James Mills

Removing foreign keys from a Laravel application

James — Wed, 14 Sep 2022 06:16:00 +0000

I currently use Digital Ocean’s managed database for my primary database but I wanted to try out Planet Scale. When migrating a database over to Planet Scale you cannot use Foreign Keys. This got me thinking about a way to automatically generate a migration file to drop all foreign keys.

If you want to jump the intro and background you can jump directly to the good stuff here building a Laravel migration to drop all Foreign Keys.

I’m not sure when it first started, probably in my advanced database class when studying Information Technology at Teesside University, but someone told me to include foreign keys whenever I can. It’s been ingrained in my mind for as long as I can remember.

I then started working with migrations in Laravel and I soon became a fan of this simple one-liner to add a column, index and foreign key to to a table using a migration.

Schema::table('sites', function (Blueprint $table) {
    // Referencing the column and table yourself
    $table->foreign('theme_id')->references('id')->on('themes');

    // Using Laravel and it's magic
    $table->foreignId('themes')->index()->constrained()->cascadeOnDelete();
});

I’ve never really understood what benefits a foreign key gives you. To me, the most important thing in these types of columns is the index, but you can add that separately.

Schema::table('sites', function (Blueprint $table) {
    $table->bigInteger('theme_id')->index();
});

I do like the fact that when you’re browsing tables in software like TablePlus that you get a convenient arrow next to the foreign key which you can click and it will take you to the references row/table. I also like the fact that when you create Entity Relationship Diagrams (ERD) that it can automatically detect relationships and draw lines between tables.

Planet Scale – Modern Databases

I’m sure you’ve all heard about the hype around Planet Scale.

“The MySQL-compatible serverless database platform”.

They’ve recently introduced a hugely powerful migration process which gives you access to a simple and easy zero-downtime migration from your current database into Planet Scales solution.

I’ve been intrigued to see what performance benefits I could get from moving so this week I decided to have a play. I use Digital Ocean managed database so I cloned my primary database and started the process of migrating this over to Planet Scale. I anticipated that I may need to adjust things on my primary before I could do the migration so I wanted to be able to use a cloned version.

The setup process for Planet Scale is remarkably easy and they guide you through the migration process every step of the way. However, I hit my first stumbling block quite quickly. I was greated with a message informing me that Planet Scale does not support foreign keys.

To support scaling across multiple database servers, PlanetScale does not allow the use of foreign key constraints, which are normally used in relational databases to enforce relationships between data in different tables, and asks users to handle this manually in their applications.

I’m sure someone could give us a detailed explanation for why this is but I’m not that person. One thing was certain, if I wanted to continue, I needed to remove the foreign keys from my database.

Removing Foreign Keys from MySQL

It’s actually quite easy to drop a foreign key. You just need to know the reference name and then just run

ALTER TABLE sites DROP FOREIGN KEY sites_theme_id_foreign;

There is also a Laravel helper which you can add to a migration to do this.

Schema::table('sites', function (Blueprint $table) {
    // If you want to use the index name
    $table->dropForeign('sites_theme_id_foreign');

    // If you want Laravel to do it's magic based on the column name
    $table->dropForeign(['sites_theme_id']);
});

Building a Laravel migration to drop all Foreign Keys

I really didn’t want to have to dig through all my database tables to work out which ones had foreign keys and then hand write each table and column into a new migration. So I thought I’d write something to do it for me.

I’ve built a very simple Laravel Command that you can run. It will connect to your database, get information on all the tables and forging keys and then loop through and spit out some formatted dropForeign stuff for you into a storage/app/migration_stuff.txt file.

