Welcome back to the Laravel Creator Series. Today we're here with Caen, who is known on Twitter and the other socials as Code with Caen, creator of HidePHP and many other things. So welcome to the show Caen. Thank you so much. Glad to be here. I love it, love it. And just so everyone knows, you're located in Sweden and that's correct, right? Correct, southern Sweden, pretty close to Copenhagen. Oh nice, I love it.
And so your project that you just recently launched, well I say recently, I mean I think it's been what, six months now? Maybe three, four? So it's HydePHP? Yeah, HydePHP. Oh that's been out for about two years, but it's only got an attraction the past four, six months. Yeah. Okay, well there you go. It shows you build it and eventually they will come, right? Yeah, exactly. So tell us kind of like the a little overview of HidePHP. So basically HydePHP is a Laravel based static site
generator. And I know there are a lot of those or a few Laravel based ones already and are quite a few static site generators. So when I set out to create HydePHP, I wanted something that was a dead simple to get started with, really easy to use, but still have the full power of Laravel when you need it. So that's what I tried to do and it seems like people think I did a very job at it. So yeah, it's a constant application, you run through the command line just like any
other one. But behind you, you really have pretty much most things that Lehrvel has to offer except for the like really dynamic stuff that changes on each request. But we have blade views, we have artisan commands, most packages work as well if you have a UI kit and stuff like that. So I really try to make the developer experience as great as possible. But yeah, Lehrvel based static site generator is a pretty sort of descriptive word.
I like it. So it's just just to sort of be clear, it generates static files or it still is basically like a Laravel app running on a server. No. It generates static files. So you have a project with like Markdown content or blade files and hide compiles to static HTML that you can just deploy. So it's not intended to be run through a web server. However, we do ship with a development web server for like developing it. But the rest is just static generated in console in milliseconds
per page. Gotcha. That's pretty sweet. And then so I guess the benefit with that you can just get a browser here, you can just sort of deploy it anywhere, right? Like, yeah, pretty, it's, it's pretty flexible as far as all that goes. And cheap. And you can host it for free. Very cheap. I guess my question, could you say you have a Lehrvel app already and you want to add a blog to it or
something? Could you generate with hide the static files and somehow just have your other like integrated with your other Lehrvel app? I don't know, like in the public directory, I guess that might work. Exactly. This is a question I've been asked a lot. And there are a few different ways depending on how standalone you want integration to be. You could just deploy like have hide compiled to the public directory. That's one way. Really see and how it's standalone.
Another thing you can do is to build a controller that routes stuff to the generated files. Or if you want to get really fancy, most of the source code for high PHP is in the framework package that you can require through a lever through a level project. And you will still need to do something to configure it into the service container and stuff like that. But once you have that, you can just render a high PHP page from the
controller. And tie it in and do use all of the fancy stuff while still being in the full dynamic Lehrvel context. So that is something you can do and make very cool stuff with. That's awesome. Yes. And, you know, as I was looking at the project, I know you do the sort of the standard markdown files, you know, you have the front matter, I think it's called. Yeah. You know, with the titles and all that stuff. And then basically, it's just a markdown page after that,
right? It just kind of reads everything and sinks it in. Exactly. So I assume you're using this yourself. What this is sort of outside of the programming question, but what app are you writing your markdown in for your for your personal blog post and things like that? Do you have a favorite? That's a good one. Canada pens, usually for the most part, I just do the pitch P storm because I tend to write very technical blog posts. And then I really appreciate having this full syntax highlighting of
code blocks. If I do documentation, I do it within the project. So I can see a reference file to make sure I get the syntax correctly and namespaces and stuff. So that's my favorite. If I want to do some light edits, I use the code. But sometimes if I just want to do something really quick, I use the GitHub web UI. You can actually manage a whole hide project just from the GitHub page without needing to install anything locally, because you can just clone the template on GitHub and use actuals.
