How to check Laravel version?

Every now and then you would like to check what version of Laravel do you have installed. How to determine that? Here are a couple of ways. I tested this for Laravel 4.

1. The easiest way is to simply run artisan command php artisan --version from your CLI and it will return your Laravel version:

check laravel version

2. You can also browse to and open file vendor\laravel\framework\src\Illuminate\Foundation\Application.php. You will see the version of your Laravel instalation near the top of the class, defined as a constant:

/**
	 * The Laravel framework version.
	 *
	 * @var string
	 */
	const VERSION = '4.0.10';

3. You can also place a little code in your routes.php file at the end and then access it like yourdomain.com/laravel-version . This of course assumes that there is nothing in your routes.php file that would not allow the access of /laravel-version route.

Route::get('laravel-version', function()
{
$laravel = app();
return "Your Laravel version is ".$laravel::VERSION;
});

Please keep in mind that it is best not to keep this code on your production server. It’s not that it is harmful but there is simply no need for this because the first two methods that I showed you are simpler. If you still want to keep it then maybe you can comment it out.

There are other ways, especially with code but why complicate things when these 3 are the easiest? 🙂

If you know some simpler ways then please let me know in the comments.

Laravel 4 with Twitter Bootstrap

One of the first thing many, including me, want to do after installing Laravel 4 is to add Twitter Bootstrap. If you go searching for this on Google you will get all kids of results that may confuse beginner. “Use Bower”, “Install it as a external package then use Basset” and several more. I think some are a little too complicated for a beginner and it doesn’t need to be. I know adding a line to composer.json is easy but this will usually (depending on whcih package you chose) download gazillion of files to your vendor folder.

Here is what to do for a simple website – you don’t need to treat it as a external package that needs to be added via composer, bower or be used with help of Basset etc. Sure, it’s easier to update it via composer but it is not that difficult to update it manually too – if you indeed need an update.

So here are few easy ways:

Use Bootstrap CDN links

Simply include 3 links, which will fetch your twitter bootstrap files from MaxCDN site. This is the easiest and fastest way. Let’s assume that you have a master blade template called default.blade.php. Place this code inside your HTML head section (anywhere):

<head>

<!-- Latest compiled and minified CSS -->
<link rel="stylesheet" href="//netdna.bootstrapcdn.com/bootstrap/3.0.3/css/bootstrap.min.css">

<!-- Optional theme -->
<link rel="stylesheet" href="//netdna.bootstrapcdn.com/bootstrap/3.0.3/css/bootstrap-theme.min.css">

<!-- Latest compiled and minified JavaScript -->
<script src="//netdna.bootstrapcdn.com/bootstrap/3.0.3/js/bootstrap.min.js"></script>

</head>

That’s it, you should now be able to use Twitter Bootstrap goodness.

Download Bootstrap and put it in your public folder

I like to host my own files and not depend on third party so I usually do this. Here we don’t treat Twitter Bootstrap as a Laravel package.We will bypass Composer so we manually put Twitter Bootstrap files into our public assets folder.

Go to getbootstrap.com, download Twitter Bootstrap ZIP file and extract the content of ZIP file (pull entire dist folder) to your /public/ folder. I usually rename dist folder to tb.

You will then end up with css,fonts and js folders inside /public/tb/ folder.

Now we follow the same procedure like before except that we will link to local files we just downloaded. I will use Laravel’s HTML helper to create links. {{ and }} is a Laravel Blade syntax.

<head>

{{ HTML::style('tb/css/bootstrap.css') }}
{{ HTML::style('tb/css/bootstrap-theme.min.css') }}
{{ HTML::script('tb/js/bootstrap.min.js') }}

</head>

As you can guess the first two lines will create CSS style links and the third one will create script link. If you view the source of generated page you will see that Laravel’s HTML helper created something like this (of course http://yoursite.dev will be replaced by your site) :

<head>

<link media="all" type="text/css" rel="stylesheet" href="http://yoursite.dev/tb/css/bootstrap.css">
<link media="all" type="text/css" rel="stylesheet" href="http://yoursite.dev/tb/css/bootstrap-theme.min.css">
<script src="http://yoursite.dev/tb/js/bootstrap.min.js"></script>

</head>

There are other ways (Bower, Composer, Basset…), which I might show in another post (or maybe I’ll update this post later) but these two are the easiest, especially for those just starting with Laravel 4.

