In a post to his site Sarfraz Ahmed shares a command that can be used in a Laravel application (via artisan) to clean up unnecessary files from packages that you may have installed.

When installing composer packages, they come up with lot of useless files and folders such as .git, tests, readme.md and more. When project becomes bigger with many packages, this junk takes considerable disk space. Since I work with Laravel framework most of the time, I created a command that allows me to automatically delete all these junk files whenever I happen to install or update composer packages.

He lists out the patterns the command matches by default including "tests", "readme*" and "*.log". There's a long list of items and, having worked with several packages, I can tell you that most of the files caught by this need to be removed anyway. He has posted the code on GitHub and provides some examples of the command line calls and how it can be called automatically.

Another package that does something similar but allows the package itself to define the files to remove is the composerclean library that is executed as a Composer command rather than an artisan command.

In a post to his site Sergey Zhuk shows you how to get up and running on Travis-CI and Code Climate for generation unit test coverage with an integration between the two services.

When you maintain an open-source project it is considered a good practice to have a high test coverage, so the community can feel safe about using your code in their projects. There are some services that can analyze your code quality and provide some feedback about it. One of the most popular is Code Climate. This service doesn’t run your tests, but you can use one of CI tools to run them and then send their result to Code Climate. This article will show how to use Travis CI to run your tests and CodeClimate to get your test coverage.

The rest of the tutorial is broken down into five steps (well, five-ish - some have sub-steps):

• Get Your CodeClimate Reporter ID
• Add Your Code Climate Token To Travis CI
• Add CodeClimate Test Reporter Package
• Update phpunit.xml
• Update Travis CI Config To Send A Report

Each section includes the configuration changes to the .travis.yml or phpunit.xml configuration files you'll need to make to connect the services and generate the reports automatically.

Matt Stauffer continues his series covering features in the 5.4 version of the Laravel framework with this look at real-time facades, a feature that allows you to use facades on classes without having to pre-define them as before.

Laravel 5.4 introduced a new feature called “real-time facades”, which provide the convenience of facades, defined real-time instead of in classes. Taylor tweeted about it, but I wanted to explain what they are and how they work.

[...] If you’re not familiar with facades in Laravel, they’re shortcut classes that provide static access to non-static methods on service classes bound to Laravel’s container. [...] Real-time facades let you create your own facades on the fly. Instead of having to create a facade class like the Session facade class I referenced above, you can use a class as its own facade by adding Facades to the beginning of its own namespace.

He includes code showing how facades are used and what kind of functionality they offer. He then covers the switch to the real-time version, switching up the namespace to tell the framework to perform the new logic. He ends the post with examples of this functionality in use inside of a view, class or any other library in your application.

On the Hackernoon site today Sebastian De Deyne has written up a tutorial showing you how to use Watchman to automatically run PHPUnit tests for your application when things change. Watchman is a tool from Facebook that watches files and directories for updates and execute actions based on the changes.

Watchman watches files and triggers actions when they change. The reasoning behing choosing Watchman: it’s easy to install, simple to configure, and reliable.

The watchman-make command - which ships with Watchman - is a specialised interface for Watchman to invoke build tools in response to file changes - exactly what we need!

In the setup he creates, Watchman is used to look for changes on files in either the project's src/ or tests/ directories and execute a bash script (code provided) that runs the tests and outputs the results. He walks through each line of the script and Watchman command, explaining how it works and what the option points to. You can see the results here of an edit to a test and the output in a Terminal window once it's saved.

On his Unnikked site Nicola Malizia has written up a post sharing some insight into how Laravel's automatic facades work, a feature that was introduced in Laravel v5.4.

Another cool feature shipped with the release of Laravel 5.4 is the ability to use Facades on the fly. Automatic Facades with the official documentation is quite informative. So I assume you are familiar with them.

He then starts in on the creation of custom facades: defining the functionality (a class), creating the facade and updating the app config to load it in. He then covers what's happening behind the scenes when the "Facades" namespace is loaded and the facade is called (lots of code snippets included here).

My suggestion is to start using automatic facades whenever is possible, their impact is negligible. To see when to use facades in general a good read is available in the official documentation.

