Forem: Chandresh Singh

Create your first Laravel Project on Docker using Laravel Sail

Chandresh Singh — Mon, 22 Feb 2021 08:31:08 +0000

There are multiple ways to develop and run Laravel project on your system but here is the easiest way to create your Laravel project on docker using Laravel Sail which is a light weight command line interface for interacting with Laravel's docker configuration.

All you need to do is install docker on your system, you can use either Docker cli or Docker Desktop and rest of the thing are all taken care by Laravel Sail.

Before we start, if you want then you can also watch this tutorial.

Let's Start!

To install Docker Desktop, Click here.

After Docker is installed and running, run the following command to create a new Laravel Project.

curl -s https://laravel.build/example-app | bash

After your project is created, go inside your application directory and start Laravel Sail.

cd example-app

./vendor/bin/sail up

Once done, You can access your application at http://localhost.

You can execute all your commands like this:

./vendor/bin/sail php --version

./vendor/bin/sail node --version

./vendor/bin/sail php artisan list

You can also create an alias for sail if you don't want to type vendor/bin/sail repeatedly.

alias sail='bash vendor/bin/sail'

Then you can execute your commands like this:

sail php --version

sail node --version

sail php artisan list

To stop all your containers, you can type Ctrl+C or you can also use sail down command.

Hope you find this useful.

Beginner's Guide to using Git

Chandresh Singh — Mon, 31 Aug 2020 13:39:05 +0000

Want to know How to use Git in your project?
It's really simple.

Let me show you the easiest way to do that. I would suggest you to follow this tutorial on your system and by the end of this tutorial, you would have learned about all the git commands that you will be using in your new project.

If you would like to watch the live examples then you can watch it here:

Let's start with some theory.

Don't worry it won't be long and i'll try to keep it really simple.

So, What is git?
Git is a distributed version-control system for tracking changes in source code during software development.

Here is how it looks like to track changes with and without using git.

if you try to track changes in 1 file, after 10 changes you are gonna end up with 10 versions of your file using traditional approach.

However if you are using git then you only have worry about a single file and git will track the changes for you.

This is just an example for 1 file but we all know that a real project contains hundreds of such files.

You now know, why we use git? but Why do we say it is a distributed version-control system?

Using git, Each developer has a local copy with full history and changes and a copy of code can be kept on server which is where services like GitHub and bitbucket comes into picture.

So anytime you make a change in your code and want to share with other developer, you just have to push your changes onto these services and the other developer can pull the changes from there.

And... that's all the theory that you need to know.

To install git on your system, Visit https://git-scm.com/downloads and download the software and install it on your system.

Once installation is done, Open your terminal and type

git config —global user.name “Your name”
git config —global user.email “Your email”

Your name and email are displayed with every commit you make, like this:

Let's start with an empty folder.

Create a new file and write some code in it and save it as say file1.html.

The first thing you need to do when you want start using git in your project is to initialise git using command:

git init

Note: If you already have a repository online then copy the repository url and then you can clone the repository using this command
git clone your_repository_url

Now add all the files to staging which will be then be added to the commit.

git add -A

You can check the changes which are to be committed using command:

git status

Changes in files which are shown in green will be part of the commit that you will make.

To commit your changes, type

git commit -m “your message”

This will create a new commit.

If you check the status now then you will see that there aren’t changes done after your commit.

You can check you commits history using command:

git log

Each commit has a unique hash and you can see the author who made this commit and commit message here.

Make some changes in your file and make another commit as done above.

Make some more changes and create a new file say file2.html and save it.

Type git status and you will see untracked files and un-staged changes in red.

Now if you just want to add file1 changes to your new commit then you can type.

git add file1_path

And if you check the status then it will only show you file1 in green.

Now you can make a commit if you want just like we did before but what if you change your mind and want to add file2 as well in new commit. Type "git add -A" and it will add the files.

Commit these changes like we did before.

Now Let’s say you want to check the code of your project for a specific commit. How would you do that?

Just copy the hash code of that commit from commits history and then use this command:

git checkout hash

And you can see the code of our project for that particular commit.

Check git log again and it will show you only commits till your checkout commit.

