Want to know if a trait is being used in your current class? Try this:

<?php
in_array(Foo::class, class_uses($this))
?>

By any chance, if the current class is inherited, please note that the class_uses() method will only return the list of traits used by the current class and won't include any traits of it's parent class.

Up until now, I've written migrations and generated seeders for some Laravel projects that I have worked on but recently, I thought of seeing if there's a way to generate migrations and seeds from an existing database especially if it's a project that never had any migrations or seeds created before.

Luckily, I found these two packages, which turned out to be quite productive:

1. kitloong/laravel-migrations-generator
2. orangehill/iseed

Execute the following commands to install the packages mentioned above:

composer require --dev "kitloong/laravel-migrations-generator"
composer require orangehill/iseed

Generate migrations using existing database

You can generate your migrations for all tables like this:

php artisan migrate:generate

Or, you can specify the tables you wish to generate:

php artisan migrate:generate table1,table2,table3

Generate new seeds using existing database

You can generate seeds for a single table like this:

php artisan iseed table_name

And for multiple tables, you can do this:

php artisan iseed table1,table2,table3

Hope you find this tip useful!.

Recently, we hosted our company's redesigned website on GoDaddy, which offers cPanel to manage your website. I was dealing with an annoying email bug in which I was able to send/receive emails to any account except the ones that share the company domain.

The company's current email setup makes use of Google Workspace and since we're using a Shared Hosting account, GoDaddy allows you to use their SMTP relay and prohibits the use of third-party SMTP services such as Google Workspace, Outlook, etc.

After configuring it with Google's MX records in the DNS settings, I wasn't receiving any email on my own company email yet I was able to receive on other email accounts that didn't share the company's domain.

I did a little R&D and ran into this documentation about email routing and figured out that there could be an issue with it's configuration.

Here's what I did:

1. Open cPanel
2. Search or look for Email Routing
3. Click on Email Routing
4. If your MX records are not pointing to the IP address of the hosting server, then select Remote Mail Exchanger
5. Save changes

After following these steps, I was able to receive mails on the same domain!

So what really caused the issue?

Since, we didn't have a default email address set up in cPanel, the current mode to send all unrouted emails was set to :blackhole:, by default. I guess, it's set up that way to prevent the server from sending/receiving spam mails from the domain.

This makes sense because:

1. The MX records are not pointing to the current server
2. There are no email accounts created for the domain on cPanel
3. By setting the mode to :blackhole, all emails with the same domain are being discarded or rejected

Not really sure if this is what caused the issue but judging from the facts, I was able to reach to this conclusion.

Hope you found this tip useful.

Reference

• Can't send email to addresses at my own domain

Thought of sharing a simple regular expression that I use on VIM to convert snake_case letters to camelCase letters (see what I did there) 😜

Here's the pattern for you to use:

:s/ \([a-zA-Z]\)/\u\1/g

Hope you found this tip useful!

Open up your text editor and use the following RegEx pattern to find and remove the duplicate lines:

^(.*)(\r?\n\1)+$

I found this technique on Regular-Expressions.info and I'm going to quote their explanation over here:

The caret will match only at the start of a line. So the regex engine will only attempt to match the remainder of the regex there. The dot and star combination simply matches an entire line, whatever its contents, if any. The parentheses store the matched line into the first backreference.

Next we will match the line separator. I put the question mark into `\r?\n` to make this regex work with both Windows `(\r\n)` and UNIX `(\n)` text files. So up to this point we matched a line and the following line break.

Now we need to check if this combination is followed by a duplicate of that same line. We do this simply with `\1`. This is the first backreference which holds the line we matched. The backreference will match that very same text.

If the backreference fails to match, the regex match and the backreference are discarded, and the regex engine tries again at the start of the next line. If the backreference succeeds, the plus symbol in the regular expression will try to match additional copies of the line. Finally, the dollar symbol forces the regex engine to check if the text matched by the backreference is a complete line. We already know the text matched by the backreference is preceded by a line break (matched by `\r?\n`).

Therefore, we now check if it is also followed by a line break or if it is at the end of the file using the dollar sign.

The entire match becomes `line\nline` (or `line\nline\nline` etc.). Because we are doing a search and replace, the line, its duplicates, and the line breaks in between them, are all deleted from the file. Since we want to keep the original line, but not the duplicates, we use `\1` as the replacement text to put the original line back in.

Hope you found this tip useful!

There are many ways to define constants in Laravel but I learnt a neat technique where you can define constants using an alias.

First off, create the following directory:

mkdir app/Constants

Next, create a file named MyConstants.php in the app/Constants directory and copy-paste the following code:

<?php
namespace App\Constants;

class MyConstants {
    const HELLO = 'hello';
}
?>

Then, go to the config/app.php file and define your new alias:

<?php
'aliases' => [
    // previously defined aliases...
    'MyConstants' => App\Constants\MyConstants::class,
]
?>

Lastly, execute the following commands to update your app's configuration:

php artisan config:clear
composer dump-autoload
php artisan config:cache

After that, you can use your new constants anywhere (Controllers, Models or Blades) like this:

<?php
echo MyConstants::HELLO;
?>

Learning this new technique helps me keep the code clean and makes it easier to trace the constants.

Hope you find this tip useful!

This happened like two days ago, when one of the client sites went down. Upon inspecting the error logs, I found this:

SQLSTATE[HY000]: General error: 1835 Malformed communication packet

If you got the same error as the one above, don't worry, it's not your fault. According to this forum, a recent MariaDB update introduced a new bug for PHP versions < 7.3 that uses PDO and MySQL connectors. You can easily resolve this by simply upgrading it to PHP 7.3.

Hope this tip helps you out!

If you want to turn your .scss files to minified .css files but without using Webpack or Gulp, just install the node-sass package using npm package manager and then run this on your terminal:

sass scss/style.scss css/style.css --style compressed

And now, you can use your style.css file on production! 😆

Hope you found this tip useful!