Laravel News Podcast

This is the Laravel News Podcast, your
one-stop podcast to find out about

Laravel-related news, tutorials, packages,
and more. Here are your hosts, Jake

Bennett and Michael

Dyrynda.

Hello, friends and neighbors and loved
ones. Welcome to Laravel News. This is

-episode...
-244.

244, folks. It has been, uh, a bit of a
rough start for us. Let's... I- I'm not

gonna beat around the bush here. Okay? I
was supposed to be on this call 26 minutes

ago, and I woke up 12 minutes ago

because... You know, I- I don't know,
dude. I'm not sure if it's that time of

year. I honestly do not know. It has been-

-No idea
-... this week, I have been so

tired. Yesterday, I was, like, I was in
bed early

and, like, woke up late this morning and
then another... Like, just exhausted. I'm

not sure if it's, like, the time, like,
you know, changing of the seasons. I have

no idea. My kids are feeling it too,
though. Dude, I don't know. So-

-Possibly.
-Thank you.

-I am.
-Yeah.

It was interesting listening to

Ian Landsman on The Mostly Technical Podcast
talking about, you know,

having showers at night versus in the
morning and how, because he has hay fever,

-he showers before night to, like-
-Oh

... make sure all of the pollen is out of
the hair, so then you're not sleeping and

rolling around in the pollen. And it's,
it's definitely getting to that time of

year where we're, we are definitely
getting the fits and starts of spring. So

it was sunny yesterday, it rained this
morning, but the sun's out today. Um, you

know, we're losing the, the undergarments
now. We're, you know, no more singlets,

just long sleeves. It's supposed to be
warm on, on the weekend. So, uh, all of

this is fantastic, but it also means that
the pollen is coming. And this-

-Mm-hmm, mm-hmm
-... I cannot abide because- ... I'm, I, I

long for the days when I didn't have hay
fever, and now it's quite severe. So time

-to start loading up on antihistamines.
-That's right. That's right. It is coming

whether you want it to or not. So folks,

welcome to the show. And, uh, I'm glad
you're here. I'm glad to be here. Today is

September 3rd, 2025. We are gonna get
into it with releases, with news, with

packages, with tutorials,

as always. So

let us start at the very top with
releases. I'm gonna be talking about

Laravel

12.26.

Soon as I get my- ... video in the right
place. There it is. Okay. Here we are,

folks. Laravel 12.26 released the week of
August 26th, which has a withHeartbeat

method to LazyCollections, a toPrettyJSON
method to Collections, Models, and more,

et cetera. Let's start with React and Vue
Starter Kits, which now include Wayfinder.

So Joe Tenenbaum updated the Laravel
React and Vue Starter Kits to include a

Laravel Wayfinder. What is Wayfinder, you
might ask? Wayfinder provides a type-safe

bridge between Laravel Routes and your
front end. If you've ever used Ziggy

before, uh, Wayfinder is Ziggy improved.
It is Ziggy plus. Uh, it does a

lot of amazing things. It makes the pieces
of your back-end application available to

your front end in a type-safe way. Not
only Routes, but lots more. So you should

definitely check that out. And it totally
makes sense that it would now be included

in the Vue Starter Kits and React Starter
Kits because that's where it's going to be

most powerfully used. Right? So there you
have it added to the Starter Kits.

withHeartbeat method has been added to
LazyCollections. Joseph Silver contributed

the new withHeartBeat method to
LazyCollections, which allows you to run a

callback at regular intervals while the
collection is being lazily enumerated. So

his primary use case that he shared in the
pull request is stated as such. In

long-running tasks, such as bass- batch
processing por- reports, you may need to

hold a lock to prevent concurrent
execution. However, if the code

unexpectedly fails to release the lock if
you don't want it to persist indefinitely.

So a common strategy is to acquire a
short-lived lock, and then you

periodically extend it while the task is
still running. So an example is ac-

requiring the lock for five minutes, then
re-acquiring it every four minutes,

assuming that a report never takes a full
minute to generate. So instead of saying,

"I'm going to lock that program
indefinitely

and then my, uh, I will unlock it once my
task is done running." Like, you can think

that, uh, when you do commands that are
in the background, Laravel will do this

actually. It will take a mutex, and it
will store that mutex in the cache, and it

will check itself to see

if that command has finished yet. And if
it hasn't, it won't allow it to overlap.

Right? There might be some reason why
you'd wanna do a lock like that. Well, in

this case, instead of setting it for
forever, just say, "Nope. We're just gonna

leave... Have it for five minutes. We'll
release it after that. And then every four

minutes, we'll make sure that we
reacquire that lock." So yeah, really

interesting. The documentation's been
updating to include this, uh, in dup-

sorry. Has been updated to include this
section about that new withHeartBeat

method, but that's an interesting one
there. Thank you, Joseph Silver.

