Laracon Winter 2021 was held virtually this year, continuing the shift from in-person events to Zoom-based presentations. The Laracon team has plenty of previous experience delivering web-based events with Laracon Online, so this year’s Winter conference was another success.

The format consisted of eight speakers giving hour-long presentations, which allowed the speakers to deep-dive on their various topics. As a result, a lot of code-reading and live-programming was done so I would highly recommend watching the videos when they are available. Here, I’ll provide my notes that might be helpful for selecting which videos/presentations to look into more closely.

10:00AM EST
Mohamed Said - @themsaid
“Diving the Queue”

Queues are used to move time-intensive tasks out of the normal request loop and asynchronously process them in order to speed up responses.

config/queue.php contains a connections configuration array that defines the connections to backend services like Redis, Beanstalk, Amazon SQS, etc.

  • any given connection may have multiple queues

app/Jobs contains all queueable jobs

  • generate a new job class with php artisan make:job NameOfJob
  • the generated class will implement Illuminate\Contracts\Queue\ShouldQueue interface

Enqueueing

  • converts a task/job to string form
  • sends to storage system (database, Redis, Amazon SQS, etc.)

Dequeuing

  • start worker, gets jobs from queue store
  • resolve back into object instance
  • execute handle() on job

Dispatching:

  • single jobs
  • chains of jobs
    • one after the other
  • batches of jobs
    • execute in parallel

Starting a worker:

php artisan queue:work --queue=high,low
                       --timeout=60
                       --memory=128
  • --queue=high,low
    • start a worker that verifies that all of the high queue jobs are processed before continuing to any jobs on the low queue
  • --timeout=60
    • exit with an error if a job is processing for longer than 60 seconds
  • --memory=128
    • exit with an error if a job reaches the memory limit of 128 megabytes

11:00AM EST
Christoph Rumpel - @christophrumpel
“The final Laravel Service Container talk”

The Service Container:

  • manages class dependencies
  • performs dependency injection
    • dependencies are put into the class via the constructor/”setter” methods

Advantages:

  • better dependency handling
  • less responsibilities
  • no duplicated code
  • change control flow (Inversion of Control/”IOC”)

How:

  • auto-resolving
  • explicit binding
  • facades

Automatic dependency injection and facades allow for rarely needing to manually bind/resolve anything from the container

12:20PM EST
Bobby Bouwmann - @bobbybouwmann
“Routing Laravel”

Agenda:

  • basic routing
  • routing cycle
  • route model binding explained
  • another use case for the router
  • basic practices

Route files:

  • web.php
  • api.php
  • channels.php
  • console.php

Ways to define a route:

  • basic controller
  • invokable controller (single action controller)
  • callback (closure-based)

Viewing a list of routes:

  • php artisan route:list --compact
  • php artisan route:list --columns=method,name,action,middleware

Fallback routes:
Route::fallback method defines a route that will be executed when no other routes match the request

  • should always be the last route registered

App\Http\Kernel.php: central location that all requests flow through

  • $middleware
    • middleware run during every request
  • $middlewareGroups
    • route middleware groups
  • $routeMiddleware
    • route middleware that can be assigned to groups/used individually

Route-Model Binding

  • can add where clauses to routes that use route-model binding
    • where()
    • whereNumber()
    • whereAlpha()
    • etc.
  • missing()
    • if no model is found, supply a callback to execute

1:20PM EST
Taylor Otwell - @taylorotwell
“Laravel Update”

Release cycle change - one major release every year (typically towards the end of the year)

  • Laravel 9 coming in September 2021

Laravel Sail (Docker environment for Laravel)

  • can now choose which services to install rather than getting all during install
  • can now use Meilisearch as a service

Laravel Breeze

  • lightweight authentication system (login, regisration, password reset, etc.)
  • starter/lighter version of Laravel Jetstream
  • also offers an Initia.js frontend implementation (powered by Vue)

Metered Billing support added to Laravel Cashier

Testing improved for JSON

  • Illuminate\Testing\Fluent\AssertableJson
  • $response->assertJson(function (AssertableJson $json) {...

Parallel Testing

  • php artisan test --parallel

New ThrottlesExceptions middleware for throttling job exceptions

  • throttle the number of exceptions that will be thrown during a certain time period
  • example: a third-party API goes down, can throttle the inevitable exceptions that will be thrown from job(s)

Laravel Octane

  • goal: speed up Laravel
  • context:
    • with PHP, the entire app is rebooted for every request
    • could speed up PHP apps by booting app once and feeding it requests
      • downside: memory leaks, etc.
  • Swool and RoadRunner are two tools that do this for PHP applications
  • Laravel Octane is a package that supports tools like Swool/Roadrunner and configures what happens in the app during the request lifecycle
  • php artisan octane:start --workers={number of workers}
  • php artisan octane:reload - will need to restart server when making code changes
  • --watch will do hot-reloading for restarting server after code changes

2:40PM EST
Marcel Pociot - @marcelpociot
“Understanding Laravel broadcasting”

What is broadcasting?

  • making an event accessible outside of app

BROADCAST_DRIVER configurations available: log, pusher, ably, null, redis

3:40PM EST
Miguel Piedrafita - @m1guelpf
“Understanding Foundation: What ties everything together”

Deep-dive into Laravel foundation codebase

5:00PM EST
Caleb Porzio - @calebporzio
“Doing small things with Livewire & Alpine”

Examples:

  • form fields that depend on other form fields
  • simple buttons that submit forms and change according to the response
  • delay loading of expensive charts until the rest of the page loads
  • dispatching jobs with a button and showing progress

Note: this presentation focused solely on Livewire

6:00PM EST
Nuno Maduro - @enunomaduro
“Laravel’s Artisan Console component”

Illuminate\Console

Live-coding presentation on rebuilding Laravel Artisan from scratch

  • Laravel Zero, PHP Insights, and Pest are all tools built on top of Artisan Console