Streamlining Laravel: 10 Game-Changing Practices You Need to Know

Top 10 Best Laravel Game Changing Development Practices

Learn the top 10 Laravel development practices for optimized performance and security, Let’s dive in!

1. Keep Laravel Up to Date:

Upgrade your Laravel for the following blessings:

1. Access to the Latest Features: Regular updates mean that you have the newest features and improvements that were released in every version of Laravel.

2. Improved Performance: Updates usually come with performance updates and efficiency concerning your application, and the updated version generally assures an excellent performance output.

3. Enhanced Security: Laravel updates come with security vulnerability fixes, offering patches that keep your application free and protected from potential threats and abuse.

4. Bug Fixes: New releases also come with fixes for addressing the Laravel community issues. In this way, updates make the work of your application more stable without any errors.

If needed, follow the detailed steps explained in the official Laravel documentation on how to update to the latest release.

2. Keep Packages Up to Date:

• Accessing various packages from the Laravel ecosystem, whether it is official or community, makes our work easier.
• Think of your Laravel application as a smartphone. Updating apps on that phone wouldn’t only make them trendier but fix several bugs in each app, and boost security.
• The same logic applies to keep packages updated in your Laravel app. When you regularly update packages, your Laravel application remains fresh, more secure, and more efficient.
• Updated packages give newer features, fix bugs, and add extra care to the security, which makes the entire user experience better.
• It’s like giving your app a compact makeover to make it trendier, safer, and more fun to use for those who do.
• Before updating packages, test them in a safe environment first. Make sure everything works as expected to avoid surprises in your live app.

3. Use Services and Traits:

Using Services and Traits in Laravel is a powerful way to increase modularity, reusability, and maintainability in your controller code. The following are distributions, and examples of each.

Services

• In Laravel, a service is a basic helper that takes care of the complex tasks that your controller needs to perform efficiently.
• Let’s say you have an e-commerce website, users can order products on the website. We want to create a service class that handles the logic of order processing. Similarly, we can:

Create the Service

• Inside the app directory, create a new folder named [Services] and Inside Services create one more file OrderService.php.
• Inside the OrderService.php:

namespace App\Services;

class OrderService
{
    public function processOrder($items)
    {
        // Logic to process the order
    }
}

• Inside the OrderController.php:

class OrderController extends Controller
{
    protected $orderService;

    public function __construct(OrderService $orderService)
    {
        $this->orderService = $orderService;
    }

    public function placeOrder(Request $request)
    {
        // Process the order using the OrderService
        $items = $request->input('items');
        $this->orderService->processOrder($items);
    }
}

• So, in short, when you are developing a Laravel-based application, consider services as your helpers, who keep your house clean and are prepared to look after any additional changes that you may make in the future.

Traits

• Traits in Laravel are reusable pieces of code. They allow you to share methods across multiple classes without using inheritance, promoting code reuse and reducing duplication.
• Imagine your application has multiple controllers that need to upload any profile pictures, files, videos, or documents. Writing upload code in each controller is not a good practice.
• So, in that case, we create a new Trait called ImagesTrait, which contains methods like uploadImage, uploadImages, deleteImage, and deleteImages. This Trait is used throughout the application. Whenever a controller needs to handle image uploading, we simply call this ImagesTrait, and it magically does the necessary work.
• This approach keeps our controllers clean and increases the reusability of our code.
• same as services we need to create a folder[Traits] in the App directory.like App/Traits/ImagesTrait

Inside the ImagesTrait:

<?php

namespace App\Traits;

trait ImagesTrait
{
  public function uploadImage($image)
  {
    // Upload a single image
  }

  public function uploadImages($images)
  {
    // Upload multiple images.
  }

  public function deleteImage($image)
  {
    // Delete a single image.
  }

  public function deleteImages($images)
  {
    // Delete multiple images.
  }
}

Inside the Controller:

class YourController extends Controller
{
 use ImagesTrait;

  public function yourControllerMethod()
  {
   // Call methods from the ImagesTrait
     $this->uploadImage($image);
     $this->uploadImages($images);
     $this->deleteImage($image);
     $this->deleteImages($images);
   }
}

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4. Create Subviews to Avoid Code Repetition:

• Think of subviews as building blocks to build different parts of your website.
• Instead of repeatedly writing the same code for similar sections, you can create a subview once and reuse it wherever you need it.
• A subview is a blade file that you can “@include” in a blade template using the include directive.
• For example, you have a website with 6 or above pages that show a dropdown menu that lists all the products you offer. If I have to do this using basic HTML, then I will simply write the code for the product dropdown for all six or above in every HTML file. Instead of including the code snippet inside every blade file, create a single template file that has code for dropdown. Then you include the subview in all those files using the include directive.
• The big advantage of using subviews is that everything that may be changed later – for instance, you may need to add multi-select for several products or modify the appearance of a drop-down menu – will have to be changed only right here. It makes your code much easier to adjust and less likely to cause mistakes.
• For instance, you may include products subview in a view that shows a table with a list of products like in the space below:

       
// inside the product-listing.blade.php

    @foreach ($products as $product)
        {{ $product->name }}
    @endforeach


// Use subview
@include('product-listing', ['products' => $products])

• Conclusion. Apart from beneficial effects such as the reduction of your code at least and its rise in modularity, making the application easier to adjust, since different parts’ files are focused only on a single thing each, ensuring understandingability.