But now let’s say you want to checkout to your latest commit.
Type

git checkout your_branch_name

Our branch name is master(It’s created by default for you when your initialise git in a project.) in this case.

Check "git log" and you will see all your commit and you are at your latest commit code in master branch.

Now let’s say you want to work on a feature but don’t want to disturb your current branch. You can create a new branch for that.
Type

git checkout -b new_branch_name

Here we are switching to a new branch with all commit till currently checked out commit in current branch. Here “-b” flag is used to create a new branch and git checkout command to switch to new branch.

Let’s make some changes again.

Create a new commit and if we check our log then we can see that new commit has been done in our new branch.

Now Let’s say you are done with your feature code and want to switch to master branch.
Type

git checkout branch_name

and we are back to our default branch that we were working on.

To merge the changes in made in feature1 branch with your master branch. Type

git merge branch_name_from_which_you_want_to_merge_changes

And this will merge all your changes from feature1 branch to your current branch that is master branch in this case.

Check "git log" and we now have the feature1 changes in master branch.

So you are done with all the changes and want to share your code with someone or may be just want to keep your changes on a service say GitHub.

For that go to GitHub.com and create a new account if you don’t already have one.

Create a new repository.

Select if you want to make your repository public or private. I’m gonna select private.

Click on Create repository

Copy the command here to add remote origin in your local repository.

Type

git push origin branch_name

and this will push all your code in master branch to GitHub.

If you want to share the repository with a team member or a collaborator.

Go to settings.

Click on “Manage Access”

Click on “Invite a collaborator”. Type in their GitHub username or email if and they will receive an invite from you.

Once they accept your invite you can see them in your collaborators list.

Now let’s say your team member accepts your invite, and make a change into it.

Most likely your team member will first clone the repository on his or her local machine and then push the code on GitHub after making a change.

So how will you take the change from GitHub to your local.

Type

git pull origin branch_name

And this will pull in the latest changes from GitHub in master branch to your local.

And that's all you need to know to start using git in any project.

Hope you find this helpful!

Setup Queue with Serverless Laravel using bref

Chandresh Singh — Mon, 10 Aug 2020 13:49:54 +0000

This tutorial assumes you already have a Serverless Laravel setup in place, if not then you can follow this tutorial "Deploy Serverless Laravel"

Let's see how we can setup AWS SQS with our Serverless Laravel Application.

If you would like to see me doing it then you can watch it here as well.

Let’s Start

First thing we need to do is pull in this package in your laravel application using composer.

composer require bref/laravel-bridge

If you followed the previous tutorial then you should already be having serverless.yml file in your Laravel application directory. Make sure it looks something like this:

service: laravel-starter-serverless

provider:
    name: aws
    region: ap-south-1
    runtime: provided

plugins:
    - ./vendor/bref/bref

package:
  exclude:
    - node_modules/**
    - public/storage
    - resources/assets/**
    - storage/**
    - tests/**

functions:
    website:
        handler: public/index.php
        timeout: 28 # in seconds (API Gateway has a timeout of 29 seconds)
        layers:
            - ${bref:layer.php-73-fpm}
        events:
            -   http: 'ANY /'
            -   http: 'ANY /{proxy+}'
    artisan:
        handler: artisan
        timeout: 120 # in seconds
        layers:
            - ${bref:layer.php-73} # PHP
            - ${bref:layer.console} # The "console" layer
    worker:
        handler: worker.php
        layers:
          - ${bref:layer.php-73}
        events:
          # Declares that our worker is triggered by jobs in SQS
            - sqs:
                arn: !GetAtt AlertQueue.Arn
                # If you create the queue manually, the line above could be:
                # arn: 'arn:aws:sqs:us-east-1:1234567890:my_sqs_queue'
                # Only 1 item at a time to simplify error handling
                batchSize: 1

resources:
  Resources:
    # The SQS queue
    AlertQueue:
      Type: AWS::SQS::Queue
      Properties:
        RedrivePolicy:
          maxReceiveCount: 3 # jobs will be retried up to 3 times
          # Failed jobs (after the retries) will be moved to the other queue for storage
          deadLetterTargetArn: !GetAtt DeadLetterQueue.Arn

    # Failed jobs will go into that SQS queue to be stored, until a developer looks at these errors
    DeadLetterQueue:
      Type: AWS::SQS::Queue
      Properties:
        MessageRetentionPeriod: 1209600 # maximum retention: 14 days

Here we are creating a new lambda function which will act as a worker for our queue and will be invoked by a new job event from SQS.

