The Laravel News podcast, hosted by Jacob Bennett and Michael Dyrynda has posted a recent episode: Episode #69 - Laravel 5.7, ZSH, and Nova packages

Jake and Michael discuss all the latest Laravel releases, tutorials, and happenings in the community.

Topics mentioned in this latest show include:

• upgrading Laravel
• Alfred search workflow for Vue.js
• Laravel 5.7 is now released
• Laracon AU conference ticket giveaway
• Trix file uploads

You can listen to this latest show either using the in-page audio player or by downloading the mp3 directly. If you enjoy the show, be sure subscribe to their feed to keep up with new shows as they're released.

Colin O'Dell has shared an interesting setup he's created to make it easier to switch between PHP versions when testing your code. In his latest post he shows how to switch the version "on cd" (directory change) with the help of some command line shell tooling.

After using phpbrew to manage my local PHP versions for a while, I got tired of re-compiling PHP after every release and decided to install multiple PHP versions side-by-side with Ond?ej Surý's PPA. One of the features I missed from phpbrew was the ability to run a command like phpbrew use php-7.2.8 to automatically change the php command to that version, so I ended up implementing this feature myself using symlinks and shell aliases.

He then walks through his end result, showing the modification of the default php symlink and aliases that can be used to dynamically switch its target. He then includes some examples of how to automate this using your application's PHP version requirements in the composer.json and a simple ZSH script that's triggered on directory change.

On the Laravel News site they've posted a guide to help you maximize your terminal productivity by sharing a few tips to help you get the most of out the time you spend at the command line.

This week, we just published some great bash aliases from the community, and I wanted to write more about maximizing your terminal productivity. I’ve coached many developers, and the terminal is often the area I see that many great developers (much better than me) could improve and gain some productivity and better tooling.

After talking about his own first steps as a developer and the tools he used, Paul Redmond talks about the set of helpful tools and software he now uses including:

• the Zsh shell (and Oh My Zsh)
• updating the CD Path
• Using path expansion
• History completion
• History search and execution
• Terminal themes

He ends the post with a few other recommendations of resources to check out and quick tips on sharing the results.

Eric Barnes has posted a guide to helping you set up (as he sees it) a good PHP development environment on your Mac that includes Homebrew for package management, Composer, Vagrant and the Laravel Homestead VM for project hosting.

This past weekend I decided it was finally time to wipe my Macbook’s hard drive and start fresh. I have used it daily for several years now and still had artifacts from when I used Mamp. Since then Vagrant has turned to my local server of choice and one of the reasons is how clean you can keep your machine by utilizing it.

After finishing the new Mac OS X install it felt like a new beginning. So clean, so minimal. [...] This go around I wanted to keep it as minimal as possible and only install things I know I need and use. This tutorial covers how I set up my Mac for local PHP Development.

His list of software includes the previously mentioned four as well as the ZSH shell replacing the default bash and, obviously, PHP itself installed via Homebrew.