Building a React App on Laravel

By Devin

The first time I built a Laravel React app, most of my time was spent simply building out the infrastructure related to authentication (login, registration, password reset, etc).

With a server rendered app, Laravel generates the authentication boilerplate for you. But with a 100% React frontend, all these pieces need to be built custom: an auth API (with JSON web tokens), routing, forms and form validation, persistent storage, and tests. There’s also aren’t many tutorials or example projects that show how it all works together.

Example To-Do App

Now that I’m more familiar with these concepts, I’ve released an example boilerplate for others to look at. You can view a demo of the Laravel React To Do App here. Source code and installation instructions are available on GitHub.

It includes:

You can find the project on GitHub. Use it as a starting base for quick prototypes or to learn from. Suggestions, recommendations, and pull requests welcome! Continue reading →

Restrict Access to a WordPress Site Based on IP

By Devin

I recently developed an internal website for our company that wanted to be accessible to employees only. Instead of having a server level password, or individual WordPress logins, we decided to just limit access to by IP address. This way everyone on the office network could access easily, but outside the network they would get an access denied message.

We use WP Engine for hosting, but IP whitelisting or blocking should work with any host.

.htaccess Option

One quick method to set this up is by editing the .htaccess file directly (this should be in the base folder of your WordPress directory) and add the 3 lines at the top of this codeblock:

https://gist.github.com/devinsays/d0781b0b7909c2d16e1b8141c950edea

You’ll want to change the IP address in the example (98.6.000.111) to the IP you want to whitelist. You can also whitelist multiple IP addresses by just adding more below that line.

Plugin Option

An easier option (in my opinion) is to use the Restricted Site Access plugin, maintained by the folks at 10up. This plugin provides you with a dashboard to set up the IP restrictions, and also allows you to set a custom restriction messages or redirects.