We are also creating two queues in SQS, first one will act as a queue for processing jobs and second will be used for failed jobs.

Now, Create a new file worker.php inside application directory which will handle SQS event in AWS lambda.

<?php declare(strict_types=1);

use Bref\LaravelBridge\Queue\LaravelSqsHandler;
use Illuminate\Foundation\Application;

require __DIR__ . '/vendor/autoload.php';
/** @var Application $app */
$app = require __DIR__ . '/bootstrap/app.php';

$kernel = $app->make(Illuminate\Contracts\Console\Kernel::class);
$kernel->bootstrap();

return $app->makeWith(LaravelSqsHandler::class, [
    'connection' => 'sqs', // this is the Laravel Queue connection
    'queue' => getenv('SQS_QUEUE'),
]);

Now we need to make a small change in config/queue.php file to add AWS session token. This may not be an issue in the latest version of laravel.

       'sqs' => [
            ...
            'token' => env('AWS_SESSION_TOKEN'),
        ],

Set two environment variables in .env file.

QUEUE_CONNECTION=sqs
AWS_DEFAULT_REGION=ap-south-1

Now before we deploy our code we need to provide permission to AWS IAM user which you created for deploying Serverless Laravel.

So login into your AWS account and go to IAM.

Click on users link and then Select your user.

Select the policy and Click on Edit policy

Click on add additional permission.

Choose SQS in service.

I’m giving it full access to SQS but you can selectively give it READ and WRITE access.

Select all resource in resources.

Click on review policy.

If you get a popup asking for deleting older version of policy then click on delete version and save.

and That’s it.

Type

serverless deploy

and this will take care of setting up your queue and lambda function.

If you get internal server error then try running:

php artisan config:cache
#to build all cache files

And then

php artisan config:clear
#to remove config cache file

Try again and this time you should see the welcome screen. Try sending a job to queue from your laravel application and you will see that that queue jobs are being processed instantly.

One thing to note here is this /dev/ prefix before every route.

This is because of AWS API Gateway which works in stages.
If you want to remove this then you will have to setup a custom domain for your application on AWS or you will need to take this into account before using any route.

If you have followed till now you should be having a working queue with your serverless laravel application.

Hope you find this useful!

csinghdev / laravel-starter-serverless

This repository uses Bref(https://bref.sh) to create a serverless application which can be deployed on AWS Lambda. The application provides everything you need to get started with Laravel APIs development.

About Laravel-Starter

This Starter Application acts as starting point for application development. A lot of things which needs to be taken care of during REST API Development are already present here.

How to deploy Serverless Laravel Application on AWS Lambda using bref?

Following are the list of things taken care of:

JWT pre-installed
Authentication APIs are ready to use
Consistent Response in all APIs and Exception Handling
Registration API
Email Verification APIs
Forgot Password APIs
API Logging
Backup automation and management
Laravel Telescope for debugging in local environment
TDD (Test Driven Development) setup using phpunit

Want to do it yourself?

Here are the video tutorials you can follow to do it by yourself.

Create a new Laravel Project	JWT installation and Setup	Auth APIs using JWT
Consistent Response in REST APIs - Part I	Consistent Response in REST APIs - Part II	Registration API
Email Verification APIs	Forgot Password APIs

…

View on GitHub

Deploy Serverless Laravel application using bref

Chandresh Singh — Mon, 27 Jul 2020 09:04:03 +0000

Let me show you a way to deploy your Laravel application on AWS Lambda for free! using bref.

Why not Laravel Vapor?
Laravel Vapor is great and if you can spend a little money then I would highly recommend that. It provides you with a nice dashboard for managing all you serverless applications and because it's built by Taylor Otwell (Creator of Laravel), So the integration and the support provided is great.

But if you are just starting out with serverless and want to test few Laravel applications then this tutorial is for you.

If you would like to watch me doing this then you can also watch this tutorial:

If you are not familiar with concept of serverless then it’s just an approach to running application without managing, configuring and provisioning servers.