Enjoy your Twitter Bootstrap powered Laravel 4 website 🙂

Use Composer to install packages not on Packagist

Packagist and Composer are a great combination for installing the packages that we need for our projects (in my case for Laravel 4 project). For example you want to use Sentry 2 so you simply add "cartalyst/sentry": "2.0.*" as required package in your composer.json file. But what if we need a package that is not on Packagist? There are several ways but I will show you two solutions (and maybe add others later).

Installing package that has no composer.json file

In my case I wanted to add Jquery.Gantt package to my Laravel 4 project. This package is not listed on Packagist and doesn’t have its own composer.json file so you can’t just add "Jquery.Gantt": "1.0.*" under "require": in your composer.json file.

What we need to do is add some code to our composer.json file to tell Composer something about the new package,where to find it etc.

Just so you can imagine how this looks when it is all done, here is my entire composer.json file for one of my projects.Keep in mind that you only have to add what is highlighted in grey (lines 2-19 and line 26) to your composer.json file and not everything. The rest of the code is for my project and is included only so you can see where to put your code. Don’t forget to backup the original composer.json before doing this 🙂

  {
    "repositories": [
        {
            "type": "package",
            "package": {
                "name": "taitems/jQuery.Gantt",
                "version": "1.0",
                "dist": {
                    "url": "https://github.com/taitems/jQuery.Gantt/archive/master.zip",
                    "type": "zip"
                },
                "source": {
                    "url": "https://github.com/taitems/jQuery.Gantt.git",
                    "type": "git",
                    "reference": "dev-master"
                }
            }
        }
    ],
	"require": {
		"laravel/framework": "4.0.*",
		"cartalyst/sentry": "2.0.*",  
		"jasonlewis/expressive-date": "1.*",
		"opauth/opauth": "*",
		"opauth/facebook": "*",  
		"taitems/jQuery.Gantt": "1.0",  
		"way/generators": "dev-master"
	},
	"autoload": {
		"classmap": [
			"app/commands",
			"app/controllers",
			"app/models",
			"app/database/migrations",
			"app/database/seeds",
			"app/tests/TestCase.php"
		]
	},
	"scripts": {
		"post-update-cmd": "php artisan optimize"
	},
	"minimum-stability": "dev"
}

Lines 2-19: You have to change few things of course, depending on what package you are installing. Copy the Name from GitHub page (I took mine from https://github.com/taitems/jQuery.Gantt)). You can find both ZIP and .git URLs on GitHub page of that package. Version should be the package version number you want to use – if you are not sure then try * sign.

Line 26: You add this just like you would normaly add every dependency/package that is listed on Packagist.

That’s it. Just run php composer.phar update and your new package will be installed into /vendor/ folder, just like every other package/dependency.

Installing package that is not on Packagist but has composer.json file

I have not tried this yet but in case the package has composer.json file you can just use this code:

"repositories": [
    {
        "type": "vcs",
        "url": "https://github.com/taitems/jQuery.Gantt"
    }
]

It’s the same as in first example – you start from line 2, after the opening {. Do we are using VCS repository instead of the package repository. Composer will use the GitHub API to fetch the branch names and check if the version dev-soft-deleteable-products-disabled exists. If it does, it will clone the repository and check out said branch.

Again, run php composer.phar update and your new package should be installed into /vendor/ folder, just like every other package/dependency.

Note: VCS example will not work on the jQuery.Gantt package because this package has no composer.json file so you have to use the first method. VCS example is here only to demonstrate what to do when the package has composer.json file included.

Laravel 4 profiler – Log and display SQL queries

Laravel 3 had a cool profiler bundle called Anbu, written by Daylee Rees. It was written as a bundle but Taylor, creator of Laravel, liked it so it was eventually included in the Laravel core. Laravel 4, at the time of this writing, however has no such profiler included in the core. So how do we display database SQL queries for debugging?

