the url that will never change, while keeping the slug intact. This creates links that are both readable and unbreakable.
Dealing with templates in Vue.js 2.0
Vue 2.0 introduced it’s own virtual DOM implementation. At first sight, this doesn’t seem to have a large effect on the way you write templates.
Using a database for localization in Laravel
When building a website for a client that wants to be able to manage content, Laravel’s language files aren’t ideal since you can’t edit them without diving into a bundle of text files. We recently decided to drop all the lang files in our custom CMS in favor of persisting translations in the database, which allows us to build a custom interface for managing them.
This post is a quick overview on overwriting Laravel’s default translation loader, which means you can keep using the lang method while fetching the translations from a database. Writing a custom loader is easier than it sounds. First we’ll set up our translation models, then we’ll write our loader, and finally register it in our application.
Normalize your values on input
Dynamic languages allow us to pass anything as a parameter without requiring a specific type. In turn, this means we often need to handle some extra validation for the data that comes in to our objects.
This is a lightweight post on handling your incoming values effectively by normalizing them as soon as possible. It’s a simple guideline worth keeping in mind which will help you keep your code easier to reason about.
Adventure Time with Webpack
Over the past few weeks I’ve been migrating our asset pipeline at Spatie from Laravel Elixir (a gulp wrapper) to webpack. Between having endless possibilities, the occasional incomplete section in the docs, and the fact that everyone has slightly different needs for their asset pipeline (which makes examples hard), it has surely been an adventure. I’m going to do a quick summary of my goals, and how I achieved them with webpack. Hopefully there will be some useful snippets in here for when you’re setting up your own webpack configuration.
I’m not going to explain any basic concepts. If you’re new to webpack, I’d recommend you to go through Webpack Your Bags on madewithlove’s blog first. On the other hand, if you just want a tl;dr in the form of a webpack config file, our base configuration is hosted on Github.