Originals — posts I've written myself.

Scotty: a beautiful SSH task runner original

by Freek Van der Herten – 5 minute read

We just released Scotty, a beautiful SSH task runner. It lets you define deploy scripts and other remote tasks, run them from your terminal, and watch every step as it happens. It supports both Laravel Envoy's Blade format and a new plain bash format. Why we built Scotty Even though services like…

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What's new in laravel-activitylog v5 original

by Freek Van der Herten – 6 minute read

We just released v5 of laravel-activitylog, our package for logging user activity and model events in Laravel.

In Flare, Mailcoach, and Oh Dear we use it to build audit logs, so we can track what users are doing: who changed a setting, who deleted a project, who invited a team member. If you need something similar in your app, this package makes it easy.

This major release requires PHP 8.4+ and Laravel 12+, and brings a cleaner API, a better database schema, and customizable internals. Let me walk you through what the package can do and what's new in v5.

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Laravel Query Builder v7: a must-have package for building APIs in Laravel original

by Freek Van der Herten – 6 minute read

We just released v7 of spatie/laravel-query-builder, our package that makes it easy to build flexible API endpoints. If you're building an API with Laravel, you'll almost certainly need to let consumers filter results, sort them, include relationships and select specific fields. Writing that logic by hand for every endpoint gets repetitive fast, and it's easy to accidentally expose columns or relationships you didn't intend to.

Our query builder takes care of all of that. It reads query parameters from the URL, translates them into the right Eloquent queries, and makes sure only the things you've explicitly allowed can be queried.

// GET /users?filter[name]=John&include=posts&sort=-created_at

$users = QueryBuilder::for(User::class)
    ->allowedFilters('name')
    ->allowedIncludes('posts')
    ->allowedSorts('created_at')
    ->get();

// select * from users where name = 'John' order by created_at desc

This major version requires PHP 8.3+ and Laravel 12 or higher, and brings a cleaner API along with some features we've been wanting to add for a while.

Let me walk you through how the package works and what's new.

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Laravel Site Search v3 is here: crawl and search your entire site using just your database original

by Freek Van der Herten – 5 minute read

We're proud to release v3 of laravel-site-search, a package that crawls and indexes your entire site. Think of it as your own private Google. Point it at a URL, let it crawl every page, and get full-text search results back.

Previous versions required Meilisearch as the search engine. That works well, but it means running a separate service.

With v3, your application's own database is all you need. It supports SQLite, MySQL, PostgreSQL, and MariaDB out of the box, and it's the new default.

Let me walk you through it.

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How to easily access private properties and methods in PHP original

by Freek Van der Herten – 7 minute read

Sometimes you need to access a private property or method on an object that isn't yours. Maybe you're writing a test and need to assert some internal state. Maybe you're building a package that needs to reach into another object's internals. Whatever the reason, PHP's visibility rules are standing in your way.

Our spatie/invade package provides a tiny invade function that lets you read, write, and call private members on any object.

You probably shouldn't reach for this package often. It's most useful in tests or when you're building a package that needs to integrate deeply with objects you don't control.

Let me walk you through how it works.

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My Claude Code setup original

by Freek Van der Herten – 4 minute read

I've been using Claude Code as my daily driver for coding tasks. Over time, I've built up a pretty specific configuration that makes the whole experience better. I keep everything in my dotfiles repo under config/claude/, so it's easy to sync across machines. In this post I'll walk through my setup.…

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Generate OG images for your Laravel app original

by Freek Van der Herten – 5 minute read

When you share a link on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn, the platform shows a preview image. Getting those Open Graph images right usually means either using an external service or setting up a separate rendering pipeline. We just released laravel-og-image, a package that lets you define your OG image as HTML right inside your Blade views. The package takes a screenshot of that HTML and serves it as the OG image. No external API needed, everything runs on your own server.

Let me walk you through what the package can do.

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Building a PHP CLI for humans and AI agents with almost no hand-written code original

by Freek Van der Herten – 6 minute read

We recently released the Flare CLI, a command-line tool to manage your errors and performance data. It also ships with an agent skill that lets AI coding agents use Flare on your behalf.

The CLI has dozens of commands and hundreds of options, yet we only wrote four commands by hand. Our laravel-openapi-cli package made this possible: point it at an OpenAPI spec, and it generates fully typed artisan commands for every endpoint automatically.

Here's how we put it all together.

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Let your AI coding agent fix your errors and review performance original

by Freek Van der Herten – 4 minute read

The Flare CLI lets you manage errors and performance monitoring from the terminal. It was built with almost no hand-written code, generated from our OpenAPI spec. Having a CLI is useful on its own, but where it gets really interesting is when you let an AI coding agent use it.

The Flare CLI ships with an agent skill that teaches AI agents like Claude Code, Cursor, and Codex how to interact with Flare on your behalf. Let me show you how it works.

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Introducing the Flare CLI original

by Freek Van der Herten – 4 minute read

At Flare, we track errors and monitor performance for your applications. Until now, that meant opening the Flare dashboard in your browser whenever you wanted to check on things.

We just released the Flare CLI, a command-line tool that lets you manage your errors, projects, and performance monitoring data directly from the terminal. It also ships with an agent skill that lets AI coding agents like Claude Code and Cursor use Flare on your behalf. And the fun part: the entire CLI was built with almost no hand-written code, generated from our OpenAPI spec.

Let me walk you through how to install and use the CLI.

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Adding a custom status line to Claude Code original

by Freek Van der Herten – 2 minute read

Claude Code has a nice little feature called the status line that lets you add a custom bar at the bottom of the terminal. I use it to show the current repo name and how much of the context window I've used. To set this up, first create a script at ~/.claude/statusline.sh: #!/bin/bash # Read JSON…

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A clean API for reading PHP attributes original

by Freek Van der Herten – 3 minute read

PHP 8.0 introduced attributes, and they're a great way to add structured metadata to classes, methods, properties, constants, and parameters. The concept is solid, but the reflection API you need to actually read them is surprisingly verbose. What should be a simple one-liner ends up being multiple lines of boilerplate every time. And if you want to find all usages of an attribute across an entire class, you're looking at deeply nested loops.

We just released spatie/php-attribute-reader, a package that gives you a clean, static API for all of that. Let me walk you through what it can do.

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How to set up PHP autoformatting in Zed using Pint and PHP CS Fixer original

by Freek Van der Herten – 3 minute read

I only switched to Zed last week (you can see my full setup on my uses page), so I'm still learning the ropes. One thing I ran into is that its external formatter configuration is global. You configure one formatter command for PHP, and that's what gets used in every project you open.

The problem is that not all of my projects use the same formatter. Some use Pint, some use PHP-CS-Fixer directly. My Zed config originally pointed to ./vendor/bin/pint, which meant it silently did nothing in projects that don't have Pint installed.

Let me walk you through how I solved this.

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Laravel Response Cache v8 is here: now offers flexible caching original

by Freek Van der Herten – 6 minute read

Our laravel-responsecache package speeds up your app by caching entire responses on the server. When the same page is requested again, the cached response is served without hitting your controller at all.

We just released v8, a new major version with a powerful new feature: flexible caching. It uses a stale-while-revalidate strategy, so that every visitor gets a fast response, even when the cache is being refreshed.

Let me walk you through it.

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