May 2017 – No Words Barred

There was an annoying issue happening in my gmail inbox today, I had 4 unread messages but 3 of them ended up being very old and I could not find them easily. When I tried to find the unread emails in my gmail primary inbox I tried typing “filter: unread” in the top search box but that search included all of the unread emails in the promotions tab and the social tab which made it impossible to find the truly unread messages in my primary gmail inbox. To find just the primary inbox messages you can copy the code below into the search box at the top of the gmail page:

label:unread in:inbox -category:social -category:promotions -category:updates -category:forums

Once you copy that code above into the top search box in your gmail account, it will run and find only the unread messages in your primary gmail inbox. From there you can mark the individual messages as read or delete them, and if you are anything like me then your mail notifications icon will go away on your phone and you can get back to your regular life without being nagged by the little unread email icon every time you open your phone 🙂

There has been quite a bit of change lately, and one of the biggest changes relates to my work and the computer system that work is being done one. I recently made the transition to a new office that has the policy of all work being done on a Mac. Which so far has actually been smoother than I thought, and I’ve started to enjoy the Mac. The first thing I did in this transition to Mac (well maybe not the very first thing, but close to it) was to get a local dev environment setup on the new Mac that would allow me to work with Laravel. I wrote down detailed notes in case anyone out there is struggling with the same setup you are in luck, just follow the steps below:

1.) Install MAMP. This one is pretty straight forward. Simply go to the MAMP website and download your version then follow the installer.

2.) Now that you have MAMP installed the first step is navigating to the htdocs directory and install Composer. This proved to be a funny challenge for me. The easiest way I’ve found (so far) to get to htdocs and install composer is:

-Open Up Mac terminal by going to the search icon in the top right of the Mac and type in Terminal, then follow these commands:

cd /

This will take us to the actual root directory. Now type:

ls

we should see the full list of folders, including application folder, now type:

cd /Applications/MAMP/htdocs

We should now be in htdocs folder.

3.) Next lets install composer, to do this go to composer website (https://getcomposer.org/download/)and then copy the following code into your terminal:

php -r "copy('https://getcomposer.org/installer', 'composer-setup.php');" php -r "if (hash_file('SHA384', 'composer-setup.php') === '55d6ead61b29c7bdee5cccfb50076874187bd9f21f65d8991d46ec5cc90518f447387fb9f76ebae1fbbacf329e583e30') { echo 'Installer verified'; } else { echo 'Installer corrupt'; unlink('composer-setup.php'); } echo PHP_EOL;" php composer-setup.php php -r "unlink('composer-setup.php');"

Assuming composer installs correctly, lets now move it into global directory:

mv composer.phar /usr/local/bin/composer

Now any projects in the MAMP htdocs folder should be able to utilize composer. Test this buy running:

Composer help

4.) Ok now lets install our first Laravel project. Our first step on this is to try and run:

Laravel new folder-name (replacing folder name with our project name)

At this point we should most likely get an error message of “command not found”. This is fine, lets circle back and run the following command in termianl:

global require "laravel/installer"

This should load laravel dependencies, and we should see a list of them as they load in. Now we can try to run our laravel command again:

Laravel new folder-name

Again we should have the same error message pop up “command not found”. This is due to us needing to add our environment variables so the laravel installer commands can be executed. So lets run:

echo 'export PATH="$PATH:$HOME/.composer/vendor/bin"' >> ~/.bash_profile

This should add our path variable to our profile. To double check this lets run:

Vim ~/.bash_profile

The environment variable we just added in the previous step should be there: export PATH=”$PATH:$HOME/.composer/vendor/bin”

Now lets close the document:

Hit ESC, Type :wq, and hit Enter

Now we are ready to circle back and run our laravel install again:

Laravel new folder-name

Hopefully you get the success message this time ☺. If you are like me and Laravel installed but you got a message about needing to update PHP versions then hit the Link below to go to the next page that lists the steps to update the version of PHP composer is using. By default it appears composer uses the system version of PHP not the version that ships with MAMP.