Laravel Packages I never wanna miss again

Let’s talk about my favorite topic: Laravel.

In Laravel, I often had the situation that I started building something where a package is already there out in the wild. Since I recognized that also for not so common topics packages are existing but also for niche problems, I check google out first before I start programming things. Best example:

I started building my own tax list for my first Product smartdb.io, where I have Stripe implemented for the billing. While researching for the way of writing the reverse charge on the receipt, I found the package from Marcel Pociot which is solving my problems totally: Vat Calculator

But now my list of Packages which I never wanna lose again:

Livewire

Writing reactive UIs is not so intuitive with vue. Ok, you can get it on your plate fast what you have to do, and packages like Interia.js are adorable, but this is nothing compared to livewire. With vue and laravel, you have to create a REST API first and then fire queries and requests to it. Or use Inertia.js, of course, this is making your life easier. With livewire, you can write everything directly in PHP, no need for big JS things. If you want to create something minimal but reactive like the burger-menu on your page, you can use alpine.js. Alpine.js is minimal and functional like tailwind, just check it out.

Horizon

Horizon is a package for managing your queues. It’s so lovely how easy it is to manage multiple, autoscaling queues with it. You can define what queues should run, how much throughput they can have and also what for timeouts etc. they have. Also, the failed jobs are visible in the UI, that’s so good!

Nova

If you didn’t buy Laravel Nova yet, go for it! It’s such a good admin-tool for all your apps, and you can just pay for it if you go live with your app because the license is not limited at your local machine, only for production apps. I also build whole management apps with nova. For example, our Community “Bitkom”: We made a management System for online orders with it, and just with it and mailgun.

Laravel Gravatar

No need for explanation: Never build an upload for an avatar in your MVP again. Here is the package: thomaswelton/laravel-gravatar

Telescope

Debugging your laravel web-application never was more comfortable than with telescope. It’s so pleasant for development purposes. GitHub

socialite

With Laravel socialite, the Social authentification is so secure and comfortable. You want your users to login with GitHub, Facebook, Google, or others? With socialite, it’s done in under 5 minutes. Get it

Cashier

If you start your own SaaS or Shop with laravel, you’ll have the moment to collect money from your users. With cashier and Stripe, it’s easy. Cashier link

Sushi

Sushi was a sponsor package from Caleb Porzio, which is creating Eloquent Models from an array instead of a database connection. Now it’s free to get here: GitHub. I can describe my use-case of this package at best with “better ENUM”. I use it for long lists of countries, specs, or others that are more or less static, for example, taxes, AWS region mappings to AMIs, and such things.

Laravel Debugbar

You all should know it. I use it for years, and I love it. I’ll not explain it too much, but you can debug your MySQL queries, Gates, views, and all other things you need to debug with it. You see how many Queries are executed, you see which views got rendered and all these goodies. Get it

To be honest, I think this list is not complete. Maybe I’ll add a second list and a third and so on. But for now, these are the packages I don’t want to miss.