May 2015 – Morgan Davison

Adding Soft Deletes to Existing Database Table in Laravel

First, enable soft deletes in your model. I’ll use the users table as an example.

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Installing the Html and Form Builder package back into Laravel 5

Here’s how to get the Form and Html Builder package back when using Laravel 5.

composer require illuminate/html

Then, in /config/app.php add the following to the providers and aliases arrays:

'providers' => [
	...
 
	'Illuminate\Html\HtmlServiceProvider',
],
 
'aliases' => [
 
	...
 
	'Form'=> 'Illuminate\Html\FormFacade', 
	'HTML'=> 'Illuminate\Html\HtmlFacade',
],

Disable Registration in Laravel 5

A new Laravel 5 installation comes with user registration out of the box. If you don’t want to use this feature, here is a clean way to disable it. Open up app\Http\Controllers\Auth\AuthController.php and add the following methods:

public function getRegister()
{
    return redirect('auth/login'); // Or wherever
}

public function postRegister()
{

}

These will override the parent methods in the AuthenticatesAndRegistersUsers trait.

Using Laravel 5 Auth Middleware

To restrict pages in your app to authentication status, add the middleware to the controller’s constructor.

To restrict a page to guests only (not signed in):

public function __construct()
{
    $this->middleware('guest');
}

For signed in users:

public function __construct()
{
    $this->middleware('auth');
}

If you want to make exceptions for certain methods, just pass those parameters in as an array for the second argument.

$this->middleware('auth', ['except' => 'show']);

Using Route Resource for RESTful routes in Laravel 5

To have laravel automatically generate all the REST routes for a controller, use Route::resource()

Route::resource('users', 'UsersController');

Set up Elixir with Laravel 5

First, make sure you have gulp installed.

npm install --global gulp

Then run npm install in order to install Elixir.

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Form Model Binding in Laravel 5 with FormBuilder

Here’s an example of how to use form-model binding with FormBuilder.

{!! Form::model($user, ['route' => ['users.update', $user->id], 'method' => 'PATCH']) !!}

Generate Excerpt without Breaking a Word

Here’s a little snippet for generating an excerpt without breaking up a word:

function excerpt($string='', $maxChar=50, $uri='#') {
     $length = strlen($string);
     if ($length < $maxChar) {
          return $string;
     }
     $trimmedString = substr($string, 0, $maxChar);
     $choppedString = substr($trimmedString, 0, strrpos($trimmedString, strrchr($trimmedString, ' ')));
     $newString = $choppedString . ' <a href="' . $uri . '">more</a>';
     return $newString;
}

Setting Up a Virtual Host on WAMP

One of the biggest pains about developing on a local server setup like WAMP is that the root filepaths are different when you go live. To get around this I always set up a virtual host so that my development url can be something like, http://myapplication.dev/. Here’s how to do it on Wampserver 2.5. This is tailored for Laravel but you can adjust it as needed.

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Check For an Element on the Page with jQuery

Sometimes I write a function that I only want to apply to certain pages. Say, a form. I may need some javascript to apply to the form when I’m inserting and different javascript to apply when I’m editing. Since I’m reusing the form, I just change the id of the form and use this check:

if ($('#insert-form').length > 0) {
// do stuff that only applies to the insert form
}