PrettyJSON method. Wendell Adriel
contributed a toPrettyJSON method. What

this does is it will, um, it will be
implemented in all the places where the

toJSON method exists. So for example,
collections, models, JSON resources,

paginators, et cetera. Uh, an
example...From full request 56697 using

collections where it previously would've
had collection error to JSON, you can now

say to pretty JSON. So, um, you know,
we're all used to seeing the, the nasty

output and then you copy and paste it over
into Sublime and you say, "Set the syntax

-to JSON," and pretty-
-Full map

-... you know, print sort of deal.
-Mm-hmm.

You don't have to do that anymore. It will
just do it. You can do to pretty JSON.

It'll give you a nicely formatted output
there, uh, that is now available. Folks,

that is the diff there for f- uh, version
12.26. Of course, you can see the full set

of release notes on GitHub, if you care
to. That's a good one. All right, dude.

-Over to you.
-Laravel 12.27 introduced things such as

support for the SQS FIFO queue message
group IDs, uh, which unlocked the ability

to utilize Amazon's Fair Queue feature in
SQS. Uh, we'll talk about that and more

now. Nior Mohammed Zaki, one of the
Laravel core team, contributed support for

FIFO queue message group IDs. As
mentioned, this enables Laravel SQS queue

driver to utilize Amazon's Fair Queue
feature. The Laravel documentation has

been updated in kind with details on this
and fair queues, and you can see the

Amazon SQS documentation for more about
them as well. Casey Dwyer contributed the

ability to prepend the count when using
the string plural method. So, often we've

done this thing where we wanted to say,
like, number and then the string plural

and then, you know, then we pass the count
again and we do the thing. Now you can

pass a third argument to the string plural
method, which is a Boolean flag

defaulting to false to preserve backwards
compatibility, which will automatically do

this for you so you don't need to do the
concatenation dance there. So thank you,

Casey Dwyer, for that one. Uh, Jake just
spoke about the pretty JSON functionality

that was added in Laravel 12.26. Lucas
Michaud contributed the ability to pass

additional parameters to the pretty JSON
method, giving developers more control

over encoding when using this method. Uh,
so this is a unary

type that you can pass through with a
bunch of PHP-defined options that allow

you to manipulate what that pretty JSON
looks like. Obviously by default it is to

format it, but you can also pass, uh,
parameters to do things like, uh,

unescaped Unicode characters and so on. So
thank you to Lucas for that. And last up

in our notes here, Jesper Nordset
contributed support for enum values in

collection countBy and groupBy methods by
converting them to strings or ints as

array keys. So we've seen backed enums
throughout the framework, uh, everywhere,

so this allows you to do countBy key and
then pass

enums directly into those, um, arrays as
values and it will handle the casting to

n- numeric values for you when you call
something like all, for example. But also

giving the ability to implicitly count
without having to pass a, a closure and,

and handling that for yourself manually.

That's all we have for releases this week.

All right, folks. Um, this is not a
Laravel release, but it is a release

nonetheless. And we are so excited about
it, we actually have it listed twice in

our show notes, which is that Pest 4 has
now been officially released. So this is

going to allow you to get started if
you... Let's, let's back up. In case

you've been living under a rock for the
last couple years, Pest is a

new and improved

version of PHPUnit. Can I say that? I
think so. It's built on top of PHPUnit.

Pest 4 is in fact built on top of PHPUnit
12. Um, it's a superset of that, right? So

it runs on PHPUnit but it allows for this
beautiful syntax. Um, it takes care of a

lot of the things. It's, it's actually
not, um, Laravel specific, right? It's not

locked to Laravel, it's, it's available
for use in, uh, other testing

environments. Anything where you would use
PHPUnit you could use Pest. Really,

really good stuff. Was, what, what's
different about Pest 4 that we care about?

Let's talk about that. So, the big thing
about Pest 4 is browser testing. So this

is, um, the brand new feature that's
unlocked allowing you to run tests in your

browser using

not the old one. Uh, what was the old one?
I'm trying to remember. It's like, you

know, we use Chromeless, uh, browser. What
was it?

Yeah, it was browser... Eh, not browser.
Dusk.

-Headless, headless Chrome browser.
-The headless... Yeah, it was-

-Yeah, it was Dusk-
-It was-

... but I'm trying to remember what the,
uh... There was, like, Selenium, which was

-the old school one.
-Chromium, wasn't it?

-Right? Yep. Yeah.
-Is this what you're looking for?

So there was like Selenium, which was old,
old. And then you would use, like,

Chromium, right, version. Like this
headless browser Chromium sort of deal.

