Supercharge Your Laravel Development and Get AI to Understand Your Models
Hey there, Laravel enthusiasts! Today, I'm diving into a nifty trick that'll make getting AI to understand your Laravel model structures a breeze. We'll harness the power of bash scripting and AI to analyze our migrations quickly and efficiently. Let's get started!
As our Laravel projects grow, so does the complexity of our database structures. Migrations pile up, relationships intertwine, and before you know it, you're drowning in a sea of Schema::create and up functions. Wouldn't it be great to get a bird's-eye view of our models without manually sifting through dozens of files? What if you could get AI to understand your Laravel project without adding every file to the chat window?
Here's where our dynamic duo comes in a clever bash one-liner and your favorite AI chat tool (like ChatGPT or Claude). We'll use bash to extract the relevant parts of our migrations and then feed that information to an AI for analysis and insights.
Here's the one-liner code to copy and paste:
First, let's break down our bash sorcery to understand what's going on in an easier-to-read format:
Just add | pbcopy to have it copied directly to your clipboard on Mac:
This command does the following:
Please copy the entire output from your terminal and paste it into your AI chat of choice with your preferred prompt. I usually start with this prompt:
Generate a diagram
Here are some additional prompts you can optionally pair with the output to extract valuable insights and improvements:
There you have it, folks! With this simple bash one-liner and the power of AI, you can transform how you analyze and understand your Laravel database structures and output code. Give it a try on your next project, and watch your productivity soar!
Remember, tools like these are meant to augment your skills, not replace them. Always review AI suggestions critically and trust your developer instincts.
Using Laravel Vite with MAMP
As seen in other posts, I use MAMP quite a bit for my web development environment. I know I can run docker, or any of the other platforms out there but they use more memory and resources that I'd prefer to devote to my dev tools.
I started a new Laravel project and wanted to use MAMP but Vite was throwing errors due to the SSL not matching out of the box.
When adding
to my blade file, I'd get errors including:
I found articles saying to add --https or --host to my package json command but then I got this error:
Load MAMP Pro, add your host and generate your SSL certificates. For this example, we'll use set the host name to my-app.test, and assume you're storing the SSL keys in the default location.
Open vite.config.js and add the following 2 lines:
Then add this to defineConfig section:
You should now be able to run npm run dev and have no issues.
Sample full vite.config.js file for easy reference:
Add GTM to Gatsby using Helmet
One of my devs needed to add Google Tag Manager (GTM) to an older Gatsby project we built and he was running into issues implementing the GTM code provided by Google since the react-google-tag-manager package required a newer version of Gatsby and its dependencies.
The issue turned out to be that the strings needed to be escaped for Helmet/React to process it correctly. If you're using an older version of Gatsby, the snippet below should help you add GTM and call your events as needed. Just add it to your main template file.
How to Setup CI/CD of Jigsaw Site to Digital Ocean Droplet Using Bitbucket Pipelines
I created a new personal resume site and decided I wanted to build a static site since it wouldn't be frequently updated. I evaluated Nuxt, Gatsby, and a few others but settled on Jigsaw, a static site generator based on Laravel. I had never used it before and figured this would be a good learning experience while building something I needed. I was pleasantly surprised by how easy it is to use and setup, so kudos to the Tighten team for putting together such an elegant solution.
I wanted to get a CI/CD pipeline configured to handle the site's deployment but couldn't find any working tutorials, so I'm sharing my solution in case it helps others. I'm using Bitbucket for this since it's a personal private repo, so I'm using Bitbucket Pipelines.
After you enable pipelines for your project, you'll need to configure a Pipelines Repository Variable in your project. Go to the settings tab in your repo, and then select Repository variables:
Add 3 variables:
Generate an SSH key (or use your own) and add it to your server under the SSH Keys tab in Pipelines:
I generated a new key and then added it to ~/.ssh/authorized_keys for the account.
Add this YAML snippet to your bitbucket-pipelines.yml in your root. This will use PHP 7.4, install rsync, node + npm, composer, and build the production version of the site to deploy to the specified folder.
The -aVP switch for rsync is to give me verbose progress feedback so I can see what's happening. If you don't need the detail, switch it to -a.
I received a few errors when rsync ran. In case you run into them as well, here's the list and fixes. The first was:
rsync: failed to set times on "$FOLDER": Operation not permitted (1)
I added --no-t to resolve that and then got a new error:
rsync: failed to set permissions on "$FOLDER": Operation not permitted (1)
which was fixed with adding the switch --no-perms. My final rsync command became:
How to use Backblaze B2 with Laravel
I am working on a Laravel project and decided to use a Backblaze bucket as it's cheaper for storage when compared to AWS S3. I couldn't find a tutorial on how to get it working from scratch and I tested a bunch of Laravel B2 libraries that didn't end up working. The good news is that you don't need a special B2 plugin and instead can use the S3 package recommended by the Laravel docs.
If you haven't added the flysystem-aws-s3 package, add it to your project using composer:
Login to your B2 account and create your bucket with your required settings. Once created, you'll want to create a new application key with the permissions you need for your app. You should get a confirmation once it's generated:
Open your .env file and locate the settings for AWS. You'll need to add one key that's not there by default:
Match the settings in your .env from the application key to the values below.
