The importance of email marketing cannot be over-emphasized in modern-day business, mostly because of its cost-effectiveness and conversion-to-sales ratio. This tutorial will teach you how to use Twilio’s SendGrid Email API with Laravel and a Vue.js frontend to send bulk emails to more than 100 email addresses at once. This removes the pain of sending out emails slowly, as well as the possibility of emails going to spam.

After we’re finished, you will have developed a custom mailing list that:

• Allows anyone to enter their email address and save it to the application database
• Send out bulk emails to provided email addresses

Prerequisites

To follow along with this tutorial you should have the following in place:

• Composer installed and ready to use
• Basic knowledge of the Laravel framework
• A locally-installed database server ready to use
• Basic knowledge of Vue.js
• A SendGrid account
• npm
• Node.js (with a minimum version of 12.14, …

Web applications need a way of identifying users in order to serve dynamic data back to users. The process of collecting and storing data when a user registers, validating the data and recognizing a unique user when the user logs in is the authentication flow.

As mankind continues to evolve, cybercrimes continue to increase by the day. The security of user’s data and their privacy becomes more important than ever. In the quest to achieve this, security measures such as the popular 2-step verification (2FA verification) are put in place.

Implementing 2FA (Two-Factor Authentication) verification in modern web applications can be tricky. Nonetheless, do not worry as the Twilio API for WhatsApp has plenty of documentation and support to make this possible for developers.

This tutorial is intended to teach you about the Twilio API for WhatsApp and custom token-based authentication in Laravel using JSON Web Tokens (JWTs). …

Pest is a new testing PHP Framework developed by Nuno Maduro. While Pest itself is built on top of PHPUnit, the popular and widely adopted PHP testing framework, Pest aims to provide a better experience for writing tests. The philosophy is simple. Keep the TDD experience simple and elegant by providing expressive interfaces.

In this tutorial, we’ll be looking at how to get started using Pest in a Laravel project. Using the test-driven approach, we’ll be building a simple to-do application that allows you to create, edit, update and delete tasks.

Technical Requirements

• PHP version 7.3 or higher. Pest requires PHP 7.3+ to work.
• Laravel 8.
• Composer.
• A basic understanding of PHPUnit.
• A basic understanding of SQLite. We’ll be making use of SQLite because it makes running our tests faster.

Set up Laravel

There are different ways to set up a new Laravel project. You can …

Sometimes, you want your application to confirm user identities even when they are logged in. This is especially useful for sensitive routes and actions like deleting a user-owned resource, updating a delivery address, or completing a financial transaction where you want to be sure that the user’s session hasn’t been hijacked. This process is called re-authentication and is supported by the Laravel framework out of the box with the password.confirm middleware.

In this tutorial, we will implement a new Laravel middleware that asks users to verify themselves before allowing them to access select routes. Our sample application is a notes application where we need to confirm a user’s identity before they can delete an existing note. The verification is done using a code sent to their Authy application, though you can replace that with a regular SMS if you so chose.

Jump directly to the Implement the Verification Middleware section …

Laravel Livewire is a library for building reactive and dynamic interfaces using Blade as your templating engine. It works by making AJAX requests to the server when a user interaction occurs and rendering the updated HTML sent to it by the server.

In this tutorial, we will build a live search page for a list of users stored in a MySQL database. The reactive parts of our interface such as changing loading state, dynamically showing and hiding parts of the web page, etc will be handled by Livewire.

Pre-requisites

To complete this tutorial, you will need the following:

• Composer, npm, and Laravel (version 8.26.1 is used in this article) installed on your computer.
• MySQL installed (for FULLTEXT indexes support).

Set up Laravel, Livewire, and Tailwind CSS

To get started, generate a fresh Laravel application with the Laravel CLI and enter the directory with the commands below:

GitHub Actions help you discover, create, and share actions to perform any job you'd like, such as CI/CD, and combine actions in a completely customized workflow. In this tutorial, I’ll be showing you how to build, test and deploy a Laravel Application using GitHub Actions.

Prerequisites

You will need the following to get started with this

1. GitHub account
2. Knowledge of Laravel
3. Knowledge of GitHub
4. A live server

Getting started

Let’s create a new Laravel application:

Next, create a repo on GitHub and push the new application to the repo. You can follow the instructions here.

I went ahead and created a repository on GitHub containing the application, which can be found at https://github.com/ammezie/laravel-github-actions in case you would like to just clone it instead.

Setting up GitHub Actions

Now, let’s set up GitHub Actions for the repository. Click on the Actions tab on the repository navigational …

In modern day web applications, real-time notifications are very common as service providers want to keep users informed and engaged about events happening on their platforms. Notifications are a great way to build incentive for users to come back to the platform.

In this tutorial, we will be implementing a real-time application with desktop notifications by utilizing your browser’s Notification API, Laravel, Pusher, and notifications via Twilio Programmable Messaging.

Prerequisites

To follow along in this tutorial, here are the essentials to get started:

• PHP and Laravel 8 installed on your machine.
• Working knowledge of PHP and JavaScript.
• A Twilio Account

Set up a Laravel Application

This tutorial assumes that you are somewhat familiar with PHP and the Laravel Framework. Hence, we will quickly go through the installation process of Laravel and the procedures needed to create a brand new Laravel 8 Application.

Create a Laravel Application …

In recent years, SMS has been widely used as one of the cost-effective and seamless means of disseminating information in the form of a survey. This allows survey creators to reach a larger audience and facilitate gathering data more efficiently.

In this tutorial, we will build an automated customer survey application to receive customer feedback for a fictional company through SMS. In leveraging Twilio Programmable SMS, we will connect a Twilio phone number to a Laravel application to build the business logic that will determine when to begin the survey, the questions to ask, and a persistent layer to save the users’ responses. Each participant will send an SMS response to the Twilio number until the survey is completed.

Let's begin building an automated survey that can be answered via SMS!

Prerequisites

You will need the following to complete this project:

• Knowledge of building applications withLaravel
• A Twilio Account …

By default, browsers implement a same-origin policy that prevents scripts from making HTTP requests across different domains. Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS for short) provides a mechanism through which browsers and server-side applications can agree on requests that are allowed or restricted.

From version 7, the Laravel framework comes with first-party support for sending CORS headers using Middlewares. 

In this tutorial, we'll be building a simple Vue.js app powered by Laravel to learn about CORS. We will take a deep-dive into the various configuration options needed by Laravel to handle CORS OPTIONS requests and see how some of these options affect our application.

Prerequisites

In order to complete this tutorial, you will need the following:

• Familiarity with the Laravel framework
• An existing project with Laravel framework version >= 7.0.
• Vue CLI installed.

Getting Started  

Create a new folder to hold both the Laravel API and the Vue project, and create …

Often referred to as a platform or programming language agnostic query language, GraphQL is a comprehensive approach to guide software engineers in building data-driven applications. It is, in my opinion, the new API standard, offering client applications the flexibility to request exact data and not an entire record from the database. If you are not yet conversant with this technology or looking for simplified technical content to guide you through, you are in the right place.

In this tutorial, you will learn some of the fundamental concepts required to build a Laravel API powered by GraphQL. This is a shift from the conventional architecture of building REST APIs, as we will take a different approach in this tutorial. To help us explore GraphQL, we will build a bookstore API with an ability to carry out CRUD ( Create, Read, Update, Delete ) operations on data, in your database.

Prerequisites …