-Mm-hmm.
-This uses Playwright. So Playwright is a

new version of, uh... We- we've talked
about it on the show before, right? But it

basically is a new and improved version
of

the old

headless Chrome browser. I, again, I'm,
I'm oversimplifying here, right? There's a

lot of amazing benefits that we've talked
about for why Playwright is, uh, a great

choice moving forward. Um, but Nuno has
done the hard work of wrapping up all

those APIs and building them into Pest so
that you can continue to use your new PHP,

uh, your new favorite PHP testing
framework, Pest, um, with Playwright. So

really, really cool stuff here. So let's
talk about what that is. End-to-end

browser testing. You also have visual
testing, so you can get visual diffs.

Device testing, so you can say on iPhone
it should look like this, on desktop it

should look like this. Uh, code coverage
with browser and unit tests. You can also

launch a tinker session mid-test, which is
really, really cool. Um, you can have

test sharding, so, like, across your, um,
CI actions. So you

have this idea that you can run

things in parallel, right? Um, you could
always do that with PHPUnit or with

Pest.... really difficult to accomplish
browser tests. Um, but Pest will help with

that and will allow you to run more than
two instances in parallel by doing

sharding, which basically means it will
take your test suite, it will break it up

into however many groups of things you
want to run, and then you can run those

all at the same time across different
actions. So previously, because with

GitHub Actions, you only have two
processors at max that you could use for

their test runners, you could only run two
instances of parallel at a time, right?

With sharding, you can say, "I wanna run
eight," and it'll spin up four different

GitHub Action runners, and will allow you
to run all of those at the same time.

Really, really cool stuff, uh, and allows
your test suites that used to take 30

minutes down to, like, five minutes.
Right? Uh, so there's a whole official

announcement post if you were not able to
catch, um, Nuno's release of Pest 4 live

on stage at Laracon this year. We also
have a link to that, so you can watch that

on YouTube. So lots of really, really
cool stuff. There is an announcement post

that kind of goes over all the different
things that I just talked about with far

more detail. And then there's also an
upgrade guide that was gonna allow you to,

uh, go from Pest 3 applications to Pest 4
applications. And then lastly, I wanted

to mention that Jason Mercuri, uh, Laravel
Shift, has created a, a Dusk to

Pest ta- uh, conversion, and so you can
run that as well. That will attempt to

take your Dusk tests and convert them over
to your Pest v4 browser testing, uh,

paral- uh, you know, browser testing
equivalents. So good stuff on that. Lots

of options there, lots of ways to get
started, and really, really exciting, uh,

-exciting stuff there.
-Well, sure. Uh, I wanna say two things

about sharding. Number one, the way you
say it, uh, is very close to dangerous. So

-just, uh-
-Sharding

-... just be careful there. Sharding.
-How- I, I know.

-Uh-
-Like, it is a weird, it is a weird word. I

don't know how else you would sa- shard?
Is it sharding? How would you say it?

You say shard. But, see, well, it... The D
very-

-I want, I want you to give me-
-Comes close to a T

-... the good version of it-
-Sharding.

-... and I want you to give me the bad-
-Sharding

-... version of it.
-See, we, we, we... So there's, there's

-sharding, right? But if-
-Sharding.

-The way-
-Sharding.

The way, the way you sha- sharding, the
way you say sharding, it, it, it, it

crosses into dangerous- ... inappropriate
territory. So I just wanted to say that,

-number one.
-We need to have, like... We need to have,

like... You know how, like, I say beta and
you say beta?

-Yeah.
-Like, beta testers or whatever.

-Uh-huh.
-Like, we need to have an equivalent for

this word. Is it, like, uh, I don't know.
Like, how do you say it differently? I

-don't know.
-I, I don't think there's, there's an

-answer. I just think it's, uh... Anyway.
-Sharding.

-But-
-Maybe sharding.

Sharding. So as part of, uh, some work
that I'm doing at the moment, I did

upgrade our code base from Pest3 to Pes-
Pest4, which was mostly a straightforward

transition. Obviously, Pest4 requires PHP
unit version 12, which we had some-

Okay, yep

... you know, interdependent issues, you
know, dependency of a dependency of a

dependency that we have forks of to, to
keep alive because they technically only

work for Laravel 6, and we're on Laravel
11.

Um, but using the shard functionality
inside of GitHub Actions took our test

run... Like, it halved our test runtime.
So it's-

-Wow. That's incredible, yeah
-... we've split our suite up into five.

And so each shard runs for about two
minutes. So our-

-Okay
-... total cumulative runtime for our test

is about seven and a half minutes now,
where it was 16 before. So it's a-

-Wow. That's amazing
-... it's a huge improvement, um-

-Yeah
-... just, just by turning that on. And

then, obviously, we've got, you know,
caching between, um, different test

executions and things like that. But it's,
uh... I, I haven't even looked-

-That's amazing
-... at the Playwright stuff yet. Uh, I

know that our front end guys did a bit of
work to convert all of the Cypress tests.

