Category: Uncategorized

PHP Monitor, the lightweight native Mac app to manage PHP and Laravel Valet, has released v5.0!

The author Nico Verbruggen announced the release yesterday:

🚀 PHP Monitor 5.0 is now live!

This version comes with an improved domains window, global composer update, “Fix My Valet”, services indicator, PHP info per site, and more.

⬆️ `brew upgrade phpmon`

👀 Full release notes: https://t.co/T6jYLZaw6r

🔗 https://t.co/AJs0AzXRWn pic.twitter.com/EjrKSkRuP5

— Nico Verbruggen (@nicoverbruggen) February 2, 2022

Here are some of the highlight features summarized from the release notes:

• Link a folder in Valet
• Site list performance improvements
• Faster and improved site search
• Site list displays project type (i.e., Laravel, WordPress, etc.) from composer.json
• Brew services status in the dropdown menu (PHP, Nginx, Dnsmasq, etc.)
• See project’s PHP version requirement at a glance in the site list
• Compatibility status per site
• Change PHP versions from the compatibility status on the sites list
• Automatic update of PHP INI changes
• Alfred integration
• Sponsor awareness – a one-time message to sponsor the author

One of my favorite features added is linking a folder and securing it (adding HTTPS) during creation:

Linking a folder makes it convenient to manage projects via the UI and visualize the requirements for all your sites in one place. The site list updates in v5.0 are insane!

On his blog, the author has written about the 5.0 release with insider details. I recommend giving it a read and following the author for future updates.

To get started, check out the GitHub project for documentation and installation instructions. Since this project is free and open-source, you can support the creator by sponsoring his work.

You can now have Optimus Prime read you a bedtime story. This is not a sentence I expected to write today, and yet, it is now an inescapable fact that you can go to bed listening to the dulcet tones of the leader of the Autobots… as he describes the horrible wars that enveloped his home planet Cybertron before coming to Earth. Sweet dreams!

To clarify, you’ll need to have access to the immensely popular meditation/relaxation/sleep assistance app Calm—specifically, the Calm Kids iteration—to hear Optimus narrate a “Sleep Story,” which the company describes as being “soothing tales that mix music, sound fx, and incredible voice talent to help you drift into dreamland.” The story is titled “History of the Transformers,” which doesn’t seem like a tale that would be easy to drift off to given that the vast majority of it has to do with the endless wars between the Autobots and the Decepticons.

That said, Optimus, as per the classic cartoons and modern live-action movies, is played by Peter Cullen, whose deep, low, soothing voice seems absolutely tailor-made to lull just about anyone to sleep, no matter what he was reading. You can get a too-brief 30-second preview of the Sleep Story over at Calm, and hear for yourself.

The press release adds, “This never-before-heard Transformers story tells the history of the Autobots and Decepticons, taking listeners deeper into the More-Than-Meets-the-Eye themes of the iconic franchise, exploring bravery, leadership, friendship, and STEM.” I’m very curious about how much importance will be placed on science, technology, engineering, and mathematics in the recording, given that 1) virtually all of the STEM in Transformers is made up, and 2) I don’t know much you’re going to learn about these sciences while you are literally falling asleep. There’s not a chance in hell that any fact I heard would remain in my mind come daybreak, no matter what robot told it to me

“History of the Transformers” is available now in the Calm Kids app. If we’re lucky, the next release will be terrorist leader Cobra Commander reading a bedtime story about the time he created an entire game show just to make G.I. Joe feel dumb.

Wondering where our RSS feed went? You can pick the new up one here.

Why transactions are a good thing.

Let’s say that in your application all users have to belong to a team. And in your createUser action, you create a user and then you assign this user a team.

$user = User::create(['email'=> '[email protected]');

$user->teams()->attach($team->id); //Throws an exception

If you get an Exception while attaching the Team to the User, your application ends with a wrong state where you have a User which hasn’t a Team assigned.

This is simple to fix in this case, but it can be more complex in other cases and by using database transactions will yourself these state fixes. Because, when using database transactions, if the team assignment throws an exception, your application will also prevent the user creation.

How to implement write transactions in Laravel

Database transactions are good practice for all write actions. Therefore we create a global middleware for this, using the following command.

$ php artisan make:middleware DatabaseTransaction

and we change the handle method like below:

//app/Http/Middleware/DatabaseTransaction.php

public function handle($request, \Closure $next)
{
		if (!in_array($request->method(),['POST','PUT','PATCH','DELETE'])) {
			return $next($request);
		}

		DB::beginTransaction();

    try {
        $response = $next($request);
    } catch (\Exception $e) {

        DB::rollBack();

        throw $e;
    }
	
    if ($response->getStatusCode() > 399) {
        DB::rollBack();
    } else {
        DB::commit();
    }

    return $response;
}

This code will check if we make a write operation by checking if the request method of the request is a write one, and start a transaction. If within the write request something goes wrong it will roll back the transaction.

The only thing left to do is to register the middleware to our web middleware group in the app/Http/Kernel.php.

//app/Http/Kernel.php

protected $middlewareGroups = [
    'web' => [
			// ...
			\App\Http\Middleware\DatabaseTransaction::class
    ],
];

Now your application will use this DatabaseTransaction middleware on every request.

What to keep in mind

Once you have fully integrated database transactions in your applications, there is this one thing that you need to watch out for when dispatching jobs. If you dispatch a job and later your application rolls back, your job will still be processed by your queue.

For that reason, Laravel has the afterCommit method which you can chain after the dispatch. This way you are safe that the dispatch will only run if the response was successful.

So if you also are sending an email after the user creation, your code should look like this:

$user = User::create(['email'=> '[email protected]');

$user->teams()->attach($team->id);

dispatch(new SendWelcomeEmail($user))->afterCommit();

Final words

The accuracy, completeness, and reliability of your database data are viable things for your application. Using database transactions in Laravel is easy for us to take advantage of them.