Peter Coles – A developer's perspective

Disabling Laravel Exception Handling

2nd September 2017 / Peter

One of the benefits of Laravel is the way that it sits at your elbow, quietly and effectively taking care of the boring stuff … like whole classes of exceptions – hiding the stack traces away and presenting the consumers of your system with minimal explanations in appropriate formats.

But what about when you, the developer, need to see that detail. For manual browser based testing, not a problem. Set APP_DEBUG=true in your local .env file (which it is by default) and it’s beautifully formatted for you. But nowadays my development is mostly done using Test Driven Development, and all I get to see is the status code to which Laravel has mapped the exception 🙁

Of course the application error log is still there, sitting in the storage folder. But opening and scrolling down that is tedious. Could there be a better way …?

Big Data Seeding Part I – Importing Large Datasets into Laravel

4th October 2015 / Peter

I love Laravel’s data seeding. I use it to create test and sometimes initial production data on every Laravel project that I do. But recently I was presented with a (very) large lump of pre-existing test data.

A bit of background … I was extracting microservices from a monolithic legacy system, and had decided that to minimise risk, I’d maintain data compatibility between old and new systems. With Laravel, this was really easy as Laravel models allow us to define table names and relationships even when they don’t conform to Laravel’s default expectations.

Having an existing, large scale, integration test database looked like a huge benefit, and it was. It would have taken ages to construct this much data from scratch, but thought of translating it to into seeding classes filled me with dread. Happily there’s a much better way of handling this.

I Think I Worked on This System

28th September 2015 / Peter

<shaking head> I think I worked on this system </shaking head>

(credit xkcd)

Using Elixir outside of Laravel

15th September 2015 / Peter

I recently inherited a medium-sized Symfony application. The backend code was beautifully organized. The frontend … not so much.

I’m a big fan of Gulp and more recently have converted to Elixir, so that begged the question, could I use Elixir outside of Laravel to help me get the frontend assets under control? Happily the answer was yes. Let me show you how.

Bi-weekly (fortnightly) Scheduling

15th March 2015 / Peter

We have a lot of tasks run to a bewildering schedule across multiple servers. We use cron, of course. But maintaining the schedule is painful. Very painful.

We’ve tried committing copies of the crontab to a repository, but they’re almost never up-to-date.

And worse, if I need to do something even moderately complex like, say, schedule a job to run every two weeks, cron starts to get complicated.

But things just got better.

Principles Of Site Design

5th March 2015 / Peter

Command line PHP

21st February 2015 / Peter

I know that there will be people who read this and say, “well of course, you can do that”. But I also know that there others who, like me, worked with PHP for many years unaware that you could execute PHP directly from the command line without the need for a script.

But why would you want to?

Transferring large files

3rd February 2015 / Peter

Sometimes I have to move large files between servers. Most often they’re database backups, and since we have single database tables that can extend to many hundreds of gigabytes, whole database dumps can easily generate files of one or more terrabytes.

Even more challenging was a recent need to re-construct historical data from backup drives on a development workstation and then upload the results.

But here’s the wrinkle. Once file sizes move beyond 3-4GB, transfers seem to become a smidgen unreliable, whatever protocol I use.

The answer … a very useful *nix utility called split.