The short version: Someone exploited an outdated Livewire version on a dormant side project of mine. They stole my .env file, used the Mailcoach API keys to send 50,000 spam emails, and I spent a panicked night tearing through every project I own trying to find the source.

I run it for my apps with traefik in front and is awesome. you can easily add services, DBs, backups and more and using the bin mounts you can migrate in painless way.

At the end of November, I shared a questionnaire to discover what the community thinks about the state of Laravel packages today.

I wanted to focus on the real-world pain points developers face.

To ensure I got busy developers to respond, I kept it short, under 3 minutes on average.

Without an established audience, I managed to reach around 200 responses.

This article illustrates what the community had to say.

If you are building high-performance Laravel applications, you are likely already exploring the limits of what's possible with FrankenPHP and Laravel Octane. In my previous work designing a production-ready Laravel architecture with Traefik and FrankenPHP, I promoted this stack for its simplicity and raw power.

However, bleeding-edge tech often comes with bleeding-edge problems. Recently, I lost three hours debugging an issue that should have been obvious: The FrankenPHP binary installed by Laravel Octane is version-locked.

In my case, it was locked to PHP 8.4, despite my system running the latest stable PHP 8.5. If you are trying to upgrade your stack or build a high-performance directory like I did for LaraPlugins.io, you need your environment to match your expectations.

Here is how to force FrankenPHP to use PHP 8.5 and stop chasing ghost bugs.

As someone who built a standard shortener (coz.jp), this is hilarious. I spent so much time trying to make links look trustworthy; doing the exact opposite is a surprisingly fun concept.

Nice project, I love the laravel stack. but why did you use the laravel 11 version if i may ask?

upvote for the laravel topic

Launching Laraplugins.io

Hello artisans!

I'm excited to launch Laraplugins.io, a Laravel-built directory that helps you discover healthy, maintained plugins faster.

The platform features automated health scores for each plugin, so you can quickly assess quality and make confident decisions without spending hours researching. Check it out the launching page here

Also I should also mention that the site also expose this health data as Readme embeds for developers to use in their projects

Honored to be featured by Laravel as artisan of the day