The source for the below is also available in a GitHub Gist

groupBy('TABLE_NAME');

        $text = '';

        foreach ($results as $table => $data) {
            $text .= sprintf(
                "Schema::table('%s', function (Blueprint \$table) {
",
                $table
            );

            foreach ($data as $item) {
                $text .= sprintf("    \$table->dropForeign('%s');\n", $item->CONSTRAINT_NAME);
            }

            $text .= "});\n";
        }

        Storage::put('migration_stuff.txt', $text);
    }
}

This dumps something like the below in storage/app/migration_stuff.txt

Schema::table('team_invitations', function (Blueprint $table) {
    $table->dropForeign('team_invitations_team_id_foreign');
});
Schema::table('placement_webhook', function (Blueprint $table) {
    $table->dropForeign('placement_webhook_placement_id_foreign');
    $table->dropForeign('placement_webhook_webhook_id_foreign');
});
Schema::table('site_partner_buckets', function (Blueprint $table) {
    $table->dropForeign('site_partner_buckets_bucket_id_foreign');
    $table->dropForeign('site_partner_buckets_partner_id_foreign');
    $table->dropForeign('site_partner_buckets_site_id_foreign');
});

I have thought about making this a package but I honestly don’t have the time right now so if you feel like you could package this up then please feel free!

Applications to install on a new Macbook Pro

James — Mon, 21 Jun 2021 12:28:20 +0000

I know everyone does these posts but I always find it helpful to document this sort of thing just in case it’s useful to others.

I’ve recently for a MacBook Pro 13″ M1. I’m going to add what I install (in no particular order) to this page. Let me know if it’s helpful.

1Password

Been using this for years now. It’s got everything in it. I don’t even think about passwords anymore, I just use a unique one for each service and store it in 1Password. With convenient apps for all devices and helpful browser extensions, it’s a no-brainer for me.

Spark Mail

There are hundreds of email clients out there and everyone has their own personal preference about how email should work. I’m a huge fan of Spark Mail. It just works. I love the “Smart Inbox” which helps me see at a glance what’s new and important to me. The other thing I like is that you create one login for Spark and then once you sign into that on Laptop, iPhone and iPad everything is in sync.

Dropbox

Since the very early days, I’ve been using DropBox. I use it for everything and anything. The only thing that’s not in DropBox is the code that I have in Git. Passport copies, travel insurance, receipts for expensive items, photos of childhood memories… it’s all in DropBox. Synced and accessible from anywhere. It’s a no-brainer.

Slack

Some love it some hate it. I love it. Slacks the core of all my communication at Successful Media and I try and invite as many external partners into Slack as possible. I create channels for almost everything. We have project channels (shared with a partner) and I have channels for deployment notifications, website uptime issues, etc.

Other Chat Clients

I hate that I have to install, manage and use so many differnt chat apps but that’s the world we live in. Here are the others:

Skype – Business chat with people I cannot connect with in Slack
Telegram – Useful for notifications (& people who don’t like Slack ;-))

Zoom

We all need it. Much prefer this than Google Hangouts and MS Teams etc. Once you set your preferences to match your needs it’s so quick and easy to “jump on a call”.

GitTower

I know people like to stay retro and use the CLI for Git but I’ve never been able to get into that. I’m a huge fan of using something with a GUI. I’ve tried a few over the years but GitTower is the winner for me. I’ve paid for a license for this for a long time. It does what it says on the tin. Great product.

PHPStorm

Use what you feel comfortable with and certainly always go for the best tool for the job. For me that’s PHPStorm. I install it via the JetBrains Toolbox. Happy to be trying out the Apple Silicone version, hoping to see things feel slightly more responsive.

Moom

If you’re a little OCD about keeping your open windows organized then Moom will help. Easily snap windows to grids etc. Simple. Does what it says on the tin.

Evernote

I should probably look at using the Apple Notes but quite frankly I just love the simplicity of Evernote. I’ve been using it since 2010 and so I have so much data in there. Quite literately everything gets dumped into Evernote. Everything including things like planning, documentation, settings, how-to, reminders, meeting agendas, follow-up notes, and most importantly random brain dumps!

Postman

A fantastic local tool to test and consume API’s. Great for requests and responses. I use it all the time.

TablePlus

If you do any work with databases then you’ve got to give TablePlus a go. It’ll also connect to Redis too!

CloudApp

Great tool for taking and sharing screen shots and screen recordings. I use this all the time to share things with people online.

Homebrew

The magic of everything! The Missing Package Manager for macOS (or Linux). If it can be installed using Brew then it should be installed using brew!

Things I then went on to install using Homebrew:

brew install node
~~brew install redis~~ (actually don’t do this, see DBngin below)

iTerm2

If you spend a lot of your time in the terminal then iTerm2 will help add some helpful features to your day-to-day routines.

