Tag: laravel

Laravel Notifications support a number of channels, such as email, SMS and Slack. If you follow their documentation for sending Slack notifications you’ll need to setup a bot user with an OAuth token.

If you were creating a new Slack ‘app’ to receive messages this would be the way to go. In my case though I was refactoring some Logging which used the Slack channel with a webhook URL setup. The Slack interface didn’t allow me to setup or find the bot user/OAuth token for an existing App.

In order to use the Notifications class with a webhook I needed to send a simpler message structure than what you see in the docs and use slightly different service configuration.

Slack Service Config

In config/services.php

<?php

return [
    'slack' => [
        'webhook_url' => env('LOG_SLACK_WEBHOOK_URL'),

        /*
       Use a webhook_url instead of the bot_user_oauth_token structure

        'notifications' => [
             'bot_user_oauth_token' => env('SLACK_BOT_USER_OAUTH_TOKEN'),
             'channel' => env('SLACK_BOT_USER_DEFAULT_CHANNEL'),
        ],
       */
    ],
];

Instead of calling the text, headerBlock, contextBlock type methods I just called content()

<?php

namespace App\Notifications;

use Illuminate\Notifications\Messages\SlackMessage;
use Illuminate\Notifications\Notification;

class CafeNotification extends Notification
{
    public function via(object $notifiable): array
    {
        return ['slack'];
    }

    public function toSlack(object $notifiable): SlackMessage
    {
        return (new SlackMessage)
            ->content($theMessageGoesHere)
            ->unfurlLinks(false);
    }
}

This was enough to get simple notifications going without having to recreate my Slack app in order to setup a bot user and token.

I’m in the process of upgrading my coffee discovery app HadCoffee to Laravel 11. Shift did most of the work, but you always have to tweak a few things.

I found that although my test suite passed locally, the Chipper CI builds were still failing on tests that touched Redis, or cache (which uses Redis in my case).

I needed to update the env variables to connect to Redis. Maybe you do too if you’re on this page 🙂

I’m using the Predis client.

REDIS_CLIENT=predis
REDIS_HOST=127.0.0.1
REDIS_PASSWORD=null
REDIS_PORT=6379

Laravel makes it easy to add created_at and updated_at fields to your models. Just include the ->timestamps() shorthand in the migration, and use public $timestamps = true on the model.

Sometimes though you’ll have high-volume models such as an event log that record immutable things that will never be updated. Storing a redundant updated_at can be a bit wasteful if you’ll never need it, and it tells you nothing new.

It’s easy to customise the behaviour, but perhaps a little hard to discover. I missed it in my searching until Jess Archer told me it was supported.

In the migration

Define your migration like so:

<?php
// ...

return new class extends Migration
{
    public function up(): void
    {
        Schema::create('my_table', function(Blueprint $table) {
            $table->smallIncrements('id');
            $table->timestamp('created_at', 0)->nullable();
            // define created_at on its own
        });
    }
}

In the model

By default Laravel will attempt to write to the updated_at column. If you don’t have one it will error.

You can easily disable it like so:

<?php

namespace App\Models;

use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Factories\HasFactory;
use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Model;

class MyModel extends Model
{
    public $timestamps = true;

    const UPDATED_AT = null;

    //...
}

Done 🙂

I recently got stuck writing a test for a Controller which uses a custom form request for validation and authorization. Though the form request worked correctly for real requests in the browser, it was being ignored from the Feature test. In other words the Controller action would run even with invalid test input and even when the form request was hard-coded to specifically block authorization.

Incorrect Approach

I had been creating the form request, instantiating the Controller I wanted to test and sending the request. This bypassed the checks, presumably because the middleware that triggers validation isn’t run in this context.

function test_invalid_request()
{
  $request = CafeStoreRequest::create('cafe', 'POST', ['cafe_name' => '']); //should fail
  $controller = new App\Http\Controllers\CafeController();
  $response = $controller->store($request);

  $response->assertSessionHasErrors(['cafe_name']);
}

What Worked

Instead of manually creating a controller, I needed to route the request through the HTTP layer so that the middleware would do its thing and trigger the appropriate error.

function test_invalid_input()
{
  $response = $this->post(route('cafe.store', ['cafe_name' => '']));
  $response->assertSessionHasErrors(['cafe_name']);
}

The Eloquent ORM in Laravel makes it easy to pull in related models using the ::with() method.  It’s very useful and can solve the N+1 Query problem that can occur when accessing related models in a loop from the parents records.

<?php
$data = MyParentModel->with('ChildModel');

You’d commonly want to use this when accessing a particular parent model using the ::find() or ::findOrFail() method. The trap can be that with() must be called before findOrFail().

If you chain methods and call findOrFail() first it will be ignored and your result set will include all parent rows!

<?php
$data = MyParentModel->with('ChildModel')->findOrFail($parent_id);

Laravel 4 used a function that checked the servers hostname to determine the environment. Laravel 5 simplifies environment detection by having a .env file present in your project root.

.env.example is ignored by Laravel’s detection. You can fill it with the keys your application expects to act an an example for your own file.

.env is for the current environment

Add .env to your .gitignore file. It’s got to stay out of your repo so you don’t overwrite it each time you pull.
Copy/Rename .env.example to .env for each environment.

set the APP_ENV value within your .env file to tell Laravel where it’s running.

APP_ENV=local
APP_DEBUG=true
APP_KEY=123abc...

$app->environment(); //get the current environment
if($app->environment('local', 'staging')) { }  //test if local or staging env

You can retrieve your .env config values with the env() function.

$cfgValue = env('MY_SWEETAS_VARIABLE');