Here are a couple of solutions:

1. Use Loic Sharma’s Profiler. It is a PHP 5.3 profiler based off of Laravel 3’s Anbu. I have not tried this yet so just follow the instructions there.

2. Try Profiler by Juy, a PHP 5.3 profiler for Laravel 4. Backend based on sorora/omni, fronted based on loic-sharma/profiler, some features inspirated from papajoker/profiler, some features written by Juy.

3. Create an event that will listen to illuminate.query. Open your routes.php file and add this at the bottom:

 Event::listen('illuminate.query', function($sql)
 {
     var_dump($sql);
 }); 

This will print every query on the screen on the place where it is called so it might not look pretty,especially in loops. Also you might not see the queries on the screen in some cases since they will be “hidden” in the HTML source code (so just view the page source to see them, they will usually be at the top of the page)

4. You can also display the last executed query by placing a code in front of the code that executes a query. For example let say we have this code in our controller:

// Grab all the users
$customers = Customer::orderBy('name','asc')->get();

Place the Event::listen code in front of that statement and you will see that query displayed on your screen.

// dump the next executed query and die (dd)
Event::listen('illuminate.query', function($sql)
{
    dd($sql);
}); 

// Grab all the users
$customers = Customer::orderBy('name','asc')->get();

Keep in mind that this will only display 1 query. If your statement calls more queries they will not get displayed.

5. Put the following code in the App::before filter to get a dump of your database queries:

DB::listen(function($sql, $bindings, $time)
{
    var_dump($sql);
    var_dump($bindings);
});

6. There is another “trick” that I use sometimes (because having SQL queries displayed all the time is not practical and it messes up the code and design): I intentionally make an error in my SQL statement. For example here I mistyped type as tyspe:

$contracts = Contract::where('tyspe','=',0)->orderBy('note','asc')->get();

Since tyspe doesn’t exist Laravel returns an error,showing me the complete SQL statement:

SQLSTATE[42S22]: Column not found: 1054 Unknown column ‘tyspe’ in ‘where clause’ (SQL: select * from `contracts` where `tyspe` = ? order by `note` asc) (Bindings: array ( 0 => 0, ))

Let me know if you know of any other solutions in the comments.

Script php artisan clear-compiled handling the pre-update-cmd event returned with an error

I had a problem with Basset package (website didn’t load, it kept timing out) so I tried to remove it from the composer.json file to see if it helps. After running php composer.phar update I got this error:

Script php artisan clear-compiled handling the pre-update-cmd event returned with an error

You can even get this error:

Script php artisan optimize handling the post-update-cmd event returned with an error

To fix this error open your composer.json file and delete the scripts key (or just the part that fails – in bold). In my case it was this:

	"scripts": {
		"pre-update-cmd": [
			"php artisan clear-compiled"
		],
		"post-install-cmd": [
			"php artisan optimize"
		],
		"post-update-cmd": [
			"php artisan optimize"
		]
	},

I ran php composer.phar update again and it worked.

Some people report that after this they have problems with running php artisan optimize and few others . I didn’t have this problem but if you have it then delete the app/bootstrap/compiled.php file and then try running php composer.phar update

Laravel 4 Accessors & Mutators

Eloquent provides a convenient way to transform your model attributes when getting or setting them. In Laravel 3 they were called Getter & Setter Methods. In Laravel 4 they are called Accessors & Mutators.

Accessors are custom methods in your Model that modify the value of a field before it is returned to you (e.g. before you display it on screen). Similarly, mutators are custom methods in your Model that modify the value of a field prior to being set (e.g. before being saved to database ). These methods are called automatically when you access or set the field as a property on the model (e.g. $movie->release_date).

Note: Laravel 4 adheres to the PSR-0 standard so the accessors / mutators’ method names have to be CamelCase. So, if you have an attribute called “release_date”, the appropriate mutator has to be called setReleaseDateAttribute() and the appropriate accessor has to be called getReleaseDateAttribute(). But enough of theory, let’s see an example.

