Marcel Pociot's blog about Laravel, PHP and more

Visual Regression Testing with Laravel

Published on May 25th 2018 – 2 minute read

I'm not sure how you feel, but I consider myself a backend developer. Sure - I know my way around Vue.JS and really enjoy working with it, but writing CSS has never been my strong point.

At one of our companies recent projects, we are working together with another development team, which is mostly taking care of frontend development. So we build controllers, repositories, services, etc. and hand it over to some basic views. They handle the rest.

We introduced continuous integration to them and showed them our usual workflow, when I thought that it would be excellent to also have some kind of visual CI for frontend changes.

That's what this package is all about.

A .env replacement for storing your production credentials in your Laravel application

Published on May 15th 2018 – 2 minute read

Today I published the latest open source package under the Beyond Code Github account and it's called laravel-credentials.

The package allows you to store all your production-related credentials in an encrypted file and put that file into version control instead of having to add multiple credentials into your .env file on your production system.

Use the Telegram login widget

Published on Feb 9th 2018 – 3 minute read

Yesterday Telegram announced a Login Widget, which allows you to add a "Login with Telegram" button on your website. By clicking on this login button, the user needs to input there phone number and instantly receive a confirmation message from Telegram. Upon confirming the login, you - as…

Deploy Your Laravel Forge Sites With Your Voice

Published on Jan 4th 2018 – 4 minute read

Let me show you, how you can create your own Amazon Alexa skill to have a voice powered deployment system for Laravel Forge.

2017 - A PHP year in review

Published on Dec 21st 2017 – 3 minute read

It's this time of the year again - the end of the year is coming up fast, so why not step back and take a look at what we, as a PHP community, have achieved this year? For these statistics, I used the free GitHub Archive data in combination with Google BigQuery, which lets you process 1TB of data…

Create custom, distributable web components with VueJS

Published on Dec 8th 2017 – 4 minute read

I am currently in the middle of working on a new BotMan feature - a frontend widget that you can embed into your website to make it easier to connect your website visitors with your own self-hosted chatbot solution. The backend / PHP side is already working and leverages the BotMan web driver, which is basically just an API that you can use to interact with your chatbot.

Write a Slack bot using Laravel and PHP

Published on Oct 19th 2016 – 5 minute read

This guide will show you how to configure Slack and get started with writing your first Laravel-based Slack bot using my PHP Slack Bot API.

Using Eloquent models with the Firebase Realtime Database

Published on Jun 20th 2016 – 2 minute read

When working with Laravel, we have multiple ways of implementing real time messages / event broadcasting to our application, thanks to the Redis or Pusher integration in the framework.

Speed up the Laravel Baum package

Published on May 30th 2016 – 2 minute read

Here's a quick tipp, if you happen to use the Laravel Baum package and you have large nested structures. In my case, we have a hierarchy of over 1000 entries that we need to display as a JSON / Array structure. The whole API call used to take nearly 7 seconds - so I began some detective work and…

Laravel TestTools

Published on Mar 21st 2016 – 2 minute read

Testing a Laravel application really is an easy task - the "Integrated" package from Jeffrey Way, that later got merged into the core framework is fantastic and helps you with the otherwise cumbersome task of testing and interacting with your application. But still - are you actually using tests?

Managing users and teams in Laravel

Published on Sep 15th 2015 – 2 minute read

If you're building a product, for example a SaaS as a side project, you might come to a point where you need more than the basic Authentication handling from Laravel.