This article was written in French and translated to English by AI. Any resemblance to any token coming out of a GPU's silicon is purely coincidental. Unless the AI consumed this article before regurgitating it.
Introduction — Good Taste
If there's one thing that stands out about Laravel and its ecosystem, it's taste, good taste.
Good taste drips from everywhere, from the framework's guts, all the way to the sweet smell of a successful deployment.
Today, we're going to focus on the perfume, the hat, the makeup, the wallet, and the shoes of Laravel.
Everything that surrounds it, that dresses it up. What some developers and creators have built around Laravel, and what makes it a more complete framework than Cristiano Ronaldo with blonde highlights in the Champions League.
I won't go into detail about each tool, so I recommend you check out these projects via the links in the article. That sounds like an order but you do what you want (do it).
1. Administration and Back Office — Filament
Imagine, you've developed your app, everything works perfectly, and you think it would be nice if you had a back office to manage a bunch of stuff.
You start researching how to integrate that into your project, looking for integrations, ready-made solutions, asking questions... Stop. Actually, you're using Laravel, so it already exists.
You follow the documentation for 2 minutes, and boom, you've got authentication, an admin panel, and a dashboard.
3 more minutes, and you've got everything you need to manage a model.
And everything lives in your initial codebase, right next to the rest of your application. What could be better for adding context directly to your favorite LLM.
2. CMS — Statamic
The site you're reading right now is partly built with Statamic.
What. A. Pleasure.
The interface is beautiful. There's a ton of features. It's extensible at will.
It integrates perfectly with Laravel.
One of the big advantages is the "Flat File" management. Everything is managed by files that live directly in your project. So you can git everything very easily.
But if you look a bit further, that also means your LLM has easy access to all your CMS information, whether it's the articles you write or the pages you shape.
Like with Filament, everything lives next to your existing codebase. (or you can make it a separate site obviously)
3. Deployment — Forge, Ploi, and Laravel Cloud
It's a very important part of application development, and having solutions tailored for it is a huge advantage.
Makes sense, you're not going to let your project sit on your computer and revisit it in 2 years covered in cobwebs.
Laravel Cloud is Uber Eats. You press a few buttons and it's delivered directly. In 1-2 minutes (faster than Uber Eats actually), you have your project online. It costs a bit more, but it's perfect for not overthinking it.
Forge and Ploi are restaurants. You place your VPS order, and they take care of seasoning and cooking it so it's ready to be enjoyed by your git push.
Two of these three offerings are first-party tools (Cloud and Forge).
4. $, €, CHF — Cashier
At some point, you need to stack some coins.
Cashier enters the scene.
It becomes so simple to take payments and manage subscriptions that you wonder how come you're not rich yet.
You can leave the glue and tape to others—you'll need to run 2-3 commands in your terminal and add a few lines of code to start collecting.
Besides the two first-party integrations for Stripe and Lemon Squeezy, there are other payment systems that have integrations for Laravel and are based on Cashier.
I'm thinking particularly of Polar.
5. Eyes in the Back — Nightwatch
You probably already know Sentry so I won't dwell on that.
Now, imagine Sentry, but in total harmony with your framework. So in sync that the first time you open the platform, you already know what you need to look at (jobs, users, logs, cron).
Well that exists in the Laravel universe, and it's called Nightwatch.
6. The Artisans — Spatie
Impossible to navigate the Laravel galaxy without using at least once one of the engines that Spatie has created.
It's not a tool, but a set of packages you can install to make your life easier.
Pretty much anything you'll want to do in your application, Spatie has already made a package for it.
Images associated with your entities?
Anyway, I could go on for a long time because the list of packages is huge. You can find them all here.
They're clearly the GAOAT (Greatest Artisans of All Time).
Conclusion
Here's a small non-exhaustive list of what makes the Laravel ecosystem beautiful.
All these tools are solid, well-maintained, and pleasant to use.
And I haven't even talked about Lunar (You can even build stores !), Livewire, Pest, Inertia (React or Vue served by your Laravel!!!), Pennant.
I hope this made you want to try Laravel !!!