Blog Category Screencasts

Learning from Laravel's Source

Shawn McCool Mar 14, 2012

In this video I discuss using the Laravel source code as a valuable educational resource.
Application Logic in Laravel Using Routes

Shawn McCool Mar 13, 2012

In this video I discuss the basics of embedding your application logic into Laravel's routes. We revisit the topics from the the application logic in controllers screencast and approach them a bit differently.
Application Logic in Laravel Using Controllers

Shawn McCool Mar 13, 2012

In this video I discuss where to put your application logic when using Laravel Controllers. I discuss registering controllers with the router, creating a route with a wildcard to send parameters to a controller action, and restful controllers.
Configuring Your Laravel Application on a Per-Environment Basis

Shawn McCool Mar 13, 2012

An application will usually be deployed to many environments over its lifetime. From the team's own development environments to a staging environment to the production environment configurations will likely need to be changed.

Laravel provides a simply way to enable different configurations on a per-environment basis.
A Walk Through Laravel's Folder Structure

Shawn McCool Mar 12, 2012

In this video I walk through the Laravel folder structure and share some of my thoughts about Laravel.
Unit Testing Laravel's Core in Windows

Shawn McCool Mar 8, 2012

Testing Laravel's core is a critical part of making and submitting changes to the codebase. Without testing it's incredibly difficult to know if your changes break something. It's possible that your seemingly perfect modification could cause an error in something obscure that few people would ever use. It's important to test for an increased level of confidence.

A few preparations must be made when unit testing Laravel's core in Windows. In the video I walk through updating PEAR, PHPUnit, enabling the fileinfo PHP extension, and pulling down the framework / core tests.

1. Clone Laravel and the tests bundle.

Clone the Laravel framework.
```
git clone https://github.com/laravel/laravel.git
```
Clone the laravel-tests bundle into the bundles folder.
```
cd laravel/bundles

git clone https://github.com/laravel/tests.git laravel-tests
```
2. Upgrade PEAR.

Change directories to your PHP installation folder.
```
cd xampp177/php
```
Upgrade PEAR.
```
pear upgrade pear
```
Upgrade PHPUnit.
```
pear upgrade phpunit/PHPUnit
```
3. Enable the fileinfo extension in php.ini.

Laravel's File class uses the fileinfo extension. This is generally not enabled by default in Windows packages.

In your php.ini file find the following line.
```
;extension=php_fileinfo.dll
```
Uncomment the extension by removing the semi-colon.
```
extension=php_fileinfo.dll
```
Then restart your apache.

4. Run the tests against Laravel's core.

Change directories into the folder that you cloned Laravel into.
```
cd laravel
```
Then, run the tests against the core.
```
php artisan test:core
```