PHP on ma.ttias.be

Turn your Filament panel into an AI-native dashboard

mattias@ma.ttias.be (Mattias Geniar) — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

You can already point an AI agent at your Filament admin panel and have it click around like a human. Take a screenshot, find the button, fill the form, submit, screenshot again to check it worked. With computer-use or a browser MCP, that works today. It’s also slow, brittle, and spends a small fortune in tokens describing pixels to figure out where the “Save” button is.

Lessons learned: don't mix $timeout attributes and properties on queued Laravel jobs

mattias@ma.ttias.be (Mattias Geniar) — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Update: the fix described in this post has since been merged into Laravel and ships in the next 13.x release. From that release on, a child class’s plain $timeout property correctly overrides an attribute inherited from a parent, so the specific footgun below no longer bites. This post stays up as a historical write-up: how the bug behaved, the subtle PHP reflection edge case behind it, and the fix that closed it.

Catching SQL performance issues in PHPUnit and Pest, as part of your test infrastructure

mattias@ma.ttias.be (Mattias Geniar) — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been on a bit of a SQL performance kick lately. Over at Oh Dear , I wrote a 3-part series about finding, fixing, and automatically detecting SQL performance issues . The last part of that series covers how we catch regressions before they hit production by running checks in our test suite.

A PHP package to simplify working with percentages

mattias@ma.ttias.be (Mattias Geniar) — Mon, 01 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I created a PHP package that can make it easier to work with percentages in any PHP application.

Build & test your Laravel project via Bitbucket Pipelines

mattias@ma.ttias.be (Mattias Geniar) — Wed, 29 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

This post will show you how to use Bitbucket Pipelines to build and test your Laravel Project in a docker container.

How I write and curate the cron.weekly newsletter

mattias@ma.ttias.be (Mattias Geniar) — Wed, 29 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Every Sunday, I send out a newsletter called cron.weekly to over 10.000 subscribers. In this post, I’ll do a deep-dive into how those mails get delivered to subscribers.

Composer require specific version while ignoring package dependencies

mattias@ma.ttias.be (Mattias Geniar) — Thu, 16 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I’m working on some new versions of PHP packages, and for that I’m working of a temporary branch. I wanted to update my local composer packages, but ran into a package constraint.

Forcing a Content-Type header with Guzzle's form_params

mattias@ma.ttias.be (Mattias Geniar) — Mon, 09 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I just lost an hour or 2 of my life to this, so I figure I’ll do a small write-up to save future me from having to do the same dance.

Name your Laravel Horizon workers for easier debugging at the CLI

mattias@ma.ttias.be (Mattias Geniar) — Thu, 19 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

As part of our Oh Dear! monitoring service , we run workers. A lot of workers. Every site uptime check is a new worker, every broken links job is a new worker, every certificate check is a- you get the idea.

A Caddyfile config example for Laravel

mattias@ma.ttias.be (Mattias Geniar) — Mon, 25 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been using the Caddy webserver for all my projects lately. Here’s my current default config for a Laravel project.

Remove index.php from the URL in Laravel

mattias@ma.ttias.be (Mattias Geniar) — Thu, 21 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0000

If you have a Laravel project, you might be surprised to find your routes are probably available on a number of different URLs.

Disable HTTP sessions in Laravel to speed up your API

mattias@ma.ttias.be (Mattias Geniar) — Fri, 08 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0000

If you run a Laravel application purely as a headless API, you can benefit from disabling the HTTP sessions.

Mac pecl install: configure: error: Please reinstall the pkg-config distribution

mattias@ma.ttias.be (Mattias Geniar) — Wed, 16 Oct 2019 19:26:28 +0000

I ran into this error when doing a pecl install imagick on a Mac.

$ pecl install imagick
[...]
checking for pkg-config... no
pkg-config not found
configure: error: Please reinstall the pkg-config distribution
ERROR: `/private/tmp/pear/temp/imagick/configure --with-php-config=/usr/local/opt/php/bin/php-config --with-imagick' failed

By default, the needed pkg-config binary isn’t installed. You can install it via Homebrew .