That's interesting. Yeah, from everything. It's kind of cool. Because like, so the Laravel news site, all of our posts are actually written in markdown. But for me, I use an app called like I writer. And I just, I don't know, it's just like a markdown app. And for some reason, it just doesn't click for me to go to PHP storm or I writer or VS code or any of those others. So it's always fun, interesting to find out what people are using for for the different things that we
do. And you can really use anyone and you don't even need to use front much if you don't want to, because you can specify some stuff in configuration files. And a lot of stuff hide can actually find. So if you don't set a page title, we'll try to find one from the first markdown heading, and stuff like that, or try to generate from the file name. So we try to discover a lot of stuff for you. So there's really not much boilerplate you need to do unless you want to do something that's out of the
conventions. And that was one of my goals when designing this. I love that. Yeah. So basically, yes, you're like first heading or your file name. I like I like the yeah, trying to be smart and make it easier. That way, you don't have to have all that front matter stuff that exactly is probably duplicated anyway, like most of the time. Yeah, it really is. Yeah, I was gonna say I assume most people don't even deal with that. What about like dates? I guess that comes to the file name too.
In the next version of hide, we will support setting dates in the file names. And also ordering using numerical prefixes that would unstrip. But for now, if you want to publish date, the default blog post system supports a lot of different formats. So you can just put in any string that is state time compatible with a string to time in PHP. And we'll use that to formalize and personal normalize the output date. If you want to do like when it was published and stuff like that.
Gotcha. Gotcha. How how are you brings me to another question? How are you handling like images in the blog post? Like is is that something fancy there you got? Or is that depends on what you think as fancy, I would like to think it's the dumbest way possible to do things. We have a media directory that is copied to the site output directory. So you can just reference in using relative pass, so just media slash
whatever. And in front matter, you don't even need to specify the media because we'll find out automatically. So yeah, just a dumb way to do it. But it, it makes sense when you think about it, I want you to be able to visualize and understand implicitly where something is going to be saved and accessible from the file structure. Right, right. That makes sense. Yeah, I'm, you know, I keep going back because like, our site, you know, we end up pushing all the assets to s3.
And, and then we use cloud for in front of that, which I honestly assume all that would actually because Laravel supports most of that stuff out of the box, like, because Laravel supports it, hide supports it. Yeah. Or at least you could tap in and do it if you you could tap into it. We have a really powerful thing called build tasks, where you could potentially just use that to run some code during deployed, and just sync to s3 or something.
Think your local media file study with the media file research, you can version control it. Because it's optional if you want to version control the site output, I prefer not to version control that for a lot of projects. But you can, if you want to, if you just want to deploy straight from there. Right, right. Well, I guess, my next question is more of like, to go back in history, like, why did you originally create this?
What was your was it just sort of something that you wanted to scratch your own itch about? Or just you just like this, like creating things like this? I think I had a few go arounds with doing different markdown generates markdown based website generations for various stuff I needed. It started when I just wanted something quick for like privacy policy pages, I just rendered that from markdown, then I realized, well, I could render that both page from this too.
So I started in a lot of level apps, do very repeated logic and steps. So I first like made a package for for things like that that I used myself just to share. Then I thought, well, why do I even need to run a web server for these things? A lot of projects, I don't feel like I need to do that. So that's where the idea was to, to build something more standalone. Usually, when I hold talks about hide, I say, ever wanted to host the Laravel on
GitHub pages? No, you can, because that's kind of what it feels like. That's something I'm really happy about. But yeah, it was just because I needed something myself. And I saw that others might be able to use this, because it's such a simple way to get started. And get a website, you can literally have a website out in less than five minutes, because we shipped with default, with bundle views, tailwind, and blade components for most things you need. So you can really get started quickly.
That's awesome. Well, what was, what was the hardest thing about building it with, you know, from the developer standpoint? Like, did you run into any like major problems or anything? Or was it? I think the most the hardest problem has not been developing, it has been maintaining it and maintaining a balance of all the cool stuff I want to do. And then also being able to support it, if I build something just for myself, I can get crazed into whatever I want.
Here, I still need to consider I cannot break anyone's website. So I need to dedicate very much time to code quality. And I need to prioritize which features can I maintain, because right now I'm the only maintainer, open source contributions are very well kept as always. But it's mainly just been me. So I really had to prioritize and I think it's been the hardest to make sure how can I deliver a quality experience when it's just me who's doing this in my free time. Right, right.
