#1 — Laravel & More: What I’ve learned this week

There is a lot of information circulating on the Internet and it can be very time-consuming to look everywhere, stay up to date and discover new things. Here’s why I’ll — try to — write a weekly digest of everything I find scrolling here and there.

Some of these pieces of information were found long before I had the idea to make an article out of them, which is why I can’t tag any author of the original posts. This will be corrected in each future article of this “series”!

PS: This series primarily focuses on Laravel and web development.

Reducing your request’s memory usage.

/**
 * Limit memory usage when loading relations
 * by selecting specific attributes.
 */
User::with('comments:id,user_id,content')->get();

Laravel 9 selected() blade directive.

/*
 * Laravel 9 is shippes with a new @selected
 * Blade directive.
 */
<select name="countries">
    <option value="" >Select a country</option>
    @foreach($countries as $country)
        <option value="{{ $country->id }}" @selected($country-is($user->country)) >
            {{ $country->name }}
        </option>
    @endforeach
</select>

Encrypt/decrypt your model’s attributes.

/**
 * Data can be automatically Encrypted/Decrypted using Laravel's
 * 'encrypted' cast.
 */
Class CreditCard extends Model
{
    protected array $casts = [
        'number' => 'encrypted',
    ];
}

/**
 * It is worth reminding that encrypted data will be larger than 'raw'
 * data, so be sure to store them in an appropriate column type. 
 */
Class CreateCreditCardsTable extends Migration
{
    public function up(): void
    {
    Schema::create('credit_cards', function (Blueprint $table) {
        $table->id();
        $table->text('number');
        ...
    });
}

Split your routes into separate files.

/**
 * Laravel provides an easy way to split routes in separate files.
 */
Class RouteServiceProvider extends ServiceProvider
{
    public function boot()
    {
        Route::middleware('web')
            ->namespace($this->namespace)
            ->group(base_path('route/web.php'));

        Route::middleware('api')
            ->namespace($this->namespace)
            ->prefix('api/v1')
            ->group(base_path('route/api-v1.php'));

        Route::middleware('api')
            ->namespace($this->namespace)
            ->prefix('api/v2')
            ->group(base_path('route/api-v2.php'));

        Route::middleware('api')
            ->namespace($this->namespace)
            ->prefix('webhooks')
            ->group(base_path('route/webhooks.php'));
    }
}

The pluck() method works with your model’s relations!

/**
 * pluck() is a method that retrieves all values for a given key, but
 * did you know it also works with relations ?
 */
$users->pluck('comments')->each(fn(Comment $comment) => ...);

Use the validator’s “bail” attribute to stop validation at the first failure.

/**
 * When validating a request, you can ask Laravel to stop at
 * the first failure using the 'bail' attribute.
 */
public function rules(): array
{
    /**
     * Here, Laravel's validator will not run a query to check
     * if a user exists if a previous validation fails.
     */
    return [
        'id' => ['bail', 'required', 'integer', 'exists:users,id'],
    ];
}

Hope you learned something new!