Once you have iTerm2 installed install ohmyzsh and take advantage of the many plugins and themes available to you.

Install Git

Install “Developer Tools”. This will happen once you type “git” into the terminal. for the first time (if not already installed).

Create an SSH Key

Loads of places to show you how to do this. If you’re setting up a new Mac you probably already have one you can just move. I’ve decided to create a new one. GitLab has some help for you here.

You can copy your key’s content by using this hand snippet.

If you don’t want to type your passphrase each time then add the below to your config file ($ touch ~/.ssh/config) (More info here)

Host *
  UseKeychain yes

Local Development (Laravel Focused)

DBngin

Free All-in-One Database Version Management Tool! The easiest way to get started with PostgreSQL, MySQL, Redis & more
DBngin.com

This is a game changer when it comes to getting a local database and Redis running locally to use with Valet. By the same awesome people as TablePlus.

TinkerWell

I’ve only just started to use this but it seems helpful.

Showing if a user is online in Laravel

James — Sun, 07 Jun 2020 13:25:45 +0000

I’m working on a little project for work which will allow all our team to log in using our Google Mail accounts. I was able to get the auth set up quickly with Laravel Socialite and added a quick restriction to make sure that only people with an @clicksco.com email address was able to log in.

We are using the amazing Tailwind UI framework for the project and I’m using the Application UI >Lists > Wide Lists > Two-column with avatar list.

I wanted to use a little online indicator to show if the user was online or not

I decided to create a UserLastSeenAt Middleware and add it to my web routes file which would store the datetime the user was last seen in the cache.

First create the Middleware which can do using php artisan make:middleware UserLastSeenAt

user()->id, now());

        return $next($request);
    }
}

Now register this new Middleware so you can use it in the route file

// App\Http\Kernel

use App\Http\Middleware\UserLastSeenAt;

protected $routeMiddleware = [
    'auth' => \App\Http\Middleware\Authenticate::class,
    ...
    'user.last.seen' => UserLastSeenAt::class,
];

Now you can use it in the web routes file like this

// web.php

Route::middleware('auth', 'user.last.seen')->group(function () {
    Route::get('/', 'HomeController@index')->name('home');
});

I then created a little helper function on my User model.

public function isOnline()
{
    $lastSeen = Cache::get('user-last-seen:' . $this->id, null);

    if (!is_null($lastSeen) && $lastSeen->diffInMinutes(now()) < 2) {
        return true;
    }

    return false;
}

And now in the blade view file I can just do this


    
        avatar }}" />
        @if($user->isOnline())
            
        @endif

The tools and services I use

James — Tue, 10 Dec 2019 07:34:41 +0000

Workstation

Workstation December 2019

MacBook Pro (13-inch, 2018)

I made the switch to use a 13″ MacBook last year. I have used a 15″ MacBook for most of my career but I made the switch for portability. It’s powerful enough (just) for what I use. I wish I could have gone for the 32GB of RAM but the 16GB just about gets me by.

Apple Magic Mouse & Apple Keyboard

Anything that means I don’t have to have cables anywhere keeps me happy. Having an external mouse and keyword just makes sense to me.

Samsung Monitor

When I decided to go with the 13″ MacBook I also committed to getting a good sized monitor so that I could dock my MacBook. For the majority of my career, I have been a huge advocate of using two monitors. This was a big decision but having one screen seems to keep me more focused.

I got some little box’s from Muji which I use as a monitor stand. I prefer to keep my monitor high to try and help aid my sitting position so that I am looking up or directly ahead at my screen. One day when I am rich and famous I will invest in everything from grovemade.com

Plants

I like to be surrounded by plants. I am not sure why but I feel they help my mental health. I feel they bring an element of calm when working in an open office.

Development

PHPStorm

I have tried them all. I started my career using Dreamweaver, progresses to Sublime and then found PHPStorm. I absolutely love PHPSotm. I prefer to keep the minimalistic look and feel so I have a lot of things hidden.

