How to use Backblaze B2 with Laravel
I am working on a Laravel project and decided to use a Backblaze bucket as it’s cheaper for storage when compared to AWS S3. I couldn’t find a tutorial on how to get it working from scratch and I tested a bunch of Laravel B2 libraries that didn’t end up working. The good news is that you don’t need a special B2 plugin and instead can use the S3 package recommended by the Laravel docs.
If you haven’t added the flysystem-aws-s3 package, add it to your project using composer:
composer require league/flysystem-aws-s3-v3
Login to your B2 account and create your bucket with your required settings. Once created, you’ll want to create a new application key with the permissions you need for your app. You should get a confirmation once it’s generated:
Open your .env file and locate the settings for AWS. You’ll need to add one key that’s not there by default:
AWS_ENDPOINT=
Match the settings in your .env from the application key to the values below.
AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=keyID
AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=applicationKey
AWS_DEFAULT_REGION=us-west-000
AWS_BUCKET=bucket-name
AWS_ENDPOINT=S3 Endpoint
Now you should be able to call the Laravel storage system like normal:
\Storage::disk('s3')->put('test.txt', 'test');
How to Extract Text from image using Laravel and Amazon Rekognition API
I’m currently working on a project that requires extracting text from images of variable quality. I’m doing quick prototypes using PHP and Laravel, but I’ve found the documentation for accomplishing this a bit lacking. After working on it for a bit, I figured out a really simple solution and am sharing in case it helps anyone else.
This sample will send the image to the API as a blob instead of using a URL. I had tried Base64 encoding it without any luck. I discovered that using Imagick was the easiest way to make this work so the sample relies on that.
Fire up terminal and add a requirement for aws/aws-sdk-php:
composer require aws/aws-sdk-php
Add keys for your AWS access keys and region to your .ENV file:
AWS_REGION=YOUR_REGION
AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=ENTER_YOUR_KEY
AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=ENTER_YOUR_KEY
Create a controller, add the snippet below, and create a route to the controller. Check the URL and you should have a dump showing the array returned from AWS with all the text, bounding boxes, and information.
//Build config array for AWS variables
$config = array(
'region' => env('AWS_REGION'),
'version' => 'latest',
'credentials' => array(
'key' => env('AWS_KEY'),
'secret' => env('AWS_SECRET')
)
);
//Replace with path to image or uploaded image.
$path = '{path to image.jpg}';
$image = new Imagick($path);
$imdata = $image->getImageBlob();
$client = new RekognitionClient($config);
$result = $client->detectText([
'Image' => ['Bytes' => $imdata],
]);
//Dump Result
dd($result);
How to test email sending in Laravel 5.3 using artisan tinker
I’m building a Laravel app and ran into an error when trying to send mail but wasn’t getting an error back since the request was posted through ajax. If you’re trying to troubleshoot it, artisan tinker app is very useful to get more information on the error.
Fire up terminal/command line and run:
php artisan tinker
and then run the following snippet:
\Mail::raw('hello world', function($message) {
$message->subject('Testing email')->to('test@example.org');
});
You should either see a success/null message if everything was correct, or an error with details on what went wrong.
The error I encountered required configuring 2FA in Gmail or you can choose setting the insecure app option up to send through Gmail for testing.