5. Follow Laravel Naming Conventions:

• Therefore, using Laravel Naming Convention is one of the most fundamental prerequisites to develop clean code.
• It will also help you follow the best practices and standards set by the Laravel community.
• To learn more visit: Laravel Naming Conventions.

6. Practice Error Handling and Logging:

1. Let’s discuss Error Handling and Logging in Laravel to understand it clearly:

• Error handling in Laravel is a safety net that prevents your application from crashing. Laravel catches those unexpected circumstances and handles them silently so that if something goes wrong while your Laravel application is running, it won’t cause your running Laravel application to terminate, such as an error in your code or a server error.
• In other words, logging is the process of recording events or actions that occur in a system or application. Logging in programming language terminology involves putting messages into a log file, the technical equivalent of keeping a diary that keeps track of what your code is doing behind the scenes.

2. Practice Error Handling and Logging in Laravel: Now that you’ve created a Laravel application, you’ll want to ensure that you’re equipped for when things go wrong. When you’re running your web app in Laravel. you want to make sure that you have instructions to handle these scenarios when, the user provides invalid input, or your database connection fails.

3. Logging, on the other hand, manner retaining a report of these activities so that you can review them later and figure out what went wrong.

4. Let’s compile an example of a Laravel controller function that fetches a user’s details from the database using Error Handling with a try-catch block and logs any error that might occur.

    
use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Log;

public function show($id){
    try {
        $user = User::findOrFail($id);
        // If user found, return user details
        return response()->json($user);
    } catch (\Exception $e) {
        // Log the error
        Log::error('Error fetching user: ' . $e->getMessage());
        // Return error response
        return response()->json(['error' => 'User not found'], 404);
    }
}

7. Don’t Track Your .env File:

1. .env file in Laravel to operate in designations such as database credits and API symbols. It’s critical to accomplish that because it keeps your application’s sensitive data separate from your code. That helps you handle different environments without many issues, including development, examination, and production.

2. Do not track your.env file with your Git since it includes sensitive details such as passwords. If it’s shared or exposed, someone might quickly get entry to your database or additional services and create a vulnerability. It might seem an obvious conclusion, but keeping it private protects your program.

3. Ensure to include it in your .gitignore.

8. Use custom Form Requests For Complex Validation:

1. Since you want the separation of concerns to be maintained in your application and you don’t want to fill your controller with validation, using custom form requests is the best practice.

2. This is because the controller should be responsible for the execution of the business logic, not validation. Furthermore, they aid in reusing the same request on various controller actions and keep your application more safe and secure.

3. The best approach depends on the complexity of your project. If the validation is simple, you can do it with an inline validation on the controller. However, custom form requests are worth it if the validation continues to grow or you would like to keep the code clean.

4. Let’s assume that you want to create a file for validating the blog post creation request:

First, Create the custom form request file using the artisan command:

• php artisan make:request StoreBlogPostRequest

This will create a new file called StoreBlogPostRequest.php in the

 
app/Http/Requests directory.

// Inside the controller
<?php

use App\Models\BlogPost;
use App\Http\Requests\StoreBlogPostRequest;

class BlogPostController extends Controller
{
    public function store(StoreBlogPostRequest $request)
    {
        BlogPost::create($request->validated());
    }
}

9. Prevent N+1 Issues With Eager Loading:

If I hear a problem with Laravel performance, I first check how many SQL queries are executed under the hood of Eloquent sentences.

Here is the classic example from the docs:

   
use App\Models\Car;

// Bad Practice
$cars = Car::all();

// Good Practice
$cars = Car::with(‘owner')->get();

foreach ($cars as $car) {
    echo $car->owner->name;
}

• So, as you see, this code looks almost the same, and it is still readable. The only thing that you have added here is ::with(‘owner’) which will fetch all of the cars, then make another query to get the owner at once. It means that we will have to cut it down from 101 queries to 2.

10.Use Queues For Even Longer Running Tasks:

For instance, let’s say you had an e-commerce application that allows users to place orders. After a user places an order, you need to send the user an email to confirm that their order has been received. Sending emails can sometimes take time, especially if you have many emails to send or if there are delays with the email service provider. You don’t want your users to experience delays while waiting for their orders to be processed, so you decide to use queues to handle the email-sending process asynchronously.

When there is a task that takes a long time on your website, put that in a “queue” to get handled in the future.

This way, not only do you improve the experience of the user but also can make your application scale.

Learn More About Queues: How to Send Emails Using Queue Jobs in Laravel.

Conclusion

In conclusion, the use of these best practices can substantially improve your development workflow and the performance of your Laravel applications. Your development workflow can be improved by staying current on the state of Laravel and its packages. creating services and traits for modular, reusable code, and subviews to avoid repetitive tasks.

Additionally, more robust error handling, never tracking sensitive files like the.env file, custom form requests versus validation, and not showing off with eager loading to prevent N+1 issues all contribute to a more robust and secure application. Finally, Queues should be used with longer-running jobs for increased user experience and scalability. These best Laravel practices will help you develop exceptional Laravel applications.

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