DEV Community: Dennis 🚀

We are giving away a Dracula Pro license 🔥

Dennis 🚀 — Wed, 12 Feb 2020 11:22:08 +0000

We are giving away a Dracula Pro license on our Twitter, retweeting and liking is required to enter the contest.

Ploi

@ploi_deploy

GIVEAWAY TIME! 🔥

Win a Dracula Pro license (by @zenorocha), awesome theme colors for your IDE 🎨

Retweet & like to enter the contest, the winner will be determined 17th of February 💙

draculatheme.com/pro

#contest #giveaway #developer #webdeveloper #win

11:02 AM - 12 Feb 2020

12 10

Credits for Dracula PRO go to @zenorocha , more information about his story:

I made a Color Scheme for Programming Using Math

Zeno Rocha ・ Feb 11 ・ 1 min read

#darkmode #theme #dracula #vscode

So I rebranded my SaaS and ditched the logo 💪

Dennis 🚀 — Tue, 06 Aug 2019 13:45:56 +0000

I've had the idea to rebrand my SaaS ploi.io for a long while now, but the biggest problem was that I am a core backend developer and not good at designing.

Luckily for me I have a designer friend who helped me setup a whole new brand for ploi: and boy was it a challenge 💙

We used to have the green color, but I always liked blue more over green. Which makes me feel its a whole more complete product now.

With the frontend redesigned and rebranded - we couldn't leave the panel behind (which is the most important part of the complete application).

So we overhauled that too! (Image in header and below this post some more screenshots)

Oh, and we are on product hunt too!

To sum up the changes;

Ditched our logo (all text now)
Changed branding color from #62A6A6 to #1853DB
Completely redesigned frontend website
Completely hauled over the panel design
Changed login, register & password forget page
Code editor highlighting added
Exported sites & servers to 1 general search bar
A lot of new features added to API (server creation is still in progress & changelog page is coming to https://developers.ploi.io)
Ability to export personal user data to see what we save
Speed improvements panel
Bug fixes panel

I am really curious to hear what you think of the rebranding and new design, let me know!

Partnership with Hetzner! 😍

Dennis 🚀 — Tue, 21 May 2019 12:41:23 +0000

We are very proud to announce we have established an official partnership with Hetzner, this partnership is a big step for us moving forward. 👏

We are still working on partnering up with the other providers that are available in our integrations system. It is an excellent way for us to offer stability and assurance to our users.

If you know a server provider that would fit nicely in Ploi; let us know! We are more than welcome to open up our list and welcoming new and/or young providers. 🤝

More information about our partners: https://ploi.io/links

Ploi.io - Server installation process

Dennis 🚀 — Tue, 14 May 2019 20:18:35 +0000

Server installation process & usage in https://ploi.io

LaraBug — A Laravel Exception Tool Helper

Dennis 🚀 — Mon, 29 Apr 2019 06:18:03 +0000

When creating and developing websites it is most common that your users do not always report bugs, certainly if you do not solve these errors you will lose (potential) customers.

This is were LaraBug comes in, I created this tool in 2016 to basically scratch my own itch. I needed a clear and clean tool to read my errors on, I had to know what was going on when something went wrong. (Whoops, something went wrong 😰)

LaraBug will catch any exception generated in your application and collect this in a nicely formed dashboard for you.

You have a complete overview over your exceptions per project. You can view the complete details about the exception including the stack trace and code piece with the actual line highlighted so you know where the code broke.

If available, LaraBug’s package will also send along the user details (with Sentinel support!) so you know who’s it about.

Sharing exceptions to solve with teammates or colleague’s is also no problem, just make your exception ‘Public’ inside the options tab in LaraBug which will allow URL sharing of your exception.

Nova Tool Package
We also provide a LaraBug package for the newly-released Laravel Nova panel! This allows you to view your errors from your Laravel Nova panel.

Github.com: https://github.com/LaraBug/nova-larabug-tool

Novapackages.com: https://novapackages.com/packages/larabug/nova-larabug-tool

Website LaraBug: https://www.larabug.com

Thats it! Let me know if it helped you and if I can improve in any way.

Note: please bare in mind that I am a Dutch developer, English is not my native language so this article could contain any grammatical errors.

Ploi.io - Server Management Tool

Dennis 🚀 — Fri, 26 Apr 2019 12:57:36 +0000

I am someone who loves to try out new tools, I think I’ve seen so much panels (Plesk, DirectAdmin, cPanel, VestaCP and much more) that I might have tried them all. Sadly, fact was that I was never satisfied with any of these.

Developing in PHP is what I love to do, I use Laravel all the time and I’m a big fan. So trying to find a way to easily deploy my Laravel apps for my customers was not that easy, I was getting tired of all the manual terminal work I had to do.

I started thinking; “What if I combine everything that I need, in just 1 tool?”

Enters the concept

This is where Ploi started with just 1 question. I’ve started development in 2017 may but quickly gave up, it was just too much work to encapsulate in a brief time. Half year goes by in which I did some basic things to the application, but never was it ready for usage.

Then in February 2018, I noticed a colleague-programmer had built something similar, which motivated me a lot. (And this tool he built was really tiny, basically what it did was setup a webhosting environment on a server and you we’re able to upload with FTP or 1-click install WordPress on it).

