As a project grows, it becomes necessary to maintain and enforce some defined standards for the code. Such standards help achieve uniformity, readability, and maintainability, irrespective of the engineer that wrote the code. For a PHP project, one of the best ways to enforce such standards is PHP_CodeSniffer (or PHPCS for short).

PHPCS is a tool that helps detect violations of pre-defined coding standards. It also includes an additional tool that can automatically correct those violations.

Prerequisites

To complete this tutorial you will only need Composer globally installed.

About the project

PHPCS is framework-agnostic, but for simplicity, we will be using it with a simple Laravel project. The project, called “Twilio Greeter”, displays a list of common greetings depending on the language chosen by the user. You can view the complete source code here.

The project files that are of interest to us are:

• PROJECT_ROOT/app/Http/Controllers/WelcomeController.php: Our main controller …

PHP_CodeSniffer (PHPCS) is a tool that validates your code against a set of predefined standards and ensures that such standards are maintained across the team. This tutorial will walk you through automating those validations during development by setting up PHPCS on Sublime Text, Visual Studio Code, and PHPStorm.

Note: The accompanying sample project is available at https://github.com/idoqo/twilio-greeter. You can also download the phpcs.xml to use in your existing project.

Prerequisites

Completing this tutorial requires the following prerequisites:

• Composer installed
• Either Sublime Text, VS Code, or PHPStorm installed

Installing PHP Code Sniffer

All of the editors below require PHPCS t …

Laravel provides a queue interface to help you defer long-running tasks such as sending emails/SMS, file processing, etc. As much as you try to avoid it, your queue will fail sometimes and because these failures are ignored by default, you need a way to be notified. In this article, we will explore how to send a Slack notification each time a queue fails.

Pre-requisites

• Existing Laravel Application
• Understanding of Laravel Queues
• A Slack Hook URL

Before Laravel 5.8.x, the Slack notification channel was pre-packaged into the framework. If your Laravel version is < 5.8.0, feel free to skip the installation (although you should look into upgrading as Laravel is currently on version 6.0). From Laravel 5.8.x and above, the Slack notification channel is packaged separately from the framework so we have to import it via:

Next, update your .env file to include your Slack webhook URL …

Queues are ways in which we enable our application to listen and act based on predefined events. They allow us to delay tasks that would otherwise interfere with the user experience or our application’s performance.  

From the Laravel docs, "Laravel queues provide a unified API across a variety of different queue backends, such as Beanstalk, Amazon SQS, Redis, or even a relational database."

What are we Building?

In this tutorial, we will be creating an application that utilizes Laravel queues to send our users “Happy Birthday” messages on their birthday. We will create a command that fetches all users whose birthdays are today, and sends them to the queue to be processed.

Pre-requisites

• Basic understanding of the Laravel framework
• Composer
• A Twilio Account and Twilio SDK credentials

Setting Up our Application

As our application is Laravel-based, we will create a new Laravel application. If you're not …