Like, this was already underway before
Pest4 was announced, so rewriting our

Cypress test into Playwright. But now that
Pest supports Playwright-

-Yeah
-... uh, on the back end, we can, we can

now do more comprehensive end-to-end tests
as well, which, which I'm really looking

forward to. I think that will really, um,
you know, for us specifically, but for the

community at large, it's gonna make
testing those things, making them robust,

much, much more powerful across the board.

Absolutely. Yep. Super excited. I, I can't
wait to, to get in there and try it. Uh,

we've got a couple things that we're
prioritizing before we head to that, uh,

as the next list on... or next item on the
list. But we will get there. We have no

doubt we will get there and, uh, take
advantage of that. Super excited. I'll

-keep you updated.
-Mm-hmm. Yeah. Uh, the Laracon Australia

2025 talk titles have been revealed.
They're up on the website at

laracon.au/schedule, and we have placed
all of the titles up there. And so whilst

the speaker lineup has been announced, uh,
already earlier this year, the talks

themselves have until now been a mystery.
And for an extra twist, we're not going to

link the speakers

with their talk titles until next month,
which gives the opportunity, a chance to

guess who's presenting what topic. And to
make it fun for attendees, we're running a

giveaway. If you can guess the correct
pairings for each of the talks, you could

win one of our very special limited
edition hoodies to collect if you are

attending in Brisbane this November.
Entries close Sunday the 14th of November

at 11:59 PM Eastern Standard Time. Uh,
anyone can play this, of course, but only

a, uh, attendee will be able to collect
the prize. This year's theme is Level Up,

and the program reflects a wide range of
topics for developers looking to push

their skills further. Tickets are still
available, including a limited allocation

of early bird tickets, which are now open
to both individuals and small teams of up

to four per, per transaction. And premium,
bundle, and community sponsor tickets are

still availble- available, along with
group discounts for larger teams, which

you can grab at laracon.au/tickets.

Very good. Okay. So I'm gonna... Uh, I...
That one, is that under news? Because I

think it must have replaced one of the
other links or something. I wanna make

-sure-
-Okay

... I'm in the right spot and not
skipping.

-Oh, yes. It is under news. I, uh-
-Okay

-... must have put the-
-Okay. Gotta fix it

... wrong thing into the Notion document.
I will fix now.

Not a problem. Not a problem at all. Okay,
folks. We are gonna move on to packages,

shall we? So-Let's talk about ownership
relationships between eloquent models with

Laravel ownable. Michael, I feel like you
might have had something like this back

in the day. Did you have your own package
that sort of did something like this?

Yes, I had something similar. It was- it
was much less comprehensive. Like, it was

just

an owned by thing, which, you know, you
can realistically do using

-Eloquence's method now.
-Sure.

Yeah.

Sure. So, let's talk about this package.
Um, Michael used to be a prolific package

author back in the day. In fact, that is
the story of how we met. Uh-

-Mm-hmm.
-Michael had an amazing nullable fields

package, which just fit the bill for
something I needed, and I was using it all

the time. And every time I used it, I was
like, "Michael, dude! This is so awesome.

Thanks for making this." And I was like,
"Hey, should we start a podcast? We should

definitely start a podcast." "Are you
going to Laracon?" I'm definitely going to

Laracon, yeah. It's the start of a
beautiful relationship, and it's been-

-Long-
-What? Like, eight years now?

-It's 10 years. Be 10 years next year.
-10 years? Dang. 10 years. Crazy, crazy.

So, anyway, let's talk about ownership
relationship packages. All right, Laravel

Ownable package created by Abdulla
Sawaliam, provides a flexible and

straightforward way to manage ownership of
any model by another model in your

Laravel application. So, uh, a user might
own, uh, another user in a

manager-employee or manager-team member
sort of relationship. Uh, you might have a

user that owns a blog post, or a blog
post that belongs to a user. Uh, key

features of this package would be flexible
ownership, meaning any model can own any

other model. You can transfer ownership
between different owners. You can also

keep track of those ownership changes over
time. Think like a ownership history log.

You can easily retrieve the current owner
of any ownable item. You can check the

ownership status and manage multiple
ownables in bulk operations. It will

automatically clean up ownership records
when models are deleted, so it'll take

care of, like, that cascading problem
there. And then it also has facade

support, you can use the convenient owner
facade for ownership operations. So,

there's some example usages in here. Uh,
it's- it's quite simple, where you are

going to implement an owner contract. You
use a trait of 'has ownables' and then you

have a 'is ownable', uh, trait that you
can use in an ownable contract for the

other side of that relationship. So we
have a user, which has a owner contract,

and then you have a task, which is a
ownable contract. So with those two things

in place, then you can say, "User, give
ownership to task." So you could say, you

know, in very plain English, "Giving a
user ownership of a task," or you can

transfer that to another user. You can get
the current user. You can remove

ownership, just as you would assume. Uh,
but it's very, very simple. The API looks

really nice there, and you get all those
things we talked about along with that,

right? The ownership history, transfer
operations, bulk operations, et cetera. So

this is something you find yourself
needing to do, uh, that would be really

helpful for you to take a look at this
package. Uh, you should definitely check

that one out. Thanks, Yannick, for writing
that up.

