Laravel Laravel Moris March Meetup

Laravel Moris held a meetup today at Workshop17 in Vivéa Business Park, St. Pierre. I had a talk scheduled, themed on Laravel and FrankenPHP.

Meetup was planned at 10 a.m. I reached Les Fascines, Vivéa Business Park fifteen minutes earlier. As I arrived in the parking lot, I started reading the signage to look for directions for Workshop17. Just then, I saw Bruno and Nathan, both walking towards the building. I waived at them and we talked while walking towards the entrance.

Ravish Dussaruth was the event host (for the day). He welcomed everyone and gave an introduction about the Laravel Moris community. He spoke about Laracon India which he attended earlier this month along with other co-organisers of Laravel Moris. He thanked the two sponsors of today's meetup, Viitorcloud and NativePHP.

Then, Ravish introduced today's first speaker, Percy Mamedy, who is also a co-organiser of Laravel Moris.

Percy spoke about the recent release of Laravel Starter Kits. He highlighted the features of the three default starter kits, React, Vue and Livewire. E.g the React starter kit comes with Inertia.js pre-configured, it's built using the shadcn/ui library, and comes with user authentication features, either using the built-in Laravel authentication (which most of us are familiar with) or WorkOS Authkit. I know nothing about WorkOS. Even Percy asked the attendees if anyone was familiar with WorkOS and could share thoughts on that but no one used it before.

Then, Percy did a quick demo of the starter kits, showing how easily and quickly one could adapt the layout with the different options available. Also, one could further customise the code if the default layout/style is not preferred.

Lastly, he mentioned that Laravel now allows the use of custom starter kits. Therefore, developers are not limited to starting a new project with the default Vue, React and Livewire starter kits, but one could pull a community based starter kit, say for example a Svelte starter kit and use it, one could build his/her own starter kit as well.

laravel new my-app --using=statamic/statamic

The above command creates a new Laravel project using the Statamic starter-kit. During the discussion, as Percy's presentation ended, someone asked that it would be nice if there is a location where all starter kits could be published. I found a GitHub project by Tony Lea which lists such starter kits. The one by Statamic seems to have garnered the most installs so far.

After Percy's presentation, Sanjivee Muthoora spoke about Viitorcloud.

He mentioned the participation of Viitorcloud at Laracon India and Laracon EU. He also shared information about the company, projects that they've delivered and some exciting projects that will be released soon.

I was the next speaker in line.

My presentation was titled, "deploying Laravel with FrankenPHP".

I started with a problem statement — at La Sentinelle, for years we struggled to host news content locally. Recently, thanks to cloud.mu, that has been possible. However, the Virtual Private Servers (VPS) do not provide us similar fast provisioning and auto-scaling features like those available from major cloud providers. In our quest to build something similar on top of the cloud.mu infra, we decided to experiment with Kubernetes — for future web projects.

I showed a few examples of Laravel based websites that we've developed at La Sentinelle, while mentioning which starter kit we used. Then, I mentioned the websites of the Cloud Native Chapter of Mauritius and meetup.mu created by Alex Bissessur, both sites run Laravel. Lastly, I mentioned the Developers Conference website, which also runs Laravel.

Next, I explained the process of containerising a Laravel application using a Containerfile which I jokingly said I prefer instead of the other one that starts with D.

Bruno, confirmed that podman recognises Containerfile and that I would not require the -f option to specify the filename, but instead I could simply use the dot . symbol. Meaning, I could run the podman command as follows to build the container image.

podman build -t 5plus:laravel .

Once the image was built, which took about 17 seconds, I pushed the image to the GitHub's container repository. Then, I open my Kubernetes deployment YAML file to update the image name, and finally I applied the deployment file. We waited a few minutes for Kubernetes to deploy a pod with the new image and when it was done, I tested the web page. It worked.

I answered a few questions related to Kubernetes. I missed Alex during the Q&A time, as his k8s knowledge was required to answer questions regarding monitoring of deployments and how to handle failed deployments. Alex could not make it to this month's meetup, but I'm sure in a future meetup, he will be able to assist anyone wishing to learn more about managing deployments.

The next presenter was remote — Sarthak Shrivastava from India. Sarthak is a Software Engineer at Pfizer and is the founder of Bitfumes.

Sarthak spoke about Vibe Coding. He gave a bit of background on conversing with AI. He explained about prompt engineering — not giving too many tasks in one prompt and try to break down the tasks into several prompts with concise instructions. He also mentioned that sometimes people personalise the AI by saying something like "you are a Laravel developer with 10 years of experience" but Sarthak advises to use "you have 10 years of programming experience" instead, in order to broaden the expertise area rather than keeping it within the scope of Laravel.

He did a demo using Cursor — the AI code editor that has been much in the news, since Vibe Coding has gone viral. It was a nice talk, we had a exchange of ideas on comparing Cursor with VS Code + GitHub Copilot.

We had lunch break after Sarthak's talk and demo.

The last talk was also remote, and a short one, by Simon Hamp, the creator of NativePHP — the cool stuff that allows you to build desktop and mobile applications using PHP. 🤯

Simon shared his motivation behind creating NativePHP. He explained how awesome things that can be done with it and invited us to try to build applications with NativePHP. He explained that the idea of putting a license for using NativePHP mobile is solely to generate revenue that can sustain the continuous development of the project. He also explained about the Early Access Program (EAP) for NativePHP mobile.

As we reached 1.30 p.m., it was almost time to end meetup. The last fifteen minutes was spent with a fast Q&A with some of the speakers that intervened, i.e Percy, Sarthak and myself, in a panel style. We tried our best to answer the questions. 🙏

It was time well-spent with the Laravel community of Mauritius.