Modifying date attribute with Accessors & Mutators

Let’s suppose we have a table “Movies”. The table has various fields like title,length, studio etc and of course release_date field (date). What we want to do is automatically modify/format release_date field before inserting it into database and before displaying it in our form. Now this is just for example but let’s suppose that in the database it is stored in Y-m-d format (2013-06-16) and in our form it has d/m/Y format (16/06/2013). I am using Carbon class for date conversion (you can find it in vendor/nesbot/carbon folder – it is included with Laravel 4) but you can use anything you like – even PHP date().

So open your Movies.php model (that extends Eloquent) and add this method somewhere:

//mutator for changing date d/m/Y format to Y-m-d format so it can be stored in database
 public function setReleaseDateAttribute($value)
    {
        $this->attributes['release_date'] = Carbon::createFromFormat('d/m/Y', $value)->toDateString();
    }

This might look complicated at first but don’t worry, it isn’t. As you can see we have a mutator method (setReleaseDateAttribute). If you are wondering why does this method have such name then please re-read the third paragraph of this post (about PSR-0 standard). Note that the value of the attribute is passed to mutator.

Let’s explain this line:

 $this->attributes['release_date'] = Carbon::createFromFormat('d/m/Y', $value)->toDateString();

We access the attribute “release_date” with $this->attributes['release_date'] and set/change it to whatever we want. In the right part we are using Carbon class to create ‘d/m/Y’ variable with $value and then convert it to Y-m-d format with Carbon’s toDateString() method. Again, read Carbon documentation. The right part can be anything you want :

 $this->attributes['release_date'] = '2013-06-13';

Of course that would manually set the date and ignore the actual $variable so this is just for demonstration.

Accessor works the same way, except that we use “get” instead of “set” in the method name. Also since it is just accessor we do not modify the $this->attributes['release_date'] – we just return a (new) value. So add this code below mutator code in your model:

//accessor for changing date Y-m-d format to d/m/Y format so it can be displayed in form field
 public function getReleaseDateAttribute($value). 
    {
       return Carbon::createFromFormat('Y-m-d', $value)->format('d/m/Y');
    }

As you can see we return the value with return and in the mutator we don’t – in mutator we set/modify the $this->attributes['release_date'] .(Also Carbon statement is a little different)

How does Laravel automatically know when to use accessor and when mutator?

If we access the variable somewhere in our controller or model (like $var = $movie->release_date;) then Laravel will call accessor before it is returned to us. If we set the variable (like $movie->release_date = "16/06/2013";) and then save it to database ( e.g. $movie->save() ) Laravel will call mutator before it is saved to database.

Note: If you want to use Carbon class that is included with Laravel 4 you can autoload it or simply add use Carbon\Carbon; right at the top of your model so it looks something like this:

<?php

use Carbon\Carbon;

class Movies extends Eloquent {
//your code, accessors and mutators here
}

Populate dropdown list from database with Laravel

While building admin/CMS or just a form on your site you might need to build a dropdown (select) list with values read from database. It is very elegant to do this with Laravel’s Eloquent. (For the sake of this post let’s assume that you want to read values from the database and not from some array stored in a class or somewhere else.)

Let’s suppose the database table is called “countries” and is already populated (You can get one here). It contains, you guessed it, a list of country names, which you would like to display in a HTML dropbox list.

First, create a model named “Country.php” (you can use artisan, excellent  Laravel 4 generators or create it manually. Keep in mind that the model name is singular (Country) and the database table is plural (Countries).

In your controller add:

$country_options = Country::lists('short_name', 'id');

Simple isn’t it? This will return an array of values like “[1] => Afghanistan [2] => Aland Islands”… (We are assuming that database field name containing country names is “short_name”).

Note: Personally I like Eloquent but in case you do not want to use Eloquent or/and do not want to have an empty Country.php model lying there just so you can populate drop-down then you can use Laravel’s Fluent Database Query Builder:

$country_options = DB::table('countries')->orderBy('short_name', 'asc')->lists('short_name','id'); 

Ok, now let’s send this to view with ->with :

return View::make('admin/customers/create')->with('country_options',$country_options);

In above case I am sending $country_options to admin view that is used to create customers.