Sequel Pro

I have been using Sequel Pro for a long time. Although I am getting very frustrated with the bug that exits the app when I close a tab, I am still to move over to Table Plus. I have it installed, I just always find myself reaching for Sequel Pro.

iTerm 2

I use iTerm with oh-my-zsh plugin. Using zsh allows you to install plugins like Auto Suggestions which helps.

Homebrew

Quoting Jeffrey Way “If it can be installed through Homebrew, then I’m installing it through Homebrew. And that’s all I have to say about that.”. I agree.

GitTower

I know it’s highly debated if you should use a GUI for Git or use the command-line. I should probably know more about Git’s command-line commands but, that’s life. I use GitTower and absolutely love it. We use GitFlow to ease our workflow and things work well.

Medis

We use Redis quite a lot and having a tool to be able to manage and view Redis comes in handy.

Postman

For API development and API testing Postman is something I use a lot.

Workflow

Clubhouse

One of the newest tools in my toolbox. I have tried a number of tools for project management including Trello and Codebase. Codebase was a huge part of the last four years as mentioned in my article about Clicksco PHP Flow in 2014 however it felt clunky. I stumbled across Clubhouse and after an initial trial, I switch my team over to it and haven’t looked back since. It has seamless integrations with a number of services.

Evernote

This may sound like an odd one given there are a million other tools out there which probably do a better job. However, I have been using Evernote for years now and it has a huge history of notes, brain dumps and lists.

Everything goes into Evernote, everything! I have install guides, technical note and diagrams, brain dumps, to-do lists. Everything! It just works for me. Once it’s out of my brain I can concentration getting things done rather than going over and over in my head what I need to remember.

Spark Mail

This one is relatively new to me. I found out about it from someone on Twitter. I tried it and in less than a day I had moved to use it permanently for Mobile and Desktop. I use Google Mail to power my mail (work and personally) and it’s almost enjoyable to work with email again.

1Password

I don’t use the browser password managers. I have used 1Password for a long time now. It helps me sleep at night. The browser plugins are amazing. If you don’t use a password manager then please start to use one today!

Services

Laravel Forge

I have been using Laravel Forge for years. It’s an amazing tool to spin up new servers in seconds.

Laravel Envoyer

Simple zero-downtime deployments. This tool gives me the control I need when deploying a multitude of different projects f different sizes and complexities.

Laravel Shift

I use Laravel Shift on a number of projects. I use the Shift service and also the Fixer. I also use the automated dependency updater as part of our CI process.

Sentry.io

I have been using Sentry for a long time now for exception tracking in my production apps. I love how it

Other Stuff

Spotify & Soundcloud

I really wouldn’t be able to work without my paid Spotify account. I also listen to Soundcloud. I like a mix of music. I am usually listening to some Hip Hop or if I am focusing I tend to listen to 2F Friendly Sessions or Trademarks The Pregame Series

Bose Noise Cancelling Headphones

I remember the first day I invested in some Bose Nise Cancelling Headphones. My productivity and mental health shot through the roof! I cannot recommend a good set of headphones enough for anyone who spends part of their day in “focus time”. I currently have some Bose QuietComfort 35 wireless headphones.

Awesome Uses

I am not sure where the Awesome Uses started but Wes Bos has a list of loads of people who have added a /uses page to their website here https://github.com/wesbos/awesome-uses a few of my favourite are listed below.

Photo by Austin Distel on Unsplash

My packages are now Treeware

James — Mon, 02 Dec 2019 16:30:29 +0000

UPDATE: 9th January 2020
I’m really pleased to say that other people are starting to add #Treeware to their packages. I have started to curate a list here.

When Freek published “Our packages are now postcardware” I was intrigued to know what Postcardware was.

Postcardware, also called just cardware, is a style of software distribution similar to shareware, distributed by the author on the condition that users send the author a postcard.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postcardware

We use a number of Spatie packages and so I was determined to do my bit and “send the author a postcard”. You will notice that on all of Spatie packages in the README.md file there is a licence.

I live in Dubai and it’s tricky to send international post so I hand-delivered my postcard to Freek at Laracon and I was pleased to see it on their website soon after.

OK, so what’s Treeware

Before I start to explain what Treeware is I need to touch on one more thing. I have known Phil Sturgeon for a long time and he has been a source of much inspiration. Phil is currently on a bike somewhere and in between biking and working he likes to shout about how we can do our bit to look after this beautiful planet we live on.

