Production crashed on every Inertia request after the PostHog branch
landed:
TypeError: App\Models\Account::cachedPostCount(): Return value must
be of type int, string returned at app/Models/Traits/HasUsage.php:80
Root cause: Laravel's RedisStore optimises is_numeric values by storing
them raw (not serialised) so they remain INCR/DECR-able atomically.
The side effect is that an int written via Cache::put comes back as a
string on read. The strict ': int' return type on cachedPostCount then
threw a TypeError.
Local dev and CI used the file/array/database drivers respectively,
which serialise everything blindly and preserve the int type, so the
bug never surfaced before deploy.
Fixes:
- Cast the Cache::remember result to (int) — defensive, survives any
driver-specific behaviour. Documented inline so the cast is not
later removed as redundant.
- Change config/cache.php default from 'database' to 'redis' so local
dev matches prod by default and similar driver-specific bugs surface
before merge instead of after deploy.
- Regression test that seeds the cache with a literal string (mimics
the production Redis read) and asserts cachedPostCount still returns
an int.
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