This post should help you setup Visual Studio Code to use for PHP and Laravel development. It it a solid base configuration that can be expanded upon using additional workspace specific configurations. I will cover the best extensions to use as well as some helpful configuration settings and external tools. …

How many times have you worked on an application and you needed a random alpha-numeric string? Did you try to provide a list of numbers and characters in a string and pass in a length to randomly generate a string with a loop? Using Node.js, this can be a lot…

This is a quick tip to get that first user created in your application so you can login and start testing things out. You just installed a new Laravel application, you configured the database, and ran migrations. php artisan migrate Now you go to your site and realize you don’t…

I was recently working on a project where I was receiving data from an API that had a payment_type. I converted the payment_type into the enum below: enum PaymentType: string { case CREDIT_CARD = 'credit_card'; case APPLE_PAY = 'apple_pay'; case GOOGLE_PAY = 'google_pay'; case PAYPAL = 'paypal'…

Recently, I was working on handling API responses and I wanted to pass them into a DTO. One of the fields was an optional deleted_at column. In my DTO, I wanted that to be converted to a Carbon datetime object. Carbon comes packaged with Laravel, but can also be used…

The Laravel team is hard at work upgrading Jetstream to use Livewire 3. With all the changes being made recently, some of the steps in this post may no longer be valid. The Livewire 3 beta was released live on stage by Caleb Porzio just a few weeks back at…

I am building a new PHP application with PHP and Laravel. Before, for MacOS, I typically installed PHP with Homebrew. Sometimes, I’ve even used Docker and things like Laravel Sail, however, those could sometimes have performance issues and there were still tools where I wanted PHP locally. Recently, Laravel Herd…

There are plenty of ways to setup a database for local development. You can use Docker containers, install locally using Homebrew or other tools, and various other GUI tools. My option of choice is DBngin. It is a simple tool which lets you add databases quickly for whatever you need…