Better code block highlighting on our blog and docs
- Deep Dives
If you've visited our blog or documentation in the last couple of weeks, you might've noticed things look a little different. We're now highlighting all code blocks using Shiki, an open-source syntax highlighter written in JavaScript. Shiki makes code blocks look a lot better than the previous highlighting method using highlight.php.
Some examples ✨
Let's start with a simple PHP example:
use Facade\FlareClient\Report;
class FlareMiddleware
{
public function handle(Report $report, $next)
{
$context = $report->allContext();
$context['session'] = null;
$report->userProvidedContext($context);
return $next($report);
}
}
JavaScript poses no challenge either:
import { flare } from "@flareapp/flare-client";
try {
functionThatMightThrow();
} catch (error) {
flare.report(error);
}
HTML looks great too:
<html lang="en">
<head>
<title>Laravel error tracking – Flare</title>
<meta name="description" content="Full-stack Laravel error tracking made specifically for your Laravel applications and JavaScript frontends.">
<meta charset="utf-8">
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">
<link rel="alternate" type="application/atom+xml" href="https://flareapp.io/feed" title="flareapp.io">
<link rel="apple-touch-icon" sizes="180x180" href="https://flareapp.io/apple-touch-icon.png">
<link rel="icon" type="image/png" sizes="32x32" href="https://flareapp.io/favicon-32x32.png">
<link rel="icon" type="image/png" sizes="16x16" href="https://flareapp.io/favicon-16x16.png">
<link rel="manifest" href="https://flareapp.io/site.webmanifest">
<meta name="msapplication-TileColor" content="#4f0f8f">
<meta name="theme-color" content="#4f0f8f">
</head>
</html>
CSS never was so pretty:
.modal-header {
flex: none;
display: grid;
align-items: center;
padding-left: 1.5rem;
padding-right: 1.5rem;
padding-top: 1rem;
padding-bottom: 1rem;
height: var(--tab-bar-height);
background-color:var(--gray-200)
}
@media (min-width: 768px) {
.modal-header {
padding-left: 3rem;
padding-right:3rem
}
}
And last but not least, we can show diffs now:
--- public function invitations()
+++ public function invitations(): HasMany
{
return $this->hasMany(Invitation::class);
}
Behind the scenes
All of the above is powered by our newest laravel-markdown package. It converts markdown to HTML and it's using Shiki and our shiki-php package to highlight code blocks. Because Laravel has a built-in MarkdownRenderer that we like to use, we don't call CommonMark directly. Instead we resolve the renderer class from the container:
--- return CommonMark::convertToHtml($this->text);
+++ return app(MarkdownRenderer::class)->toHtml($this->text);
Because Shiki is quite heavy on performance (a nodeJS server is started on the backend each time you're trying to highlight a code block) we decided to add an extra layer of caching:
return cache()->remember(
"posts.{$this->id}.formatted_text",
null,
fn () => app(MarkdownRenderer::class)->toHtml($this->text)
);
On the Post model we added a listener that will (re-)cache the blogpost whenever it's saved. This will trigger when the model is created and updated:
static::saved(function (Post $post): void {
cache()->delete("posts.{$post->id}.formatted_text");
$post->getFormattedTextAttribute(); // re-cache
});