That's that I feel like that's the worst case about publishing something, you know, it's always fun to build it and publish it. But yeah, like, well, now I've got to manage this until the end of time. So I don't mind managing it. I this is something I've been working on for close to three years. I was three years ago in May, I started, and then I released it one year after. And that is coming up in two years and I still love working with it and contributing and developing it. That's
awesome. What about templates? Have you thought about like having a template system, like, I mean, not a system, but like designs that like you could already like pre install and use, or you're thinking more like people's already going to come with with their own design stuff. Yeah, that was one of the initial decisions that I thought about if I was going to support for the one and I decided not to do it because I have, sadly, I have experience in WordPress. And I remember you find a team that
looks good. So you install it and then you realize, wait, this won't work because it's missing critical features, but now it's too late. So I was thinking, if I'm going to offer either myself or others to install teams, I will want to make sure that they are quality. And I can't really control if someone makes a bad theme and then someone gets upset that well, now they can't really use their site because it didn't work out. So that's not something I've been wanting
to support. So instead, it's just we shift with a quality starter team, in my opinion, that's really minimalistic and not too opinionated. So it works for most things. But you can customize it or you can swap it out. So if you want something more custom, I think just build your own blade views, or you can just pull in one of the Laravel UI kits or Laravel templates and do
that. But I know there is a guy who recently made a package called I think Laravel team, or hide PHP layouts manager that in user land manages themes. And that's something I feel is support. And inside this extensible, I think that's a great way for the community to offer things. It's just something I don't feel like I could guarantee a good experience for. Right, right. Now that totally makes
sense. And speaking of WordPress, I came, I don't say I came from WordPress, but I use WordPress for many years on my personal site. And it was it was about like what you said, you would go find a theme and you're like, Oh, this is gonna be great. And then you install it and like the content don't match anything that we had. And it's like, well, I'm just wasted two hours of my life trying to get this going. It's like it's supposed to be a simple install.
But yeah, that makes that does make perfect sense there. Yeah, so that's really what I wanted to avoid with with that decision. You know, something that would be cool in theory, for sure. Yes, yes. So I guess outside of like, I keep thinking of like the use case being like a blog or just like articles, but I assume like you're having it probably with what documentation? Yeah, it can kind of be used kind of all over the place, right? Yeah, exactly.
And I commenting people use it for is documentation. And it actually comes with, with a module that is designed for, like making the documentation. So you just need to put your marks on files in the docs source directory, and hide will use the templates we have and populate a sidebar, it will generate a search index that works on the client side. To search between the pages, it has is responsive has night and dark mode, night and day mode, and just as a lot of pages.
So it's really quick to get a documentation page. And if you have an API key from torchlight by Aaron Francis, just drop it in the environment like automatically enable syntax, I think, which I think is really neat. Yeah, that that was, that's sort of a little hidden feature of where all the editor or the torchlight. Because this is sort of I'm going off the topic of hide, but I use
torchlight. And if you go into the docs, like you can do all kinds of crazy stuff like you could have lines commented out, you can have, you know, GitHub, or like DFS, basically, it's, it's pretty cool. Checked out that one. Yeah. I also built for my code screenshots, I built a tool called the window light that's a spin on torchlight. And so it lets you use torchlight in a browser to generate code, a switch code
screenshots. And you can also use all of these steps and cool stuff like that to make really cool code screenshots. Oh, that's awesome. So you need to send me that link. So we'll be sure to add it to the show notes. Because, you know, we're always sharing stuff on like Instagram. And you know, you got to do pictures. So it's having having many tools available, like I've already I think I have four or five bookmark
now. And I just kind of rotate through whatever I'm trying to highlight that day or whatever is new in layervel releases. So having having another option will be sweet and especially supports all that syntax highlighting. Yeah, awesome. And that was one of the things I also made for myself for a lot of screenshots for high PHP, actually. So I just made it available at the window light dot the silver dot SC and I'll send you the link to sweet. Yeah, that's awesome.