Now you should be able to call the Laravel storage system like normal:
How to Clear Archive & Read-only flags on Files in Windows in Bulk
I ran into an issue where I had to move files from one system to another and was running into issues because files had been set as read-only, had the archive flag set, or both. It was causing the system to skip files which wasn't acceptable. Normally you could just use Windows to clear it in bulk, but that could potentially mess up file permissions. I needed a way to automatically just clear all flags but respect permissions.
I did some searching and didn't find a utility that would do the job and most of the solutions I found required Powershell which wasn't available on the system I was on. I ended up writing a quick console application in C# to do the trick. I've made it free and open sourced it in case anyone wants to use it.
If you need just the app, you can find the release build here with instructions. The app also prompts for input to make things a bit easier to use. There's no install, no tracking or metrics, or anything else related to privacy concerns in this app. It's a simple throwaway utility to get the job done and move on.
https://github.com/gregvarghese/clearflags/releases/tag/1.0.0
If you want to see the source code, that is available here:
https://github.com/gregvarghese/clearflags/
Please note that I did this in about 10 minutes for my own use so error handling is pretty much non-existent. I mention this because I did run into one issue where Windows was somehow seeing a folder with files in it as a file and it couldn't be deleted or renamed and the utility couldn't get past it until it was resolved. I didn't spend much time debugging and just used my Mac to rename the folder and Windows was able to recognize it after the change, so the utility was able to continue processing.
How to Generate a Page for Each Day of Month in Microsoft Word using VBA
I briefly joined my wife at her practice to help her grow the business and figure out how to make things more efficient. One of the things I learned is that my wife created a sign-in sheet for the office in Microsoft Word. Every week she would open the file and manually enter the date for each day of the week and then print out the documents. I took over the responsibility for a month and it annoyed me due to how inefficient the process was and I decided to automate the entire thing. I couldn't find a solution to the problem online so I had to roll my own and am sharing the code in case someone else can benefit from it.
The script will calculate the first day and last day of the month and then do a loop to append the date in the "Day, Month day, Year" format (i.e. Thursday July 17, 2019) to a text field.
There are a few important steps involved to get the script working as is:
Open up Word, then open up VBA, and copy and paste this snippet into a module. When you run the function, it'll create a copy for every day of the month. I also created a function to start at a specific date in case you run it in the middle of the month.
How to Automate Sending Emails through Outlook interop using C#
I was tasked with a tricky issue in sending emails. Due to security concerns, the client's IT team was not willing to share SMTP information for their mail settings and was only willing to set up an account in Outlook directly on a dedicated machine without sharing the password with us to send the emails. The client's ask was to send emails through Outlook without letting users see the emails or Outlook itself.
Sending emails through Outlook can be done using Microsoft.Office.Interop.Outlook but the documentation is really lacking. If you need to do the same, I hope this will save you the hours of time it took me to figure out what ends up not being complex code.
Create a new desktop application project in Visual Studio. Install the Microsoft Office Interop for Outlook. I used the NuGet package manager to install it since it wasn't present on my system:
I created a static class to send the email through Outlook. Note that my error handling code was replaced with Debug.Writeline. Remember to modify it to handle errors or implement logging so it doesn't fail silently.
Email.cs:
Example on how to call the class:
email.html:
How to Extract Text from image using Laravel and Amazon Rekognition API
I'm currently working on a project that requires extracting text from images of variable quality. I'm doing quick prototypes using PHP and Laravel, but I've found the documentation for accomplishing this a bit lacking. After working on it for a bit, I figured out a really simple solution and am sharing in case it helps anyone else.
This sample will send the image to the API as a blob instead of using a URL. I had tried Base64 encoding it without any luck. I discovered that using Imagick was the easiest way to make this work so the sample relies on that.
Fire up terminal and add a requirement for aws/aws-sdk-php:
Add keys for your AWS access keys and region to your .ENV file:
Create a controller, add the snippet below, and create a route to the controller. Check the URL and you should have a dump showing the array returned from AWS with all the text, bounding boxes, and information.
How to Execute a Stored Procedure in Laravel 5.6
I've been stumped on this and tried everything I can think of but I can't get Laravel to execute a working mysql query to reorder an ordering column when deleting a row.
Here's a sample simplified query, which works directly in mysql:
Laravel code that doesn't update the database but throws no errors:
Other things I've tried which throw errors including saying there's an error in the query:
I've also tried splitting it the statements with no luck:
I tried a few other things which I didn't log in Git but I had no luck getting any of it to work. I asked for help on the forums and people told me to use Laravel's Eloquent model to update rows one by one which is pretty inefficient. You get extra trips over the network (especially important when the code is not on the same server as the database server since you can get dropped calls), extra connections to the server, the extra overhead of processing the query on the server and in the database, etc instead of just having mysql make the update.
The recommended solution may not seem like a big deal but I've run into issues where client connections have been dropped mid-update and left a table partially renumbered.
As a last resort and workaround, I opted to use a stored procedure to accomplish my goal. That presented its own can of worms as searching for examples on how to execute stored procedures in Laravel 5.x was also not easy. There's nothing in the documentation and all the examples I found didn't work.
Here's what worked for me with Laravel 5.6, with mySQL 5.6.38: