#4 Remove excess drivers, a Raspberry Pi dashboard, and more

Welcome to the 4th Andy's Web Dev Tips newsletter! Here's a few things from this week:

Sorry this is so late, I forgot today was Sunday! Anyways, let’s go.

Removing excess drivers to clean up your Laravel config files

Chances are there’s a lot you don’t use in your Laravel config files, especially in files like config/database.php. By default, you’re presented with a large variety of choices when really most applications utilize just one interface. Going through and cleaning out unused attributes can really help streamline your app’s organization, making it easier to implement changes or just check values at a glance.

Credit for the above goes to @themsaid

How I built an interactive Raspberry Pi dashboard

Over the course of the last year, I’ve been monitoring the weather outside of my house and plotting the values on an old phone near my door. Everything was being stored in a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B, but when it came time to upgrade a few packages on it, the whole system started falling apart.

I decided to take that time to upgrade the whole operating system, and revamp the previous LAMP stack into a Docker network running Laravel, MySQL, and Grafana. This way, I could upgrade packages if needed without harming the server, and also had an upgraded front-end to show off my graphs. Plus, if I get more sensors in the future and want to graph more data points it’s an absolute breeze.

An open-source alternative to ngrok, written in PHP

Marcel Pociot has been teasing a package that he’s working on, implementing the features of ngrok with PHP. Called expose, the aim is to be able to easily bring up local http tunnels for your dev environments. Running the package from the command line will provide you with a unique URL that you can visit (e.g. http://ha8g7.localhost:3000), and you can even pass in an option to customize this and more.

Check out his most recent video here, and I’ll be posting more about this as additional info gets released.

That’s it for this week! If you have any questions about the above, or have something you’d like me to check out, please feel free to let me know on Twitter.