You won’t have to worry about scaling it even at times of peak load.
You won’t have to pay a fixed price.
You will only pay for the actual use which is calculated in terms of execution time and no. of executions.

Sounds nice!
Let's see how this can be done?

First requirement is to have an AWS account. If you don’t have one, you can easily create one and with free tier plan you can get started for free.

Once you have have it, Install serverless framework as global dependency using npm

npm install -g serverless

Next we need AWS access keys.

To create them go to IAM management console of your AWS account and create a new user with programatic access.

We need to attach a new policy for this user to provide selective access to AWS services.

Click on "Select existing policies directly" and then click on "Create policy" button.

Select JSON tab.

Copy and paste the json below and Click on Review Policy

Give it a name and Click on create policy.

Go back to your create user page, Refresh the list, Search for your policy. Select policy and click on Next

Click next and finally click on Create User.

Copy the access key id and secret access key and Setup AWS Keys using this command.

serverless config credentials --provider aws --key <key> --secret <secret>

Your serverless framework setup is done here.

To integrate bref in your existing laravel project.

First pull in bref package using composer.

composer require bref/bref

Create a new file serverless.yml inside your project directory using this command.

php artisan vendor:publish --tag=serverless-config

Now you can edit serverless.yml as per your requirement.

Next we need to change the location of compiled view and a few other things like changing session driver to cookie and log channel to standard error in environment (.env) file.

Open .env file and add following:

CACHE_DRIVER=array
VIEW_COMPILED_PATH=/tmp/storage/framework/views
SESSION_DRIVER=array
LOG_CHANNEL=stderr

Another issues that I faced was with caching and changing cache driver to array solved that for me. So if you get errors related to caching then you can try changing this.

CACHE_DRIVER=array

Please note that you can not use localhost for your mysql database here, So you have deploy it on another server and add the credentials here, Or you can even use AWS RDS service.

Next we need to make changes in app service provider so that if compiled view directory is not present then it should recreate it automatically.

So copy and paste below section in boot method of app/Providers/AppServiceProvider.php

public function boot()
    {
        //
        // Make sure the directory for compiled views exist
        if (! is_dir(config('view.compiled'))) {
            mkdir(config('view.compiled'), 0755, true);
        }
    }

Now since laravel caching breaks in AWS lambda because of different file paths, However it also breaks without package’s and service cache, So to build all cache files run

php artisan config:cache

And to remove config cache file run

php artisan config:clear

And That’s it

To deploy it on AWS Lambda we just need to run

serverless deploy

and it will take care of everything else.

Finally you will see your application url, copy it and try it in your browser.

And it should works.

That's it!

Hope you find this helpful!

Automate testing for your Laravel Application using Travis-CI

Chandresh Singh — Tue, 14 Jul 2020 09:01:39 +0000

Automate testing for you Laravel application using Travis CI. As an example I will be using a repository containing test case for an API https://github.com/csinghdev/laravel-examples.

If you would like to watch me doing it then you can watch the tutorial here:

Let’s start.

First thing we need to do is create an account on Travis-CI.

If your application is open source then you can use
https://travis-ci.org which is completely free for Open Source Projects.

For private repositories you can use https://travis-ci.com

In this example I will be using https://travis-ci.org.

Create a new account on Travis-CI. It will ask you for access to your GitHub repository for first time.

We have to follow these two steps here:

Activate the repository for which we want to automate testing.
Create a new configuration file .travis.yml inside our repository for Travis-CI.

To activate repository, go to settings and then click on the toggle for that repository.

Create a new file .travis.yml Inside your project repository folder

That’s it, Add this file to git, commit your code and push it into the repository.

As soon as we do that, after few seconds, our test cases starts running here for both versions of php.

And after some time as we can see all test cases are done.

You can find the entire code here:

csinghdev / laravel-examples

Laravel Examples. Built on top of https://github.com/csinghdev/laravel-starter

About Laravel-Examples

This application contains examples with screencasts explaining them. It is built on top of Laravel Starter Application but you can follow them for any Laravel App.

Examples included:

Create Custom Artisan Command
Integration with Travis-CI

Want to do it yourself?

Here is the list of video tutorials you can follow to do it by yourself.

Integration with Travis-CI

Create Custom Artisan Command

Doing it on MacOS?

Here is a simple video to setup Laravel application environment on MacOS using Valet.

About Laravel

Laravel is a web application framework with expressive, elegant syntax. We believe development must be an enjoyable and creative experience to be truly fulfilling. Laravel takes the pain out of development by easing common tasks used in many web projects, such as:

Simple, fast routing engine.
Powerful dependency injection container.
Multiple back-ends for session and cache storage.
Expressive, intuitive database ORM.
Database…

View on GitHub

Hope you find this useful!

TDD in Laravel using phpunit for REST Api Development

Chandresh Singh — Tue, 07 Jul 2020 13:43:00 +0000

Get started with TDD in Laravel using phpunit for REST Api Development. As an example, I will be creating an api using TDD approach to allow user to update his profile.

You can also watch the entire example here:

The idea behind TDD approach is to first make the test case before writing the actual code. So writing api code becomes easy once you have already figured out all the thing you will be doing in api while writing the test case.
Once you have a test case in place then after each change in API you can validate if your api is working as expected by running the test case.

If you look into phpunit.xml. You will see environment variables defined like this.

    <php>
        <server name="APP_ENV" value="testing"/>
        <server name="BCRYPT_ROUNDS" value="4"/>
        <server name="CACHE_DRIVER" value="array"/>
        <server name="DB_CONNECTION" value="sqlite"/>
        <server name="DB_DATABASE" value=":memory:"/>
        <server name="MAIL_MAILER" value="array"/>
        <server name="QUEUE_CONNECTION" value="sync"/>
        <server name="SESSION_DRIVER" value="array"/>
    </php>

These environment variable are used while running test cases. Laravel will automatically set the environment variables defined in this file.

One thing to note here is that We are using in memory database of sqlite. The advantage of using memory database is that it is created automatically in memory when you run your tests and are automatically deleted after your test cases are completed.

It will not affect your actual database in use.

You can configure these environment variables as per your requirement.

Open TestCase file. We will have to make some changes here to migrate and seed database before test case. For this override setUp function like this.

<?php

namespace Tests;

use Illuminate\Foundation\Testing\TestCase as BaseTestCase;
use Illuminate\Foundation\Testing\WithFaker;

abstract class TestCase extends BaseTestCase
{
    use CreatesApplication, WithFaker;

    protected function setUp(): void {
        parent::setUp();

        $this->artisan('migrate');
        $this->artisan('db:seed');

        $this->withoutExceptionHandling(); //To get the actual Exception whenever it occurs instead of Laravel handing the exception.

    }
}

Let's try to create a new test using command:

php artisan make:test UserTest

Open tests/Feature/UsersTest.php

Write your first test case like this:

<?php

namespace Tests\Feature;

use App\User;
use Tests\TestCase;
use JWTAuth;

class UsersTest extends TestCase
{
    /** @test */
    public function a_user_can_edit_his_profile() {
        $user = User::first();

        $token = JWTAuth::fromUser($user);

        $attributes = ['name' => $this->faker->name];

        $this->patchJson('api/user/profile', $attributes, ['authorization' => "bearer $token"])
            ->assertStatus(200);

        $this->assertDatabaseHas($user->getTable(), array_merge($attributes, [
            'id' => $user->id
        ]));
    }
}

Here i'm using JWT but you can change it as per the package you are using to generate auth token.

I'm using assertDatabaseHas function and passing table name and the data which should be present to check if the profile is updated in database.

Now, if we try to run it will fail because we haven’t created the api route yet.

Let’s do that in api.php

Route::patch('user/profile','UserController@updateProfile');

Create a new controller using command:

php artisan make:controller UserController

Write updateProfile function in UserController to allow user to edit his profile like this:

<?php

namespace App\Http\Controllers;

use Illuminate\Http\Request;

class UserController extends Controller
{
    public function __construct()
    {
        $this->middleware('auth:api');
    }

    public function updateProfile() {
        $attributes = request()->validate(['name' => 'required|string']);

        auth()->user()->update($attributes);

        return response()->json(["msg" => "Profile successfully updated"]);
    }
}

Try running your test case again and your test case should pass this time.

That's it!

Hope you find this useful!