He has worked on a website called awesom.earth and one of the services he has been supporting is Offset Earth.

We plant trees & fund the world’s best climate crisis solutions.
Offset Earth

I have seen a big uplift in people adding methods of accepting payments to their opensource packages. GitHub and others have recently released various methods to help maintainers do this. I get it and I think there is a place for this but it didn’t sit well for me and for the small packages I have released. I loved the idea of Postcardware but it still didn’t feel right for me. When Phil shared with me his img.shields.io badge for “buy me a tree” I knew this was exactly the right fit for me.

https://img.shields.io/badge/Buy%20me%20a%20tree-%F0%9F%8C%B3-lightgreen

I have now added the badge to all my packages

As well as adding the simple badge with a link to my offset.earth profile I am also going to add a new section called “Treeware” and taking some inspiration from Spatie’s Postcardware text I am going to add the below to all my packages.

Treeware Option One

This package is Treeware. If you use it in production, then we ask that you buy the world a tree to thank us for our work. By contributing to the Treeware forest you’ll be creating employment for local families and restoring wildlife habitats.

Treeware Option Two

You're free to use this package, but if it makes it to your production environment you are required to buy the world a tree.

It’s now common knowledge that one of the best tools to tackle the climate crisis and keep our temperatures from rising above 1.5C is to plant trees. If you support this package and contribute to the Treeware forest you’ll be creating employment for local families and restoring wildlife habitats.

You can buy trees here offset.earth/treeware

Read more about Treeware at treeware.earth

view raw Treeware.md hosted with ❤ by GitHub

I would love to hear your feedback on this initiative and would love to see if anyone else likes the idea enough to follow!

You can find all my available packages listed here on Packagist

Laravel & DataDog Timeseries Metric data using their API via TCP

James — Thu, 28 Nov 2019 06:24:33 +0000

We recently started to trial some of the DataDog services for a recent project I have been working on. One of the things that jumped out at me was the ability to use one account for many services. Monitoring, uptime, API testing, application profiling, live dashboards…. the list goes on.

The setup is simple, you just install their Agent on your server and you are done. One problem for us is that all our servers are managed by our infrastructure management team and they build all our servers using FreeBSD… and there isn’t a FreeBSD compatible DataDog Agent.

What if you cannot install the DataDog Agent?

My initial reaction was to stop the payments and quit the trial. I would come back to DataDog in the future if the opportunity ever materialised. But then I saw they had an API.

One of the main things I wanted to do was start to log things from our application as and when they happen so I could monitor them on a live graph and set alerts for times when it looked like something was wrong. DataDog has Metrics for this and they work really nicely.

I had a quick Google around and searched Packagist but there wasn’t anything out there which did what I needed so I built jamesmills/laravel-datadog.

A simple package for Laravel to wrap DataDog’s API for Timeseries metrics making sure the jobs are queued.
jamesmills/laravel-datadog

One of the main things which the DataDog Agent does is use StatsD to collect data and then submit it over UDP protocol. This is none-blocking and is obviously a much better way of doing things than hitting an API over TCP and waiting for a reply when you are simply logging a metric.

Queue Everything

Building a new package for Laravel meant that I would be able to utilise the queue so I could put the sending of the metric into a Job and then queue it and wrap all this behind a hand Facade.

Tag Everything

I recently added tagging to the package too. DataDog’s system allows you to do a lot of things so being able to tag things is a real help. In our application, we are using it’s multi-domain (multi-tenant), so it’s helpful for me to be able to add a tag for each domain.

Other Packages

I also found this package chaseconey/laravel-datadog-helper. If you are able to install the DataDog Agent and you are using Laravel I would strongly recommend you take a look at this package. It ads middleware so you can log response times of various things in your application. I really like this.

It’s worthing pointing out that DataDog have their own PHP package (DataDog/php-datadogstatsd) which you can install and use without the Agent. Unfortunately, this is still no good for our situation.

What’s Next?

