Laravel 5.X directory permissions / ownership setup

August 14, 2018August 14, 2018 Catzie Leave a comment

According to the Laravel docs, “After installing Laravel, you may need to configure some permissions. Directories within the storage and the bootstrap/cache directories should be writable by your web server or Laravel will not run”. After running this command to install Laravel via Composer:

composer create-project --prefer-dist laravel/laravel blog

1	composer create-project --prefer-dist laravel/laravel blog

Change directory ownership by running these commands:

sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /path/to/your/project/storage
sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /path/to/your/project/bootstrap/cache

1 2	sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /path/to/your/project/storage sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /path/to/your/project/bootstrap/cache

Then you […]

PHP: Parse Dates in CSV with inconsistent date formats

September 16, 2016September 16, 2016 Catzie 1 Comment

A friend was having trouble with a CSV file that she needs to process via PHP before saving to database. The CSV files uploaded to the server have inconsistent date formats such as:

November 1, 2016
Dec.6,2016
nov-10-2016
12122016
12/10/2016

November 1, 2016

Dec.6,2016

nov-10-2016

12122016

12/10/2016

So I prepared a PHP script that lists possible date formats in an array $possible_date_formats and then iterates through the dates […]

Install & config Apache, MySQL and PHP on your Mac (MAMP)

September 14, 2016September 14, 2016 Catzie Leave a comment

There’s a Mac computer that I want to use as local development server for web apps. I don’t want to use bundled installers like XAMPP or MAMP because I feel that I will learn more about Apache if I install each component of the LAMP stack separately. By the way, one of my goals is […]

Web Security: How SQL Injection is done

August 28, 2016 Catzie Leave a comment

SQL injection is one of the most common website exploits. For us developers to prevent SQL injection attacks, we must first understand how it’s done. Together, let’s review the basics of SQL injection. Remember, let’s use our knowledge on good things only, okay? The scope of this post is only a MySQL injection sample from […]

Laravel 5: create route group that is only available during testing (Middleware)

July 22, 2016August 4, 2016 Catzie Leave a comment

Today I needed to protect a group of routes from everything except my testing environment. I need to run PHPUnit tests that depend on certain routes, but I don’t want those routes to be available anywhere else. I’ll share in this blog post what I did to get what I need. Assumptions in this tutorial: […]

Laravel 5: activate API token guard and print “Unauthorized” instead of login redirect

July 21, 2016 Catzie Leave a comment

In Laravel 5, I wrap my API routes in a route group like this:

Route::group(['middleware' => ['auth:api','throttle']], function() {
    // API routes here
});

Route::group(['middleware' => ['auth:api','throttle']], function() {

// API routes here

});

Notice that I use auth:api and throttle on my middleware array. auth:api turns on the auth middleware with API token as guard, while throttle activates rate limiter for APIs. To get started with API token authentication, you may read https://gistlog.co/JacobBennett/090369fbab0b31130b51. […]

Laravel 5 RESTful API with Basic Auth: PHPUnit Testing

July 9, 2016 Catzie Leave a comment

I’ve been using PHPUnit to test my RESTful API. PHPUnit is ready to use in Laravel. In my Laravel-based RESTful API, I have an endpoint /api/users which returns JSON data when you send a GET request. The API will only return such data if the client sends the corrent username and password (Basic Authentication). The […]

Laravel update from v.5.0.35 to v.5.2.32 hiccups and solutions

May 23, 2016July 21, 2016 Catzie 2 Comments

I tried to update Laravel 5 today and here were the steps I had to take. First checked my Laravel version before the update:

$ php artisan --version
Laravel Framework version 5.0.35

1 2	$ php artisan --version Laravel Framework version 5.0.35

Edited composer.json in my laravel’s root folder like such:

	"require": {
		"laravel/framework": "5.2.*"
	}

"require": {

"laravel/framework": "5.2.*"

}

Run this on command line:

composer update

1	composer update

You might need to delete root folder’s composer.lock file before the update can actually […]

Laravel 5: Create controller under new folder and routing

May 22, 2016 Catzie Leave a comment

So here I am on a Sunday, trying to make progress with a personal Laravel 5 site I need to work on. As I bear with the noise outside in the street (some crazy neighbors set up a swimming pool IN THE STREET! :oops:), I’m trying to figure out how too create a new Laravel […]

PHP dynamic variable names tutorial

February 19, 2016February 19, 2016 Catzie Leave a comment

I think it’s very convenient for us developers, being able to name our variables dynamically. I’ll show you how to do it in PHP. 🙂 For example, we have variable $foo with “bar” as value like this:

<?php
$foo = "bar";

1 2	<?php $foo = "bar";

If we want to create a variable named based on the “value” of variable $foo, this is […]