Yeah.

Larapath is a secure, fluent path builder
for PHP, featuring senet- sanitization

strategies and Laravel integrations for
version 11 and above. The package's use

case range from multi-tenant storage
organization with privacy protection, file

naming conflict resolution, and data loss
prevention, among others. So this allows

you to, using a base folder, so for
example, pathbuilder::basestorage, you can

add, uh, values using the add method. So
for example, if you wanted to provide a

path for a user at email.com, you can say
that you want to use a sanitization

strategy of hashed and then convert that
to a string. And this will give you the

path location storage/ and then the hashed
value of the email address. It also

allows you to create URL-friendly names by
using slugification or converting to

snake case, and allows you to create, uh,
timestape- timestamp-based values

for uniqueness. The package also includes
a Laravel integration with a facade. Uh,

it also includes validation and security,
which automatically validates dangerous

paths, as well as the possibility of
manually checking a path. Main features

include it being a security first package,
built-in protection against directory

traversal attacks. There is a fluent API
providing clean, readable path building

with method chaining. Sanitization
strategies include hashing, slug, snake

case, timestamp, as discussed. It is
immutable in its operation, which provides

thread-safe path building with no side
effects. It uses the strategy pattern,

meaning it has an extensible sanitization
system that you can contribute to

yourself. There is full type hits and IDE
auto-completion, and a Laravel

integration, of course, using the optional
Laravel storage facade integration. You

can get started with this package. We have
links to GitHub and the documentation in

-the show notes.
-Very cool. Yeah, we actually had to do

something like this ourselves, where we
had to build this, um, sort of path

builder out on a per tenant basis. So this
is really interesting. Uh, I'll be, uh,

I'll be digging in on this one to kind of
figure out what pieces what maybe- might

be able to pull out of this, or if this is
something we can sort of replace our own

implementation with wholesale. This looks
really, really well done, so

super cool. Uh, all right, let's talk
about Smartcache. So, if you've ever had

to cache large payloads, this might be
something that you would want to look at.

So the Smartcache package, uh, written by
Ismail Azaran, is a caching optimization

package which is designed to enhance how
your application handles data caching. So

it can intelligently manage large datasets
by applying optimization techniques like

compression and chunking and more. So
think about if you had a large amount of

data that you needed to cache. What this
will do is it'll take that large data, it

will attempt to optimize it, and then it
will, after-... attempting to optimize it.

It'll check the data size automatically,
and if it needs to, what it can then do is

it can take that data and chunk it into
multiple pieces and store it in the cache

in multiple pieces, and then it'll also
store that metadata alongside of it. And

then when you go to retrieve it, it'll
look at that and say, "Do I need to

retrieve multiple chunks? Yes, I do." Go
ahead and grab all those, decompress it,

and then present it to you on the front
side. Um, so it basically just does all of

that in the background for you. It has
driver-aware optimization strategies, so

if you have to be using Redis or File or
databoy- database, it will handle

different chunking and optimization
techniques based on that driver. So you

can look into the README to see kind of
what's going on behind the scenes, but

exactly what I described is what's
happening, checking data size, compressing

or chunking it, storing that
optimization, uh, metadata for retrieval,

and then reconstructing that on the, uh,
way out. So the API is very similar, uh,

to Laravel's cache facade. The only thing
is that you use the facade smart-cache

instead of cache.put, get, same things
that you're used to using with cache. So

definitely check this one out if that's
something you're run into before.

Yeah.

The Laravel zxcvbn package is a validation
rule that estimates password

strength using a PHP port of Dropbox's

zxcvbn JavaScript package. It considers
using user inputs as well to determine a

score for password guessability. You can
define a zxcvbn_minscore configuration

value in your environment value to
determine when validation should fail and

based on the scale provided by the
underlying package. Uh, the default is

three, but depending on your needs, you
can configure it to match any of the

following. I'm not gonna read through all
of the values zero through four, but zero

means the password is extremely guessable.
It is a dictionary word like password or

mother, and they will score a zero value.
Uh, all the way up to four, being very

unguessable with the estimated number of
guesses in the order of 10 to the power of

10, and provides strong protection from
offline slow hash scenarios. It is

important to remember that Laravel has
excellent password rules out of the box,

including the ability to ensure a password
was not present in a previous data leak.

