Wanted to fetch a specific file from your Git repository except that the repository doesn't exist in your local machine?

Try this out:

git init
git remote add origin <your_repo_link>.git
git fetch
git checkout <your_branch_name> -- </path/to/file>

After executing these commands, you should be able to see the selected directory/file in your project directory.

Hope you found this useful!

If you're the type of person who types git push -f origin master, please don't do that as it might overwrite your entire branch. I'm saying this because I did this once and I thought I lost all the files.

Luckily, I was a bit relieved as git is a VCS (Version Control Software), which means the files are most likely not deleted. This is when I came across git reflog command.

According to the Git manual, this is what it does:

Reference logs, or "reflogs", record when the tips of branches and other references were updated in the local repository.

This is a life-saver especially if you wanted to return back to the previous point in time. Here's how I recovered my files back again:

1. Type git reflog show remotes/origin/master
2. Find and make note of the previous commit hash.
3. Create a new branch with using the previous commit hash like this: git branch <new_branch_name> <previous_commit_hash>
4. Then finally, push the files to the new branch: git add . && git commit -m "pushing recovered files" && git push origin <new_branch_name>
5. Checkout to the newly created branch: git checkout <new_branch_name>
6. Delete the corrupted branch and replace it with the newly created branch that contains your restored files.

If I didn't discover this, I don't really know what I would have done to recover those files.

References

• Git reflog documentation
• How can I recover from an erronous git push -f origin master?

Hope this helps you out!

Last month, I was configuring an Ubuntu Server to deploy a client's project that uses MySQL 8.0 and PHP 7.2. So, I installed the necessary dependencies and finally installed MySQL 8.0, created a new schema and imported the database tables required for the project.

Next, I typed the project URL and ran into this error:

Unable to load plugin 'caching_sha2_password'

If you're running PHP 7.2 and facing this error, you should know that PHP 7.2 doesn't support native password authentication by default. But it's a simple fix, all you have to do is either one of the following:

1. Alter the current user's authentication to native password
2. Create a new user with native password authentication

Alter the current user's authentication to native password

ALTER USER 'your_user'@'your_server_host' IDENTIFIED WITH mysql_native_password BY 'your_password';

Create a new user with native password authentication

CREATE USER 'your_user'@'your_server_host ' IDENTIFIED WITH mysql_native_password BY 'your_password'

For the changes to take effect, you need to reload the privileges by typing the following:

FLUSH PRIVILEGES;

Hope this helps you out!

Hosted your website on a Shared Hosting Server and got limited access to clear the cache on your project?

Open up routes/web.php and create this route:

<?php
Route::get('/clearcache', function(){
    \Artisan::run('config:clear');
    \Artisan::run('cache:clear');
    \Artisan::run('view:clear');
    \Artisan::run('route:clear');
    \Artisan::run('config:cache');
});
?>

Just type the URL and it will clear all existing cache from the project.

Hope this helps you out!

If you're a developer working in the Middle East, it's quite common that you'll work on a project that bilingual, in our case, it's english and arabic.

In my opinion, it's not aesthetically pleasing and logical to have english numbers in arabic text, so, write a simple helper function to convert the numerals from english to arabic:

<?php
function convertEnglishToArabicNumerals($str) {
    if (\App::getLocale() == 'ar') {
        $westernArabic = array('0', '1', '2', '3', '4', '5', '6', '7', '8', '9');
        $easternArabic = array('٠', '١', '٢', '٣', '٤', '٥', '٦', '٧', '٨', '٩');
        $str = str_replace($westernArabic, $easternArabic, $str);
    }
    return $str;
}
?>

And since most browsers can handle RTL, you don't have to worry about how the arabic numerals are being displayed in your application.

I read about variable variables in PHP's official documentation.

Here's a sample:

<?php
    $a = "hello";
    // Remove special characters and tags to prevent it from crashing.
    $foo = preg_replace('/[^a-zA-Z0-9\s]/', '', $$a);
    echo $foo;
?>

Not sure if this is a good practice but it sure gets the job done!

This error is annoying and mostly happens if the data directory is missing under the storage/framework/cache/data directory. For some reason, this folder doesn't exist by default.

To resolve it, just manually create the data directory under the storage/framework/cache/data directory and it should fix the issue.

Using plain Regular Expressions, you can exclude certain slug from your routes, try adding the following to your routes/web.php file:

<?php
    Route::match(array('GET', 'POST'), '/{slug}', 'YourController@index')->name('page')->where('slug', '^(?!pattern).*$');
?>

Hope you found this useful!