I am not 100% convinced that I am using the Metric collection properly. With the Agent using StatsD it collecting data and then sending the data to DataDog after a set period. For example, it will collect everything locally using StatsD and then every 10 seconds it will send the data. This means that DataDog is expecting data every 10 seconds. When using the API method I have set up in the package I don’t do this I send a metric in real-time to their API. What this means is I end up with a very odd graph which looks like there is a constant “hit”

I met with a couple of guys from the DataDog team here in Dubai this week and discussed this issue with them so I hope I will be able to update this article soon with what’s happening and maybe “fix” the package.

Demand for the package

What has surprised me was how many downloads the package has had. I wrote this package to help us with something I thought was going to be quite unique. However, with over 300 installs in a month of it’s release, it looks like others might be finding themselves in a similar situation?

Laravel Dubai

James — Tue, 30 Jul 2019 10:41:09 +0000

Attending this years Laracon conference in New York City has renewed my energy to start a Laravel meetup in Dubai. I hope this is the start of something big for the Laravel community in Dubai and UAE.

Sponsorship

If you have any interest in sponsoring or supporting the Laravel Dubai community please get in touch, I would love to discuss opportunities with you.

Laravel Dubai Slack

To get started I have created a Laravel Dubai Slack account which you can join by using this link https://join.slack.com/t/laraveldubai. If you are in Dubai and work with Laravel then please join and say hello.

Laravel Dubai Meet-up

More information about this to come… stay tuned… join the slack channel for instant updated.

Laravel Dubai Website

I have registered laraveldubai.com and hope to get something live soon.

Laravel Dubai Twitter

Someone has already registered @laraveldubai username so I am trying to get in touch with whoever that person is to try and get everything aligned. If this is you, please get in touch

Adding a helper file in Laravel

James — Tue, 11 Jun 2019 04:36:58 +0000

Every now and then you will probably find yourself in the need to use a custom function in your Laravel application. I cannot think of one project which I have worked on where I haven’t needed to add a quick and easy custom function.

Our controllers don’t contain actions outside of the 7 resource actions (index, create, store, show, edit, update, destroy). For more details on this principle, review the docs or watch Cruddy by Design

So, what happens if you need a custom function here? You could refactor this out into its own class in a Helpers namespace, I have done this before too. However, sometimes you just want to use a function.

Example use case

One example we have is where we run a number of subdomains off our main application. We have app, api, admin and search. We store the root URL in the .env file as APP_URL=https://intentmatch.dev and then we have a helper function which we use to get the URL throughout our application.



	if (!function_exists('applicationUrl')) {

	/**
	* Will return the fully qualified domain name for the correct environment etc
	*
	* @param string $sub_domain
	* @param string $path
	* @return string
	*/

	function applicationUrl($sub_domain = 'app', $path = null)
	{
	$related_link = parse_url(config('app.url'));

	$final_url = $related_link['scheme'] . '://' . $sub_domain . '.' . $related_link['host'];

	if (!is_null($path)) {
	$final_url .= '/' . ltrim($path, '/');
	}

	return $final_url;
	}
	}

view raw HelperFunctions.php hosted with ❤ by GitHub

We keep functions like this in App/Helpers/HelperFunctions.php and we often have helper classes in this namespace too. The HelperFunctions.php file is dedicated to quick and easy functions.

Include in Composer.json

Your helper classes will load automatically because they are in the main Application namespace but you need to include the Helper file individually in your composer.json file so that it gets found. To do this just update your composer.json file and add the files round the autoload key.

"autoload": {
     "classmap": [
         "database
     ],
     "psr-4": {
         "App\": "app/"
     },
     "files": [
         "app/Helpers/HelperFunctions.php"
     ]
 }

How to set Social Sharing Images

James — Thu, 06 Jun 2019 13:06:12 +0000

You may have noticed that when you share my blog posts on Social Media and services like Slack, Telegram and WhatsApp etc. you get to see a nice image accompanying the link to the post.

Improved CTR

These images really help with Click Through Rate (CTR) and I have found that engagement on the shares and posts are so much higher with more likes, retweets and comments when there is a featured image included.

Manually code all the tags

There are a number of ways to achieve this. You can code the Open Graph tags, Twitter Card tags etc into the head part of your page. There is an amazing list of these tags maintained by Josh Buchea on GitHub.