Laravel 7 - Forgot Password APIs using inbuilt Laravel methods

Chandresh Singh — Tue, 23 Jun 2020 08:32:54 +0000

Want to build forgot password APIs really fast?

Let me show you how to use the inbuilt Laravel methods and notification template to build forgot password APIs.

If you would like to watch the in depth tutorial then you watch the tutorial here, where I explain each and everything used in code:

Let’s Start!

Create a new controller using command

php artisan make:controller ForgotPasswordController

Open it and write a new function forgot just like this:

    public function forgot() {
        $credentials = request()->validate(['email' => 'required|email']);

        Password::sendResetLink($credentials);

        return response()->json(["msg" => 'Reset password link sent on your email id.']);
    }

Don't forget to add use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Password; at the top.

Route::post('password/email', 'ForgotPasswordController@forgot');

Now, sendResetLink function will send a reset password link with email and token in url. To make it use our route link. Create a route with route name 'password.reset'. You can either return a view directly from here or you can even redirect it to a frontend page url with parameters.

As an example, here is a very basic form at resources/views/auth/reset_password.blade.php file which you can use.

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="{{ str_replace('_', '-', app()->getLocale()) }}">
<head>
    <meta charset="utf-8">
    <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">

    <title>Laravel Starter</title>

    <!-- Fonts -->
    <link href="https://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Nunito:200,600" rel="stylesheet">

    <!-- Styles -->
    <style>
        html, body {
            background-color: #f1f1f1;
            color: #636b6f;
            font-family: 'Nunito', sans-serif;
            font-weight: 200;
            height: 100vh;
            margin: 0;
        }
        .full-height {
            height: 100vh;
        }
        .flex-center {
            align-items: center;
            display: flex;
            justify-content: center;
        }
        .position-ref {
            position: relative;
        }
        input {
            padding: 10pt;
            width: 60%;
            font-size: 15pt;
            border-radius: 5pt;
            border: 1px solid lightgray;
            margin: 10pt;
        }
        .form-container {
            display: flex;
            flex-direction: column;
            width: 60%;
            align-items: center;
            margin: 20pt;
            border: 1px solid lightgray;
            padding: 20pt;
            border-radius: 5pt;
            background: white;
        }
        button {
            border-radius: 5pt;
            padding: 10pt 14pt;
            background: white;
            border: 1px solid gray;
            font-size: 14pt;
            margin: 20pt;
        }
        button:hover {
            background: lightgray;
        }
    </style>
</head>
<body>
<div class="flex-center position-ref full-height">
    <form class="form-container" action="api/password/reset" method="POST">
        <h2>Forgot Password?</h2>

        <input name="email" placeholder="Enter email" value="{{request()->get('email')}}">
        <input name="password" placeholder="Enter new password">
        <input name="password_confirmation" placeholder="Confirm new password">
        <input hidden name="token" placeholder="token" value="{{request()->get('token')}}">

        <button type="submit">Submit</button>
    </form>
</div>
</body>
</html>

Route::view('forgot_password', 'auth.reset_password')->name('password.reset');

Now, Let's write the function which will finally reset the password. For that create a new reset function inside ForgotPasswordController.

    public function reset() {
        $credentials = request()->validate([
            'email' => 'required|email',
            'token' => 'required|string',
            'password' => 'required|string|confirmed'
        ]);

        $reset_password_status = Password::reset($credentials, function ($user, $password) {
            $user->password = $password;
            $user->save();
        });

        if ($reset_password_status == Password::INVALID_TOKEN) {
            return response()->json(["msg" => "Invalid token provided"], 400);
        }

        return response()->json(["msg" => "Password has been successfully changed"]);
    }

Route::post('password/reset', 'ForgotPasswordController@reset');

That's it!

You can find the entire code here at https://github.com/csinghdev/laravel-starter

Create Custom Artisan Command in Laravel

Chandresh Singh — Sun, 14 Jun 2020 04:58:06 +0000

Artisan is a frequently used command-line interface that comes with Laravel which provides a set of commands that are helpful while building your application.

Let’s say you want a command to automatically email getting started guide link to users 1 day after registration.

If you would like to watch me doing this then here is the tutorial.

Let's Start!