The TutsPlus.com site continues their "Building Your Startup" series of tutorials with the latest in the series covering automatic timezone detection based on the user's local time.

For the alpha release of Meeting Planner, I provided people the opportunity to change their time zone in user settings. However, for anyone outside of the western United States, they may have been wondering why their calendar appointments were at the wrong times. You have to know to look for the settings page.

As I approach the beta, I realized I needed to fix this as soon as possible. So I began to reflect on how best to resolve this. In today's episode, I'm going to walk you through my approach to automatic time-zone detection and how I integrated it into the user experience.

The tutorial starts off with a look at the current state of timezone detection, linking to two options that do mostly the same thing. Eventually, however, he decided on the jsTimezoneDetect library as it fit best with the needs of the application. He covers some of the thoughts that went into designing the user experience and the code required to integrate the Javascript library with his Yii2-based application. He ends the tutorial with a few additional considerations worth keeping in mind including timezone representation in ical exports and virtual meetings.

The Exakat blog has a recent post talking about how PHP likes sorting too much, that is, even in some places you're not using specific sort functions, PHP does it for you anyway.

PHP likes to sort. Of course, there is sort(), ksort() and all the cousins. But, PHP actually sorts too much. My first encounter with the problem is the infamous array_unique(). Now, this is also affecting glob() and scandir(). I’m looking for others. Until then, check your code.

He covers the functionality for each of those previously mentioned functions and what kind of sorting they're performing: array_unique, glob and scandir. He ends the post with some quick advice on how to potentially replace these auto-sorting functions and some specific functions to use instead.

On the Paragon Initiative blog they've posted a guide to handling automatic security updates for PHP developers, helping to prevent security-related issues by keeping your libraries up to date.

Most of the software security vulnerabilities known to man are preventable by careful development practices. [...] However, even if you're trying to do everything right, eventually we all make mistakes and ship exploitable software.

[...] By making updates manual rather than automatic, you're forcing your customers to take all the responsibility for making sure that your mistakes don't hurt their business. Only a very small minority of your customers might prefer the responsibility of verifying and applying each update themselves. [...] Automatic security updates reduce the interval between points 2 and 3 from possibly infinite to nearly zero. That's clearly a meaningful improvement over manual patch management.

The post then walks through the aspects of a secure automatic update system that includes offline cryptographic signatures, transport layer security and separation of privileges (who will perform the actual update). The author gets into a bit of detail for each item on the list, explaining how the system should be set up and some tools you can use to start working up the process in your own applications.

In a quick new post to his site Theo Tzaferis shows you how to set up PHPStorm and PHP_CodeSniffer to perform automatic inspection of your PHP code's syntax.

Some time ago I wrote an article on how to format your code automatically in PhpStorm to be conform the PSR standards. In this article I want to show you how you can enable inspections in PhpStorm which throws a warning if you have code which is not PSR, e.g.

• Whitespace at the end of line
• No newline at the end of file
• No newline between namespace and use statements
• etc…

This is pretty easy. We will use squizlabs/PHP_CodeSniffer from Github.

I’m doing this on an Ubuntu machine, but it should work the same in OS X (no idea about Windows).

He then provides the (*nix-centric) instructions on getting the two tools up and playing happily together. Fortunately PHPStorm comes with handy built-in support for PHP_CodeSniffer, basically only requiring you to install phpcs and point it to the right location. The rest is handled by the IDE when you enable the automatic evaluation.

On the Laravel News site they've posted an interview with Jason McCreary, the lead developer behind the Laravel Shift service, a product that helps you keep your Laravel applications up to date with the latest versions of the framework.

Laravel Shift is a new project aimed at automatically upgrading out of date Laravel apps up to the current version. The way it works is you sign-in with either Github or BitBucket, purchase a shift (an upgrade package), and then review the pull request it automatically creates.

I had a chance to speak with Jason, the lead developer on the project and what follows is a Q&A about Shift.

They talk about where the idea for Laravel Shift came from originally and how the upgrade process happens (hint: it's automated). Jason also answers questions about what kinds of applications it will work on and how it's handled if there's an application that can't be upgraded. He also mentions the process for upgrading from a very old version, noting that it would be required to "shift" multiple times to achieve the correct results.