Laravel Validation mechanism has a lot of rules provided - a field can be required, integer, IP address, timezone etc. But sometimes there is a need for a special rule which is not in that list. One example of this is when you have two fields and you need only one of them to be filled. One, or another, but NOT BOTH. Laravel doesn't have a rule for that, so let's create one!
For those who work with different Laravel versions on different projects, it's useful to know the difference of CSRF logic - it changed a little from 4.x to 5.x.
A real-life scenario: you want to have URLs like account/*** under the same Route group with a prefix, but some of them should be also restricted with Auth Middleware. No problem - you can create a Group within a Group!
If you moved from Laravel 4 to version 5 or 5.x - you will miss an Artisan command artisan tail for your log viewing. How to get it back? Luckily, there's a package for that.
Eloquent mechanism isn't limited to just create/update/delete functions - that's why it's awesome. One of those helpers come to rescue when you need to increment a column, basically run update X set Y=Y+1 where id = Z - apparently, there's no need to run update() function for that.
A very convenient way to populate dropdown options with Eloquent is to use lists() function. But it doesn't work out of the box with "Append" fields, also called "Accessors". Here's a small trick to make it work.
While working with database migrations and schema builder, sometimes we do need to make changes to the columns that already exist. Can you do that and how?
Simple use-case: you want to filter only those categories which have at least one product. Or course, you write Category::with('products')->... but how do you filter out those empty categories? Those with no product? There's an app function for that: has().
Laravel 5 has an awesome new function - Request Validation. It separates the logic of Validation into kind of a separate layer - Requests, which reside in the folder app/Http/Requests. After the form validation, it auto-magically shows error messages. But what if we want to customize them?
When you load a View from the Controller, there could be a situation when you don't actually know which view to load - the name could be dynamic. For example, you would use different Blade templates for sending emails. There is a neat function to assure your chosen View file actually exists.