Create a new command using command:

php artisan make:command SendDocLinkToUsers

Open app/Console/Commands/SendDocLinkToUsers.

Set name and signature of your command and write a small description about your command.

Inside handle function you can write your logic. It should look something like this:

<?php

namespace App\Console\Commands;

use App\Notifications\SendDocLinkNotification;
use App\User;
use Illuminate\Console\Command;

class SendDocLinkToUsers extends Command
{
    /**
     * The name and signature of the console command.
     *
     * @var string
     */
    protected $signature = 'users:send_doc_link';

    /**
     * The console command description.
     *
     * @var string
     */
    protected $description = 'Send doc link to users 1 day after registration.';

    /**
     * Create a new command instance.
     *
     * @return void
     */
    public function __construct()
    {
        parent::__construct();
    }

    /**
     * Execute the console command.
     *
     * @return mixed
     */
    public function handle()
    {
        User::whereNotNull('email_verified_at')
            ->whereDate('created_at', now()->subDays(1))
            ->get()->each(function ($user) {
                $user->notify(new SendDocLinkNotification());
            });
    }
}

Create Email Notification that we want to send to users.

php artisan make:notification SendDocLinkNotification

Make changes in app/Notifications/SendDocLinkNotification file as per your liking.

    public function toMail($notifiable)
    {
        return (new MailMessage)
                    ->line('Thanks for registering. Below is the link to our get started guide.')
                    ->action('View Get Started Guide', url('/getting_started_guide_url'))
                    ->line('Feel free to reply to this email if you need any help in getting started.');
    }

Try running the command

php artisan users:send_doc_link

Now to run it auto automatically everyday, all you need to do is set the command in Laravel scheduler. You can do this in app/Console/Kernel.php

    protected function schedule(Schedule $schedule)
    {
        $schedule->command('users:send_doc_link')->daily()->at('08:00');
    }

Or You can even use crontab to run the command everyday.

*Note: For running Laravel scheduler you will have to set the command in either crontab or supervisor to run every minute.

You can learn more about Laravel scheduler here: https://laravel.com/docs/7.x/scheduling#introduction

You can find the entire code here

That's it!

Hope you find it useful.

Laravel Email Verification APIs

Chandresh Singh — Sun, 07 Jun 2020 04:37:00 +0000

Laravel provides convenient methods for verifying email id of newly registered user but when it comes to REST APIs, Laravel doesn’t provided out of the box APIs for email verification.

So today I’m gonna show how to use the inbuilt Laravel email verification methods and notification template to build email verification APIs really fast.

If you would like to watch the example then you can check it out here:

Let’s start.

In your registration api, add sendEmailVerificationNotification on user after user is created.

User::create($request->getAttributes())->sendEmailVerificationNotification();

If you want to see the implementation of this function then you can find it here at Illuminate\Auth\MustVerifyEmail. This function is available in User model because it extends Authenticatable which uses Illuminate\Auth\MustVerifyEmail.

You can find the notification template here at Illuminate\Auth\Notifications\VerifyEmail

Define endpoints in api.php file.

Route::get('email/verify/{id}', 'VerificationController@verify')->name('verification.verify'); // Make sure to keep this as your route name

Route::get('email/resend', 'VerificationController@resend')->name('verification.resend');

Create this VerificationController using command:

php artisan make:controller VerificationController

Open VerificationController and define verify and resend function like this:

public function verify($user_id, Request $request) {
    if (!$request->hasValidSignature()) {
        return response()->json(["msg" => "Invalid/Expired url provided."], 401);
    }

    $user = User::findOrFail($user_id);

    if (!$user->hasVerifiedEmail()) {
        $user->markEmailAsVerified();
    }

    return redirect()->to('/');
}

public function resend() {
    if (auth()->user()->hasVerifiedEmail()) {
        return response()->json(["msg" => "Email already verified."], 400);
    }

    auth()->user()->sendEmailVerificationNotification();

    return response()->json(["msg" => "Email verification link sent on your email id"]);
}

Try this in postman and they should look something like this. Since i have defined some methods to keep the response consistent, So the response will be different.

Verification API:

Resend API:

If you want to make your response consistent across application then you can watch the tutorials below.

You can find the entire code here.

Hope you find it useful.

