Helena Meets Laravel

Description

My first Laravel app! The basic idea here is that there's a log-in page, a home page, and form where you can take a survey about how well you slept. After you submit the form, your answers will be displayed.

There are a couple of extremely basic tests to go along with this.

You can see this running here.

This was completed as a homework assignment for a job interview.

Set up

Do you want to meet Laravel and deploy it to Heroku too? Welcome aboard!

You'll need to make sure you have a few things on your own before cloning this repo:

1. Laravel (which requires Composer and maybe some other stuff) -- installation guide
2. PHP 7.1 -- installation blog post
3. MySQL -- brew install mysql
4. I used Laravel Valet for local testing -- installation guide
5. If you want to deploy to Heroku, you'll need an account and their command line tools -- brew install heroku or installation guide

At this point, you can clone the repo.

Setting up your local DB

Make a copy of the .env.example file, and name it .env. We'll need to replace the DB section:

DB_CONNECTION=mysql
DB_HOST=127.0.0.1
DB_PORT=3306
DB_DATABASE=homestead
DB_USERNAME=homestead
DB_PASSWORD=secret

Create a new database in mysql:

mysql -u{user} -p{password} # Replace {user} and {password}, password can be empty
create database {name};
use {name};

Now use the {user}, {password}, and database {name} that you just set to fill out your .env file.

DB_DATABASE={name}
DB_USERNAME={user}
DB_PASSWORD={password}

Now run php artisan migrate:fresh. If you've set up Laravel Valet properly, you should now be able to visit helenameetslaravel.dev. 🎉

Deploying to Heroku

I followed this tutorial. You can skip creating a Procfile, as I've included that in this repo. I also skipped the "Trusting the Load Balancer" step, and everything seems to be working just fine.

By default, your Heroku app will be set up to deploy when you do git push heroku master.

Once you have your app on Heroku, you'll need to set up the database. I followed this guide.

That's not my name

You might notice that your app says "Laravel" all over the place (page title for example). You can change this!

• Locally: In your .env file, update the APP_NAME entry.
• Heroku: do heroku run config:set APP_NAME=YOUR_NAME_HERE in your terminal

Thoughts on Laravel

Laravel provides a lot of nice things out of the box (login, a nice testing framework, etc). I'm still a little confused about where helpers and business logic should go (how would I organize this if it did anything remotely useful?), and I'm not sure if it's breaking PHPStorm's static analysis, or if I'm just doing something wrong. Either way, I got the impression that Laravel was designed by someone that doesn't already benefit from IDE code generation.