Install PHP’s imagick extension on Mac with Brew

mattias@ma.ttias.be (Mattias Geniar) — Wed, 16 Oct 2019 19:24:07 +0000

I was setting up a new Mac and ran into this problem again, where a default PHP installation with brew is missing a few important extensions. In this case, I wanted to get the imagick extension loaded.

Laravel’s Tinker quits immediately on PHP 7.3 & Mac

mattias@ma.ttias.be (Mattias Geniar) — Mon, 14 Oct 2019 11:46:00 +0000

I had a weird issue with Laravel’s Tinker artisan command. Every time I would load it up and type a command, it would immediately quit.

A github CI workflow tailored to modern PHP applications (Laravel, Symfony, …)

mattias@ma.ttias.be (Mattias Geniar) — Thu, 03 Oct 2019 11:45:56 +0000

Last year we wrote a blogpost about our setup we use for Oh Dear! with Gitlab, and how we use their pipelines for running our CI tests . Since then, we’ve moved back to Github since they introduced their free private repositories.

How we used Caddy and Laravel’s subdomain routing to serve our status pages

mattias@ma.ttias.be (Mattias Geniar) — Thu, 19 Sep 2019 10:04:17 +0000

We recently launched our new Status Page feature. Under the hood, it’s using the Caddy proxy server and Laravel’s subdomain routing to serve the right status page on the right domain.

MySQL 8 & Laravel: The server requested authentication method unknown to the client

mattias@ma.ttias.be (Mattias Geniar) — Tue, 19 Mar 2019 09:52:17 +0000

For local development I use Laravel Valet . Recently, the brew packages have updated to MySQL 8 which changed a few things about its user management . One thing I continue to run into is this error when working with existing Laravel applications.

Our Gitlab CI pipeline for Laravel applications – Oh Dear! blog

mattias@ma.ttias.be (Mattias Geniar) — Wed, 12 Dec 2018 19:34:23 +0000

We’ve built an extensive Gitlab CI Pipeline for our testing at Oh Dear! and we’re open sourcing our configs.

PHP 7.3.0 Release Announcement

mattias@ma.ttias.be (Mattias Geniar) — Thu, 06 Dec 2018 16:11:11 +0000

A new PHP release is born: 7.3!

The PHP development team announces the immediate availability of PHP 7.3.0. This release marks the third feature update to the PHP 7 series.

Deploying laravel-websockets with Nginx reverse proxy and supervisord

mattias@ma.ttias.be (Mattias Geniar) — Tue, 04 Dec 2018 22:18:57 +0000

There is a new PHP package available for Laravel users called laravel-websockets that allows you to quickly start a websocket server for your applications.

Increase the number of open files for jobs managed by supervisord

mattias@ma.ttias.be (Mattias Geniar) — Thu, 29 Nov 2018 18:30:19 +0000

In Linux, a non-privileged user by default can only open 1024 files on a machine. This includes handles to log files, but also local sockets, TCP ports, … everything’s a file and the usage is limited, as a system protection.

My Laracon EU talk: Minimum Viable Linux

mattias@ma.ttias.be (Mattias Geniar) — Tue, 27 Nov 2018 14:01:14 +0000

The recorded video of my presentation I gave at Laracon EU last summer.

The title is, in hindsight, a badly chosen one. I tried to make it a pun on “Minimum Viable Product ” (you know, the startup-y stuff), but it ended up giving perhaps a false expectation to the audience thinking it was about minimal linux distros, which it wasn’t.

Automatic monitoring of Laravel Forge managed sites with Oh Dear!

mattias@ma.ttias.be (Mattias Geniar) — Wed, 07 Nov 2018 08:46:49 +0000

Did I mention there’s a blog for Oh Dear! yet? :-)

This week we shipped a pretty cool feature: if you use Laravel Forge to manage your servers & sites, we can automatically detect newly added sites and start monitoring those instantly.

How to size & scale your Laravel Queues

mattias@ma.ttias.be (Mattias Geniar) — Tue, 06 Nov 2018 07:31:23 +0000

We’ve got a new blog set up for our Oh Dear! monitoring service. In it, we share some details of our setup, how we tackle technical challenges and how we implement some of our monitoring tooling.