Setup Laravel Project on Server (Ubuntu 18.04)

Chandresh Singh — Sat, 30 May 2020 08:28:05 +0000

To setup laravel project on a Server with Ubuntu 18.04 from scratch, you need to do following:

You can watch this example here as well:

Let's Start!

Install PHP

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install php
sudo apt-get install php7.2-mbstring php7.2-mysql php7.2-xml php7.2-curl php7.2-json php7.2-zip
Install Apache

sudo apt-get install apache2
Install Git

sudo apt-get install git
Install Composer

curl -sS https://getcomposer.org/installer | php
sudo mv composer.phar /usr/local/bin/composer
chmod +x /usr/local/bin/composer
Clone laravel project from your repository

git clone https://github.com/csinghdev/laravel-starter.git
Setup Laravel app

cd laravel-starter
composer install
cp .env.example .env
Add/Edit Project Environment variables

nano .env
Create virtual host in apache and map subdomain to your Laravel app. You can watch it here.
That’s it!

Map Subdomain with Web Application

Chandresh Singh — Thu, 21 May 2020 14:16:41 +0000

For mapping subdomain with Web app we need to creating DNS entry through Domain Service Provider account for linking subdomain and server and then we need to create a virtual host configuration for telling web server to direct all requests on subdomain to our web app.

If you would like to watch me doing that then you can watch it here as well.

Let's first start with creating a virtual host on apache.

For that, SSH on your Server.

Make sure you have root access. Switch to root user.

sudo su root

Go to apache site configurations directory

cd /etc/apache2/sites-available

Create a new configuration file for your site.

nano app.example.com.conf

Configure virtual host like this. Make sure that the path in document root and directory should be the path of your web app directory containing index file.

<VirtualHost *:80>
        ServerAdmin admin@example.com
        ServerName  app.example.com
        ServerAlias www.app.example.com
        DocumentRoot /var/www/example_app

        ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/app.example.com-error.log
        CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/app.example.com-access.log combined

        <Directory /var/www/example_app/>
                Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
                AllowOverride All
                Order allow,deny
                allow from all
                Require all granted
        </Directory>
</VirtualHost>

Save the file.

Enable site configuration.

a2ensite app.example.com.conf

Reload web server.

service reload apache2

Go to your domain service provider.

Open DNS Settings page.

Add a new A type Record with your subdomain and IP address of your server.

Wait for some time. Usually it gets live within few hours but depending upon your domain service provider, it may take unto 48 hours.

That’s it!

You can now access your web app using your subdomain.

Laravel - Automate Database Backup

Chandresh Singh — Thu, 14 May 2020 15:08:42 +0000

Backup your database and automate the process using this simple method.

If you want to watch me doing it then below is the tutorial video for the same.

Let’s Start!

Pull in the package “laravel-backup” using composer.

composer require spatie/laravel-backup

Publish config file using this command.

php artisan vendor:publish --provider="Spatie\Backup\BackupServiceProvider"

Open backup.php inside config folder.

There are a bunch of configuration settings here:

In the source, Write your file path or directory that you want to include or exclude from backup.

Write the database connection name which you want to backup.

Within destination, Write disk name on which you want to store backups.

If you want to store them in AWS S3 then you can define your disk in filesystems.php.

For using S3, pull in the package "league/flysystem-aws-s3-v3"

composer require "league/flysystem-aws-s3-v3"

Write your S3 access credentials in .env file.

Select the notifications that you want to receive and Write your email id on which you want to receive your notification.

You can even get these notification on slack as well.

Configure email service if you haven’t from mail.php and write mail service credentials in .env file.

Set the no of days you want your backups to kept and deleted automatically after a certain time period.

Schedule these commands using Laravel Scheduler. For that Open app/Console/Kernel.php and write these inside schedule function.

$schedule->command('backup:clean')->daily()->at('01:00');
$schedule->command('backup:run')->daily()->at('02:00');

Set your Laravel Scheduler to run every minute using either crontab or supervisor.

For crontab, it should look something like this.

* * * * * cd /path-to-your-project && php artisan schedule:run >> /dev/null 2>&1

That's It!

All your backups now will be stored and you will be notified on email or slack and old backups will also be deleted automatically as configured by you in backup.php.