The main ones you want to consider:

Make sure you include the Open Graph ones. You can read more about the Open Graph protocol here. I have found that most of the services like WhatsApp, LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter will all fall back to use the Open Graph tags if you don’t use anything else.

I would still advise using the Twitter Card and trying to mark up your data with Scema.org markup if you can.

Creating the image

There is so much conflicting information on the web about what sizes the image should be for the various different tools and services.

One company who I have been following since they started is Buffer. They are an incredibly amazing company for so many reasons (I might touch on them in a future post). They have covered the image size topic here on their blog where they talk about ideal image sizes social media posts.

Buffer built an amazing service called Pablo. Pablo allows you to either pick an image from their gallery or upload your own. You can quickly and easily add titles and text on top of the image. You pick the font and the layout. Then, with one click, you can download the optimised version of the image.

Screen shot of the Pablo service by Buffer.

Using WordPress

The easiest way (and what I use for this blog) is to use the Yoast SEO Plugin. This plugin is a must-have if you are running a blog on WordPress in general. The added bonus is that for every article you are able to select and set an image to use for social sharing. You will see this option at the bottom of the blog editor.

Yoast SEO settings for customised social image sharing

Testing tools

Still work to be done…

I think there is still a fair amount of work you could do to make sure that the image is optimal for each and every sharing possibility. For a recent project called Flight Searches, we have hardcoded the meta tags and tried to use optimised images for each service. However, you will still see that some services cut off the text on images if you are not careful!

Link share on WhatsApp iOS.

I would love to know your thoughts and how you fit the social sharing images into your blogging routine.

Update January 2020

I have just noticed that GitHub offer a nice template for adding social share images to a project. They say images should be at least 640×320px (1280×640px for best display) and offer the below template to use

How to return JSON from Laravel Form Request validation errors

James — Wed, 05 Jun 2019 08:28:52 +0000

UPDATE 10th June 2019 : I posted this article on LaravelUK Slack channel and David T gave me some valuable feedback.

You can force Laravel to always return only JSON by specifying the Accept header However, there may be instances where you want to force it regardless and the below article demonstrates how to do that.

Recently I have been using Laravel Form Request Validation instead of using inline validation. I find it much nicer to break things out into their own classes as much as possible so I was pleased when this made its way into the core framework.

If you are like me and you cannot get out of the habit of writing inline validation then don’t worry because the wonderful Jason McCreary has added an awesome feature to the Laravel Code Fixer Shift to convert inline controller validation to Form Requests.

When using Form Requests with API’s you will notice that if you hit an API route where the validation fails it will throw you to a 404 view.

My solution is to make my own FormRequest class which I put in the root API namespace namespace App\Http\Requests\Api;



	namespace App\Http\Requests\Api;

	use Illuminate\Http\JsonResponse;
	use Illuminate\Contracts\Validation\Validator;
	use Illuminate\Validation\ValidationException;
	use Illuminate\Http\Exceptions\HttpResponseException;
	use Illuminate\Foundation\Http\FormRequest as LaravelFormRequest;

	abstract class FormRequest extends LaravelFormRequest
	{
	/**
	* Get the validation rules that apply to the request.
	*
	* @return array
	*/
	abstract public function rules();

	/**
	* Determine if the user is authorized to make this request.
	*
	* @return bool
	*/
	abstract public function authorize();

	/**
	* Handle a failed validation attempt.
	*
	* @param \Illuminate\Contracts\Validation\Validator $validator
	* @return void
	*
	* @throws \Illuminate\Validation\ValidationException
	*/
	protected function failedValidation(Validator $validator)
	{
	$errors = (new ValidationException($validator))->errors();

	throw new HttpResponseException(
	response()->json(['errors' => $errors], JsonResponse::HTTP_UNPROCESSABLE_ENTITY)
	);
	}
	}

view raw FormRequest.php hosted with ❤ by GitHub

So your SearchController which uses the SearchRequest instead of the default Requeststays the same.

We just update the SearchRequest to use our custom FormRequest and not the default and we will get a nice JSON response when we have validation errors.





So now our class will extend our own custom class







So now when we hit the API endpoint we will get this