You can see the documentation for more
details, and we'll have links to this

package in the show notes for you as well.

Awesome. Let's talk about spies. So spies
many times is considered, uh, something

that you would, uh, think about in context
of a testing environment, and this is not

what we're talking about here. What we're
talking about is an HTTP spy. So the

Laravel Spy package is a lightweight
package that will allow you to track and

then log any outgoing HTTP requests in
your application. So you can launch this

with zero config, uh, so you can just
install it, and it'll immediately start

logging these requests. Uh, they could be
really useful for debugging and monitoring

any external API calls that are made from
within your own application. But if you

are a discerning developer, you might be
thinking of a couple of things that that

could cause problems with immediately,
such as sensitive fields, right? If you're

sending a request out and you have
sensitive fields that are a part of that

request, wouldn't you want to obfuscate
those? And the answer is, of course you

would. So that is where you do the
configuration. So you can configure which

URLs are included that you're interested
in logging. Maybe you don't want to log

every outgoing request. You only want to
log certain URLs that are going to be put

into the log, and you can do that. You can
also ensure that sensitive fields are

obfuscated by saying, "Here is the list of
fields I would like- make- like to make

sure are not included in the logging." Or
if they are included, they're gonna be

obfuscated so they're not usable by, um,
you know, dangerous folks that might be

looking at your database. The package uses
a global middleware to accomplish this,

and you can ensure that the requests are
cleaned up in production by using the

included spy clean artisan command. And,
of course, Paul Redman, everyone's

favorite human, is going to make sure, uh,
that he recommends that you configure

this package to remove those sensitive
fields, uh, before you use this in your

application. Really cool stuff there.
Thanks, Paul, for writing that one up.

Notable is a Laravel package that adds
polymorphic note functionality to any

eloquent model. It allows you to attach
notes and comments to models with creator

tracking, timestamps, and powerful query
scopes. The package is helpful for any

note-taking features you might need on a
model or for tools like auditing logs and

user feedback. It includes powerful query
scopes, and you can easily add note

support to a model using the hasNotables
trait, which will give you the ability to

call the addNote method when a customer
adds a note. You can support agent

responses in the context of a ticketing
system or a support system. Uh, you can

get notes with creator to get the
conversation history. You get- can get

notes from today, from this week, this
month in a given range of s- of dates, and

you can search notes for a particular
message. Uh, polymorphic relationships

allow you to attach notes to any eloquent
model. Tracking of who created each note

is also polymorphic. Automatic created at
and updated timestamps are added for

tracking of notes. There are powerful
query methods for filtering notes. It is

configurable, so you can customize table
names through configuration. There is an

easy integration using simple trace
bait... trait-based... trace bait?

-Trade-based-
-Trace-based

... implementation, and it is ready for
all of your Laravel applications from

version 10 and above. We'll have links to
that for you in the show notes.

Very cool.

This is, uh, interesting one. This
package, I feel like I wished it existed

way back in the day, um, and it may have,
because it's actually using Bootstrap

5 behind the scenes. Um, so if you still
happen to be using Bootstrap, then this is

great. Uh, if not, you might want to wait
a little bit before using this one,

because tails- Tailwind CSS support is
coming soon. What exactly am I talking

about?What we're talking about here is
Formelo. So Formelo is a level package

that is designed to automate the
generation of forms. Instead of creating

these forms manually with HTML, you can
leverage eloquent models to define the

structure of those forms. So you can think
about, "Hey, here are the attributes that

I have available to me for a eloquent
model." All that information can then be

used to say, "I am going to create an HTML
form specifically for that eloquent

model." Of course, that saves time, but
also ensures consistency across your

applications. So, according to the
developer, Formelo was created for

developers who need to generate forms
quickly without the overhead of a complete

admin panel but who also want a simpler,
more intuitive API than complex form

libraries. So the key features are that it
has easy form definitions using Laravel

classes. So if you can write an array, you
can write a form definition. Uh, it will

automatically render the form for you. It
has support for various field types, such

as dates, text fields, text inputs, text
areas. Uh, it's got customizable widgets

as well as mel- uh, as well as automatic
error handling, and displaying and form

validation integration, as I mentioned
before. Bootstrap 5 by default, but

Tailwind CSS is coming soon. So, the mini
version of the tutorial here is that if we

have an article, for example, you could
create an article form that extends

Formelo, and what you're gonna have there
is a create method, you're going to have

an edit method, and then you're gonna have
a fields method. So, create, uh, and edit

are going to define what type of verb
it's gonna be, post or patch, uh, the

action, the route where it's going to send
that stuff, and then the fields, of

course, is just what you would think. Here
is the name of the field, here is the

value it's gonna be coming through as, and
then here is the label that you're going

to have. If it's a select, of course,
you're gonna have something like choices,

um, et cetera. So if you already have a
model, you can use an artisan command to

generate this field for you automatically.
You just artisan make formelo, and then

pass along the model, model=article. It
will go ahead and do its very best to

guess which fields you're going to need
there. It's gonna generate that form for

you, and then you can use that by
rendering the form inside your blade.

