Laravel Daily #35: Valet, PHPUnit and Valet

A new monthly tradition continues – here are 10 packages I’ve found this month, thanks mostly to Twitter and Laravel News blog. Uploading this as a SlideShare presentation, which I will present at my local Laravel meetup tomorrow, but you guys will be the first ones to see it.

Laravel Valet is the next generation development environment for Mac minimalists. No Vagrant, No Apache, No Nginx, No /etc/hosts file. Valet works by hooking into your Mac’s built-in PHP server then it utilizes DnsMasq to proxy all requests to the .dev TLD to sites on your local machine.

Installation is simple and it does require Homebrew. You’ll need to install that and then install PHP 7: The install only has to run once and it sets Valet’s daemon to launch when your system starts.

Laravel, the open source MVC PHP framework created for application development, has just released Valet, a minimalist development environment for Mac. It uses just 7mb of RAM, because it doesn’t include Vagrant, Apache, Nginx, or a /etc/hosts file. Here’s how it works:

Laravel Valet is a new high-speed development environment by Taylor Otwell and Adam Wathan.

So yesterday Taylor Otwell and Adam Wathan released Laravel Valet, it's simply a tool that helps OS X users easily run their websites locally for development purposes, without the need to configure anything each time a new project needs to be created.

Yesterday, Taylor Otwell released Laravel Valet. If you’re just interested in the broad strokes of what it is, who it’s for, and how it works, watch the funny (and slightly NSFW) video below.

Laravel Valet v1.1.0 is now released and available. This release changes the built-in PHP server to use Caddy for serving incoming HTTP requests. This will allow for future improvements and allows Valet sites to make HTTP requests to other Valet sites without blocking the built-in PHP server.

For a project I’m working on I needed to interact with a Google Calendar. I’ve your ever worked with some API’s by Google then you know their documentation can be very confusing. It’s not that they don’t have documentation, but code examples of common use cases are simply not present.

Laravel 5 is awesome, but out of the box, it seems to only allow for a single web root to be served for each installation. However, with a few minor tweaks, one installation of the framework can power any number of applications. Most of the time, the public/ folder IS the webroot.

Yesterday, it was announced that Laravel News is going to take the reigns as the official Laravel blog. This move will allow Taylor and the rest of the contributors to remain focused on improving the framework instead of spending time writing about new announcements.

In this blog post, we’ll discuss some of the best practices for configuring optimal MySQL memory usage. Correctly configuring the use of available memory resources is one of the most important things you have to get right with MySQL for optimal performance and stability. As of MySQL 5.

This post has been peer reviewed by Cláudio Ribeiro and Thomas Punt. Many thanks to the reviewers who keep SitePoint’s content perpetually excellent! It was January 2016 when the PHPUnit development team announced the release of PHPUnit 5.0.

In a previous post, we looked at SparkPost (as an alternative to Mandrill), and explored a bit of the official PHP client. The official client handles a decent amount of work, but I got to thinking about what it would take to build a new client. The more I thought about it, the more it made sense.

What is Unit Testing? The term, quite simply, refers to the process of dividing software into the smallest testable components, called units, that can be tested independently to assert whether they fulfill their requirements and operate as intended.

When designing an API, it’s tempting to do a bit of extra work and surprise the developers using it. It might be returning some additional information that would require an additional call otherwise, or try to predict the intentions and handle some specific cases differently.

Following the first part of my “Heroes of PHP”™, I subsequently posted the second of my 24 “Heroes of PHP”™ on Twitter. As with the first list, I’m reproducing that second set of Heroes here, together with some additional explanation about why these individuals mean so much to me.