#PHP

The quest is over - I have found the perfect PHP library for parsing RSS and Atom feeds. I present you SimplePie. My 2024 side project is a browser-based RSS reader/aggregator. This post isn't about...

A list of Laravel and PHP packages I absolutely need in every project, continuously updated. This list is relatively short because I follow the principle "avoid packages until it hurts". I use...

Tauri is an exciting alternative to Electron for building cross-platform desktop applications. While not as mature as Electron and still missing some features, it offers a fresh approach via its...

I talked before about BankAlt.com, the first side-project with dynamic PHP/MySQL functionality I ever shipped. In that article I expressed my desire to resurrect the legacy PHP 5.X project and make...

My recent tweet on refactoring Laravel Eloquent query conditions to a trait proved popular so here it is with a little more context, in permanent form. My biggest side-project at the moment...

I've been working and experimenting a lot lately with Carbon, the sublime PHP date and time utility library. I've tweeted a lot of Carbon tips and decided to collect all these tips into a permanent...

Recently the local PHP 8 + Composer 2 + Laravel Valet dev environment on my M1 Mac Air got trashed for no discernable reason. This might well be an obscure problem that no one else but me...

Packages are great - they bring specific functionality out of the box, without the need to re-invent it yourself. The downside is that each additional package installed into an application creates...

I host several websites on a Linode VPS, originally provisioned with Laravel Forge. I have long since canceled my Forge subscription, and I do my own maintenance, manually. I may not be the quickest...

I found myself strolling down memory lane recently when I recalled my first big side project from over 10 years ago, and dug it up on the Wayback Machine. The nostalgia hit hard, and I decided to...

Right after upgrading my local PHP environment to 7.4 on the Windows laptop that I use at work, I ran a Laravel artisan console command for an HTTP request to a 3rd party API. I ran the command in my...

On Mac, PHP can be easily upgraded to 7.4 with Homebrew. However, the command line may continue to show the previous version. Here's how to fix that. Upgrade to PHP 7.4 with Homebrew on Mac is a...

I won't make a secret of the fact that I just don't like coding open source on Windows. It makes really hard to get all the necessary tools in working order, and then it's super slow for common and...

Let's say I'm processing some input in the form of an array or object, and I can't predict which keys are defined. If I try to reference a non-existent key and don't handle that properly, I'll get...

This may seem so obvious that I shouldn't be blogging about it but I'm doing it anyway. I haven't really had to simulate a specific HTTP exception but recently I needed to create some custom 404,...