In the view you display it like this:

 {{ Form::select('country', $country_options , Input::old('country')) }}

That is all it takes to have a functioning drop-down select box. As you can see we are using Laravel Blade template engine and Form class. With Input::old('country')) we re-populate it with old values (for example after the form is submitted and there are some errors)

How to combine more fields with concat

In another case (for “customers”) I needed to combine two table fields into one and then populate the drop down with it: customers “first_name” + “last_name” should be “first_name last_name”. You can do this by combining Fluent Query Builder with Eloquent:

$customer_options = Customer::select(DB::raw('concat (first_name," ",last_name) as full_name,id'))->lists('full_name', 'id');

As you can see we are mixing Eloquent and DB:raw method.

Note: If you only want to use Laravel’s Database Query Builder then you can do this:

$customer_options = DB::table('customers')->select(DB::raw('concat (first_name," ",last_name) as full_name,id'))->lists('full_name', 'id');

How to add default option to dropdown list

Sometimes we want to have some default value that gives us some instructions what to do (“Please select a country,…”) with the dropdown or maybe even some default “non-value” (in case user doesn’t want to select anything). The easiest way to do this is to add array('' => 'Select One') + so our code looks like this (few examples with the code in this post):

$country_options = array('' => 'Please Select Your Country') + Country::lists('short_name', 'id');
//or
$customer_options = array('' => 'Select Customer') + Customer::select(DB::raw('concat (first_name," ",last_name) as full_name,id'))->lists('full_name', 'id');
//and so on..

Keep in mind that you will have to add some validation (jQuery, Laravel’s own validation etc) in case user leaves the default option (in example above we leave the value as empty but you can set it to anything you want).

I really love Laravel 4, it makes developing so much fun and simple.

Laravel erorr: Call to undefined method Illuminate\Foundation\Application::getConfigLoader()

After I resolved my speed problems with Composer (see the post here ) I got this error once the Composer ended updating dependencies:

Fatal error: Call to undefined method Illuminate\Foundation\Application::getConfigLoader() in E:\path-to-my-project\vendor\laravel\framework\src\Illuminate\Foundation\start.php on line 106

As I already mentioned in my previous post I don’t know if this was due to me canceling composer updates several times or something else but the same error appeared when I opened my project URL in web browser.

The solution is simple: Delete bootstrap/compiled.php file.

After that run php artisan optimize command, which will generate new compiled.php file. I am not sure if this last step is necessary because everything seems to work even without the compiled.php file but I would advice to run this command just in case and regenerate compiled.php file.

Installing / updating Composer dependencies is very slow or time outs

I wanted to speed up my coding by adding Laravel 4 Generators and Laravel Artisan plugin for Sublime text 2 (you can learn more about this here). I added "way/generators": "dev-master" to my composer.json file as instructed and ran "php composer.phar update" and waited….and waited…and waited. How can downloading simple text files be so slow when I have very fast connection?

For some reason I always had problems with composers speed – installing or updating dependencies was very slow. By searching net I saw that a lot of people have similar problems and various solutions are offered – for some they work and for some they don’t. I would advise you to try them out and see if any of them help you.

One of the most common advices is to use the --prefer-dist switch:

php composer.phar update --prefer-dist

I ran it however it didn’t help me. Composer got stuck on updating symfony/filesystem dev-master. After 5 minutes I got this error:

[Symfony\Component\Process\Exception\RuntimeException]
The process timed-out.

After trying it few times with the same result I realized that git.exe was having some problems with my network (not sure what). So the problem seems to be with Git protocol, at least in my case. Composers default github-protocols config settings is ["git", "https", "http"]. So what I did was changed github-protocols to https with this command:

php composer.phar config -g github-protocols https

I ran the update again and it started working, much faster and no timeouts.

Note: I don’t know if this was due to me canceling composer updates several times but after composer finished updating I got this error for the first time :

Fatal error: Call to undefined method Illuminate\Foundation\Application::getConfigLoader()

The solution for this can be found here.