Tag: php

PHP

★ A package to watch for file system changes in PHP

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Our team has released a new package called file-system-watcher. As the name implies, this package can watch changes in the file system and let you act on those changes.

Using the package

Here's a simple example that allows you to run some code when a new file gets added.

use SpatieWatcherWatch;

Watch::path($directory)
->onFileCreated(function (string $newFilePath) {
// do something...
})
->start();

After calling start, the watcher will start a never-ending loop. When a file is created in the given $directory, the closure passed in onFileCreated will be executed.

There are methods for each kind of file change onFileCreated(), onFileUpdated(), onFileDeleted(), onDirectoryCreated(), onDirectoryDeleted().

Pretty simple, right?

How it works under the hood

Under the hood, this package leverages (https://github.com/paulmillr/chokidar), a popular JS library that can efficiently handle file system changes without requiring much memory or CPU.

To see a demo of the package and learn how we integrated our PHP code with a JS package, watch this fragment of a stream in which I introduced our file-system-watcher.

In closing

There are a few more options available in file-system-watcher. Head over to the readme on GitHub to learn more.

Be sure also to check out the packages our team has created previously. I'm sure there is something that you could use in your next project.

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PHP

★ Dealing with expired signed URLs in Laravel

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Out of the box, Laravel comes with the ability to generate "signed" URLs. These URLs have a hash in their query string that verifies that the URL was not modified.

At Flare, we use these signed URLs to add action links in mail notifications. The action links allow users to snooze and resolve errors right from the mail without having to be logged in. Pretty convenient!

My buddy Dries Vints noticed a slight drawback. He got a mail from Flare that contains these action links. A few hours after the mail arrived, he clicked one of the action links. This is what he saw.

screenshot

This error screen is confusing: you might think that the links in the mail are invalid. To keep things secure, we use a short lifetime for our signed URLs. Dries got this screen because the link had expired.

We can improve on this by creating a dedicated error message when clicking expired or invalid links. Luckily, this is not that difficult.

When you try to validate a signed URL and the validation fails, Laravel will throw a dedicated exception IlluminateRoutingExceptionsInvalidSignatureException In your exception handler, you can listen for that exception and render a dedicated view.

// in app/Exceptions/Handler.php

use Illuminate<span class="hljs-title">Routing<span class="hljs-title">Exceptions<span class="hljs-title">InvalidSignatureException;


public function render($request, Throwable $exception)
{
if ($exception instanceof InvalidSignatureException) {
return response()->view('errors.link-expired')->setStatusCode(Response::HTTP_FORBIDDEN);
}


<span class="hljs-comment">// ...</span>



}

With that code in place, this is what Dries will see when clicking another expired link in the future.

screenshot

And that is all there is to it. To avoid confusions for your users, I highly recommend setting up a dedicated error message when using signed URLs.

Thanks for bringing this to my attention, Dries.

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