So to close out on high PHP, is there anything we missed that you want to highlight? Or do we kind of cover most of the stuff about it? I think we covered most things. So I mean, there are tons of features like automatic navigation menus, you can use the default layer of config, you can run stuff all from the cloud using yaml configs if you want to, website maps, RSS feeds, and yeah, just a bunch of stuffs. But basically, it's a level GitHub pages, you can do everything you're used to.
So there is no learning curve for a level developers, just easy and quick to get started with and super if you ever need to do more advanced stuff, the height won't get in your way. It will give you the same tools that are available so you can do really cool stuff. I love it. I love it. Yeah, the definitely, you know, if you haven't, if you haven't checked it out, go check out high PHP. It's a cool
little app. And, you know, especially if you're going to run a blog or, you know, documentation, anything static files to go check it out for sure. So what else you've been working on anything fun and exciting you got, you got the code, you got the code things you got had PHP and anything else? Well, I know you're going to talk about it next week with Jason, but I well a few months ago, or last year, I paired up with Jason McCurry, the creator of Laravel shift.
And we made a new side project together called release on you that generates release notes from your Git history. So that was really fun to work with a true Laravel legend. So awesome. So so release.new it's, you said it creates a go, or go and give me the two minutes pitch on new that way. It doesn't need two minutes. Basically, it's a website, you're greeted with a form, you just paste in currently only support the GitHub. So paste in your GitHub
URL. And which version is the latest and the branch, and we will clone the repository and scan through the commit logs. And from that, generate release notes. So you then get in a window on a single page. And there are a few checkboxes you can think around with to control
the output. For example, you want to link to the user to create it, do you want to show the commit hash, we can even show unlike the GitHub UI, or releases, we can show just direct single commits, and do the hashes or PR numbers. And we have our categorizations that you can take in and automatically put everything in categories like changed, added and fixed and stuff like that. That was really fun to
work on. I did a lot of the linguistic and semantic analysis to categorize that which I love doing. That's awesome. So are you using AI behind the scenes too on that to help summarize stuff? We have thought about that's something we can offer. But right now, categorization is just linguistics, which because I enjoy working with that. So that was a really cool thing.
That's awesome. Yeah. So I keep thinking of like, you know, the like, layerbell every time they come out the release, they have, you know, the whole release notes of everything. So, so basically, you could just you don't have to nobody has to go and manually do that anymore. You can just exactly go, go use release dot new and it's taken care of. Yeah, as long as you have the good commit names, which you should already
do. We actually talked a bit to Dries, who used to manage the releases for a level and got his input on it. And he said, Well, if I still, still did releases, I will probably try this out. If I remember to quote correctly, it was Jason who told me that. So I hope I don't misquote him right now. But something to that effective memory serves. Yeah, that's that's really cool. And me being level news, like I could probably even use that for like packages and stuff that we
cover. Yeah, the real popular ones when they come out with a new version, I could just stick it in there and get out. Yeah, and stuff. That's an API. Yeah, we've talked about adding like an API to automate it and stuff like that, too. That'll be super cool. Yes. And so this has already been launched, or it's launching soon. No, it's been launched a few months ago. I think we went live in the beginning of December, or November might have been actually so yeah. Perfect, perfect. Yeah, that's
awesome. Yeah, the yeah, I was we were talking behind before we started. Jason's gonna come on next week, because I've not interviewed him yet about l'oeilville shift. So you can't have a creator series without Jason on at some point. So yeah, have him talk about that. But yeah, so anything else that we should we should cover that we've missed? Not just made a lot of like random
projects. So if you're interested, you can go to my personal website, the silver dot SC and go through projects and you will see I think about 20 random experiments I've made because I just really like doing stuff. But yeah, that's pretty much it. Gotcha. Gotcha. Yeah, that's awesome. And we'll definitely have, you know, show in the show notes, we'll have links to basically everything we've talked about here and, and all
that. So, man, I want to I want to say thank you for coming on and, you know, for spending this time with us letting us know about hobby HP and release.new and everything else. Thank you so much for having me. It was an honor to be here.