What's that look like? Inside of your
controller action, you're going to new up

that form class that was just created for
you. You're gonna pass that through to

your front end blade. Uh, there is a
little bit of work you're gonna have to do

to set up. Uh, they're going to say,
"Include Bootstrap 5 assets," make sure

you do that. But also, you're gonna have
to include the formelo styles and scripts

using two directives that are included
inside of the package. And then all you do

is you $form

render. So that's it. Uh, really, really
simple there, and then it's gonna go ahead

and generate the HTML that would be
necessary in order for you to see those

form values on the front end there. Um, so
looks pretty interesting. I- I've not

seen what the form looks like on a front
end. I don't know how customizable that

is, um,

but if you're just looking for something
sort of quick and, like, "Hey, we need

just something that, that works," and- and
whatever, and it's maybe internal use,

I'm not exactly sure, may- maybe this
works great for you. Uh, again, it doesn't

have a whole lot to say about the
customizability of the forms that it's

creating. Um, maybe it does, maybe it
doesn't. I'm not sure. But, um, in any

case, seems like an interesting project.
So, check that one up. Thanks, Yannick,

for writing that one up.

Yeah. Looking, looking at the, the GitHub,
the README for it says that it is a

comprehensive form generation and handling
tool for Laravel applications that is

inspired by Django Forms.

Um, so it has built-in support for
Bootstrap 5 and support for Ta- Tailwind

CSS is coming soon. So, at the moment, it
looks like, uh, Bootstrap Form, so maybe

if you need it for your Laravel
applications that are using Tailwind at

the moment, hold off for the time being.
But it does give you the ability to, uh,

publish assets and things like that, so
it's entirely possible that you can

re-styler these things yourself. But, uh,
keep an eye out on that, because, you

know, we love a form builder. Makes life
nice and easy.

-Sure does.
-Okay. Tutorial time. We have four

tutorials. We have, uh, five framework
reminders this week, and we spoke last

week about the video series on, um,

better... What- what- how did we, how did
we term it? Let's have a look at the show

notes last, last time. We was talking
about, um... Oh, I just put a link to

Twitter, which doesn't help. Um...
Advanced Eloquent Mastery is the series

that, um, Harris was building, and he has
released now the first episode of that. So

let us go through, uh, first off, the
tutorials. Uh, first cab off the rank,

adding autocomplete to your Laravel
application. So if you've ever had to

implement a search feature that has become
hugely important for most applications

these days, uh, make sure that you are
valuing user experience so that users can

search what they need to see without
scrolling endlessly. In this tutorial,

written by Abdulrazak, uh, Jamiu-Ideye,

we will build a movie application that
leverages MongoDB's Atlas Search with

Laravel to build a rich text, uh, rich
text-based search feature that allows

users to search for movies by typing a few
letters.

Do you wanna take the rest or do you want
me to just fly through them all?

No, I'll- I'll go for the next one too.
Yeah.

-Perfect.
-I'll- I'll get the next one.

-Okay.
-No problem. Um...And the next one we're

looking at is the implementation of user
confirmation dialogs in Laravel Livewire

with the wire confirm property. So, uh, if
you've ever had to do this before, you

know, sometimes you reach for the default
confirmation dialog that you get with

JavaScript, which is very simple and works
really well, but it's not super

stylistically matching to maybe the rest
of your UI, right? It just feels a little

bit clunky sometimes. It's a native a- uh,
you know, native JavaScript API, and so,

eh, it, it's okay. But Livewire provides
developers with an intuitive approach to

implementing these confirmation dialogs
with this wire confirm directive. So, uh,

this feature addresses that common need
for preventing accidental execution of the

critical operations, like deleting
things, uh, while also maintaining your

code to be clean and declarative. So this,
uh, tutorial is gonna go through how you

can use that wire confirm directive
seamlessly so that your code continues to

stay clean and you get all the benefits of
those confirmation dialogs. I will say

that, uh, Flux has also been a godsend.
We've been using, uh, Livewire Flux, and

it has really been absolutely gorgeous and
really nice to work with. So if you're

looking, um... You know, this tutorial is
excellent, for sure, but if you're looking

for something that looks beautiful,
functions really well, and is just, uh,

really a pleasure to use straight outta
the box, you should definitely check out

Flux. A lot of hard work and effort has
been put into that by Caleb and the team

there, uh, at Livewire, so definitely
check that one out, as well as this

tutorial. Thanks, Harris Refotopoulos, for
writing this one up.

