Lessons I've learnt from developing a large Laravel project

For those of you who don’t know me, I’m a huge Laravel fan. I recently finished up a large project for a client, and I learnt many important things along the way. Below, you’ll see features of Laravel I used and loved in Laravel to make the development cycle much more enjoyable (and painless). By no means should you feel like you have to, these are merely just tips I’ve found that helped me.

Middleware is awesome - use it. Middlware allowed me to very easily filter out users who had been added to the portal, but had not activated their account. It also gave me the ability to block access to users who once had an account in this portal, but were now “archived” and no longer able to log in and make changes. Middleware is easily applied/removed to routes as you require, so use them when you can!

Form Request validators can help you save time. The Form Request classes allow you to easily abstract your form submissions into a separate step/file which in my opinion, makes for cleaner code. The portal I developed had a number of different models, and having one validation Form Request for each made it so easily to ensure the data submitted would be validated correctly. Type hinting is amazing.

Home(stead) is where the heart is. Just in case you didn’t know, Homestead is a pre-configured development environment for Vagrant that makes it painless to develop your PHP site with a modern toolset. Technically, Homestead is created for Laravel, but you can use it for any PHP project! I have the VMware Integration for Vagrant which I find to be a fair bit faster, but if you’re just checking Homestead out , the VirtualBox adapter should be more than enough.

Eloquent accessors and mutators are fantastic. Instead of jamming your create/update methods with formatting of different attributes of a model, use mutators and accessors to automatically handle all those little tasks. For example, in a project I needed an attribute to be stored in the database as JSON, but when accessed within the project, it’s automatically formatted to an array by the Eloquent model. When that array is modified throughout the lifetime of the application and then saved back to the database, it’s converted to a JSON string. It can be tempting to include validation in mutators, but I would recommend against doing that. For the most part, use it as a way to convert or format one thing to another.

Forge and Envoyer are a match made in heaven. When it came to deploying this project, I had the opportunity to deploy to a VPS, rather than a bog-standard Apache web host. I decided to deploy to DigitalOcean using Forge then continuosly deploy using Envoyer. The initial configuration of Forge + Envoyer was a bit confusing, but luckily Laracasts came to the rescue. After I got my head around how the two worked together, all updates I’ve done to the project since have been easily deployed with virtually no hassle at all.

Finally,

Testing… 1, 2, 3, testing… In Laravel 5.0.x, I was using Jeffrey Way’s Integrated testing utility, which got merged into Laravel core in 5.1. The aforementioned testing utility allows one to write tests in a more self-explanatory way. What that means is rather than getting down and dirty with PHPUnit, you can write tests like $this->visit('/')->see('Hello!'); which reads much better.

By the way, if you’re interested in signing up with DigitalOcean, please use my referral link. I scratch your back, you scratch mine :)