GraveRecorder - Beginning to Code

project › graverecorder

I had a productive day today re-acquainting myself with Laravel and rebooting this project. Like all beginnings, here was my hello world.

Where to begin? Well, I wanted to start off again with a blank project. Don’t you do that sometimes? Just like when we were back at school? You know what I mean - that new notebook feeling where it’s a new dawn, it’s a new day…

I have chosen to not use Laravel Sail (the docker environment) because it just doesn’t play nicely on my Windows PC. Docker is meant to be so simple, but still, I find Windows won’t work well with it (without a lot of work) and it prevents me from using Oracle Virtual Box at the same time, which I still use. Compose create-project it is.

As you can imagine, straight after that I set a few keys in the environment file and referenced a basic SQLite database. Why not MySQL? It’s a bit overkill for me and the little information I am going to add to it. I’ve also been hearing more and more good things related to SQLite and think it might just (maybe) be fine, even if I do get to store lots of data and have many visitors.

Next, I didn’t want to use any JS framework within this project nor Tailwind. Right now, I want to limit how much extra I need to learn and instead focus on the functionality, but I might come back to that later. I’d of course need some kind of account authentication, so used the Blade version of Breeze which is perfect.

As soon as I could log in and register, I removed the registration parts from the site. When this goes live, I will be the only person logging in for a while, so I didn’t want to deal with spamming etc. There’s a nice video by Amitav Roy on Youtube which shows you one method you can use to do this.

With that in place, I created a seeder to auto-register myself in the user’s table.

Here’s where I cribbed something from the old project. I took the old migration for the grave table and just used that. One more seeder later, and my ancestor, George Edward Meekums who died in 1915 on HMS Formidable, was forever added to the database.

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Grave::create([
    'first_names' => 'George Edward',
    'last_name' => 'Meekums',
    'born' => Carbon::create(1891, 10, 2, 0),
    'died' => Carbon::create(1915, 1, 1, 0),
    'cemetery' => 'Plumstead',
    'plot' => '',
    'inscription' => 'In Loving Memory of George Edward Meekums who lost his life in the sinking of H.M.S. Formidable',
    'lat' => '51.47678892',
    'lon' => '0.112395194',
    'image_path' => '',
]);

Now for more essentials. A favicon!

I found my icon here (thanks: fauzicon) and converted it to a favicon with this excellent site.

The .ico file was quickly dispatched to my public folder. A minute later, I altered the main screens to remove the default Laravel logos etc. and add mine.

Here’s where I’m up to so far:

Time for bed.

Hi! Did you find this useful or interesting? I have an email list coming soon, but in the meantime, if you ready anything you fancy chatting about, I would love to hear from you. You can contact me here or at stephen ‘at’ logicalmoon.com