Yeah. Uh, what have I got here next?
Optimizing Laravel Livewire performance

with computed properties. Uh, so this is
something that, that was, I think, in

like, Livewire version two, it was a bit
problematic, where it would always have to

compute. If you were returning
collections and things like that, it would

have to keep doing these things all the
time. Now Livewire provides you with a

computed attribute that you can attach to
your methods, and they will expose these

things in such a way that they're not
recalculated every time your component is

re-rendered in the browser. So, uh,
definitely check that out if you have ever

run into, you know, the mysterious
performance issues of your Livewire

components before.

Okay, last tutorial before we get into the
framework reminders. This is by Samuel

Stancil, really, really smart dude. And
the title of this one is Using SQLite in

Production with Laravel. So, SQLite is the
actual default, I believe, now for

Laravel. When you spin up a new
application, it uses SQLite by default,

and it is a really good database for many,
if not most Laravel applications

when it's well configured. And that's sort
of the trick, right? We're gonna get to

that, uh, but it can provide great
performance even if your app has a lot of

concurrent requests. But why would you use
it over MySQL? When is SQLite going to be

the best for you? Uh, what are the main
benefits of SQLite? Um, et cetera, et

cetera, and on you go. So, what do you
need to be aware of when you're wanting to

use this in production? Do you need to
use something like Turso, which is like,

hosted SQLite? So, if you've been
interested in using SQLite in production

and you want to know sort of the gotchas
or the things that you need to be aware of

before deploying this as your production
database, you should definitely give a

look through this tutorial. It's gonna
talk about the different modes, uh, for

SQLite that allow you to unlock really
good potential performance, um, as well as

like, rollback mode, data types that you
can use inside of SQLite, um,

transactions. By default, transactions
don't acquire locks until you need them,

for example, so how do you make sure that
that's all set to go? Um, and, and just a

couple other pieces that you would want,
uh, if you were deploying this. So, recap.

Using wall mode, mindful of data types,
uh, use this override, uh, that he

includes here only until PHP 8.5, but
something you need to be aware of in any

case. So, definitely check that one out if
SQLite is something you've played around

with and you'd like to deploy that to your
production application. Uh, a couple

things you're definitely gonna want to be
aware of in that case. Thanks, Samuel, for

writing that one up. And we've only got
framework reminders left, my friend, so

I'm gonna let you roll through there, and
then we've got a video to cap off the end

here. Um, and I'll let you take that one,
too.

Perfect. So, our five framework reminders
this week. First up, enhanced queue job

control with Laravel's
throttlesExceptionsFailWhen method. We

have streamlining application automation
with Laravel's task sched- scheduler,

Laravel's enhanced string validation with
inverse methods,

building cross-platform alerts with
Laravel's notification framework, and

preserving data integrity with Laravel's
soft deletes for recovery and compliance.

This is your homework for this week. It's
always good to keep an eye out for

Harris's, um, framework reminders where,
you know, we will talk about things at a

very high level, we will say, "This new
feature has been introduced in this new

release of the framework." Harris goes and
spends a lot of time going through these

kinds of things and fleshing them out,
providing more content, providing, uh,

visual aids, providing code examples and
usage examples, and things like that, that

we just don't have the capacity or the
ability to do on the podcast without

dragging each episode out to longer than
it needs to be. So, definitely check those

out. Keep your eyes peeled. It was great
to catch up with and meet, uh, Harris

face-to-face in Denver, uh, about a month
ago now. So, uh, definitely check him out.

He's a great guy and does some wonderful
work. And speaking of Harris, as I said,

he's started his, uh, new series. I
believe it's been renamed now to Laravel

in Practice. The first video, nine minutes
in length give or take, talks about

you, uh, how you can stop writing a bad
controller. So, we've all written a

controller, the one that's got, you know,
15 lines of business calculations that

you've copied to three different places.
In this latest, or this first video, he

shows how Laravel's custom collection
methods can transform these messy

controllers into clean, reusable code

that actually makes sense. This is a
series that he's publishing on

our YouTube channel. We have links to that
for you in the show notes so you can, uh,

like, subscribe, hit the bell, do all the
things, uh, and keep your eyes out for

that series.

Excellent. Folks, that wraps us up,
episode 244. Thanks so much for hanging

out with us. You can find show notes for
this episode at podcast.laravel-news/244.

If you liked the show, we would really
appreciate it if you'd rate it up in your

podcatcher of choice. Five stars would be
absolutely incredible. And of course, if

you have any questions or comments, we'd
love to hear from you on Twitter, on X, on

Bluesky, all of the places,
@MichaelDerenda, @JacobBennett, or

@LaravelNews. All right, folks. Two weeks
now, two weeks later, two weeks from now.

We'll see you then. See ya.

Bye.