I then re-started development on Ploi (this is where the name also was made up, its leading from ‘Deploy’) with a lot of motivation. So much motivation that the first beta launched march 2018, 2 other colleague-programmers helped me get started which just gave me a boost more to keep on going.

This is currently how Ploi’s dashboard looks like;

What I personally underestimated was the importance of testing, testing and testing. Provisioning someone’s server is a responsible job and has to be executed correctly, this led to some headaches sometimes.

To encapsulate what Ploi actually does;

Ploi makes it really easy to provision a server for your websites and applications. You can install a server with; DigitalOcean, Vultr, Linode or Custom VPS (with your favorite vendor, make sure you choose Ubuntu 18.04). All servers that are being created with DigitalOcean, Vultr or Linode are provisioned with Ubuntu 18.04. This is because I have the most knowledge of this OS to fully understand and support it.

You can create website’s and install your Github, Bitbucket or Gitlab repository. You can also 1-click install WordPress or upload your website with SFTP.

Packages that are installed by default;

Nginx
NodeJS
MySQL 5.7
PHP 7.1 (upgrade-able to 7.x through server panel)
Redis
Supervisor
UFW (Uncomplicated firewall) And much more to handle small things

Once you’ve provisioned a server you’re ready to go🚀

As you can see in the image above, just enter your website domain and add it, instantly you have a online website (you have to point your DNS records to your server ofcourse)

For more information check out https://ploi.io

Laravel — Include your own helper functions

Dennis 🚀 — Tue, 16 Apr 2019 15:18:23 +0000

Laravel — Include your own helper functions

Sometimes you might want to create a function that is available everywhere, this is where this tutorial comes in handy for you 👏

Everywhere I look I see tutorials passing by where they explain that you can achieve this easily by adding an autoload file to your composer file. For some reason I think its quite ugly and can get un-readable as your helpers.php might grow in that case.

I have been using a method for a long while where you are able to declare several files which contain methods, this is much cleaner and more read-able.

Let’s start.. 🔥

First of start by making a HelperServiceProvider.php provider:

php artisan make:provider HelperServiceProvider

Once you’ve done this you will see a new file inside app\Providers called HelperServiceProvider.php

You can safely remove the complete boot() method as we are not going to use this.

Inside the register function enter this piece of code:

public function register()
{
    foreach (glob(app_path('Helpers') . '/*.php') as $file) {
        require_once $file;
    }
}

What this does is loop through all the files inside app/Helpers, you might of guessed it already: You can now enter several PHP files in that directory (which you might need to create) which will be loaded into your application. These helper functions are available in each part of your code (views, models, controllers etcetera)

We still need to load this provider, open up config/app.php and add the HelperServiceProvider above your AppServiceProvider:

...
App\Providers\HelperServiceProvider::class,
App\Providers\AppServiceProvider::class,
App\Providers\AuthServiceProvider::class,
App\Providers\BroadcastServiceProvider::class,
...

Now lets try to create a simple function, create a new file called Carbon.php inside app/Helpers folder with these contents:

<?php

/**
 * Carbon helper
 *
 * @param $time
 * @param $tz
 *
 * @return Carbon\Carbon
 */
function carbon($time = null, $tz = null)
{
    return new \Carbon\Carbon($time, $tz);
}

You do not need to enter any namespacing. And if you want, you can check if the function exists by calling an if statement function_exists which might be a good idea.

You can now use the helper carbon() everywhere in the application you’d like. Now lets say if you need another function that is returning a specific format (just for the use-case of this tutorial) you can just enter that in the same file (Carbon.php):

<?php

/**
 * Carbon helper
 *
 * @param $time
 * @param $tz
 *
 * @return Carbon\Carbon
 */
function carbon($time = null, $tz = null)
{
    return new \Carbon\Carbon($time, $tz);
}
function carbonFormatted($time = null, $tz = null)
{
    return carbon($time, $tz)->format('Y-m-d')
}

Thats it! You can now start filling up the app/Helpers directory with your own PHP files which contain quick helpers that you use often 💪

Introducing: Load Balancing!

Dennis 🚀 — Fri, 08 Mar 2019 11:35:03 +0000

Introducing: Load Balancing! 🛰

Control your Philips Hue lights from your Laravel code

Dennis 🚀 — Wed, 27 Feb 2019 15:24:25 +0000

Recently I created a package to manage my Philips Hue lights with. I wanted an easy way to signal my lights in my office when something special happens. Things that are special for example could be:

New user sign up
New paid order
New support ticket
New newsletter subscription
… etc

Here’s a link to the package:

Cannonb4ll/laravel-philips-hue

I’m still doing work on it, but the basics are implemented and fully working.

You can switch lights on and off per ID, but also in a complete group.

Syntax is as easy as this:

(new HueClient)->lights()->on(1)

Some example commands:

$hue = new HueClient();

$hue->groups()->all();
$hue->lights()->all();
$hue->lights()->get(1);
$hue->lights()->on(1);
$hue->lights()->off(1);
$hue->lights()->customState(1, [
 "hue" => 25500,
 "bri" =>200,
 "alert" => 'select'
]);

You can do whatever you want!