Laravel - The Ecosystem

One of the reasons Laravel continues to be so widely adopted is the strength of its ecosystem. Not just the core framework, but the tools that sit around it. Tools that remove friction. Tools that solve real problems developers face every day. And tools that let teams move faster without cutting corners.

Some of these tools are built and supported by the Laravel core team. Others are created, refined, and maintained by the community. Together, they form an ecosystem that supports the entire lifecycle of a product, from local development and testing, right through to deployment, monitoring, and scaling.

Laravel Valet, Laravel Herd, and Sail

For local development, the Laravel ecosystem includes Valet, Herd, and Sail. 

Rather than working directly on a live website, which would be available for the public to view online, developers create websites in a ‘local environment’ on their own computer before uploading to a server for public availability.

Running a server is a different skill set to writing code, so making these tasks easy reduces context switching and allows developers to focus on what they do best.

Valet is a minimalist tool for macOS, allowing developers to quickly spin up lightweight local development environments. Sail is Laravel’s official Docker environment, making it easier for developers to build applications in a containerised environment - helping developers get up and running quickly, so they can focus on writing code.

Herd is a Laravel and PHP local development environment available for Windows and macOS. It provides everything needed to get started with Laravel development, allowing developers to get started fast.

Admin panels

When building a website, platform, or digital tool, there is often a need for administrators to manage content, users, and other crucial data behind the scenes. This typically involves an admin panel, sometimes referred to as a control panel, dashboard, or back-office system.

Think of an admin panel as the cockpit of your platform. It is where authorised users can perform tasks, such as managing user accounts, overseeing transactions, editing site content, generating reports, or moderating interactions, without ever touching a line of code.

Historically, Laravel projects, especially those needing unique functionality such as Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems, marketplaces, or complex product management platforms, featured fully-bespoke admin areas tailored precisely to the project's specific needs. While powerful, building these custom solutions required significant upfront investment in both time and resources.

However, recent years have seen the rise of powerful off-the-shelf admin solutions within the Laravel ecosystem, primarily Nova and Filament. These tools provide developers with a ready-to-use, customisable, and consistent admin experience, significantly reducing development time and cost.

Laravel Nova

The Laravel ecosystem is thriving, with both first-party (created and maintained by Laravel Holdings Inc), and third-party (created and marinated by community members) software and extensions. Nova is an officially-supported, premium administration panel built by the Laravel core team. Nova offers a beautifully-designed, intuitive interface that integrates seamlessly into Laravel applications. It provides common admin functionalities out of the box, such as:

• User and role management

• Data filtering, searching, and sorting

• Customisable dashboards and metrics

• Powerful reporting tools

Filament

Filament is an increasingly popular open-source alternative to Laravel Nova. It provides developers with a powerful yet flexible admin panel, built using modern front-end technologies. A few benefits include:

• Open-source accessibility

• Highly customisable and extensible

• Rich feature set including data tables, forms, and live notifications

• Strong community support with frequent updates and contributions

Filament is particularly well-suited for teams seeking greater flexibility and customisation than possible in Nova.

Filament makes use of Laravel Livewire which allows developers to build powerful front-end interfaces without leaving the comfort of Laravel. This means your developers can focus on writing PHP, reducing costly context-switching when developers need to work in two different programming languages.

Laravel Nightwatch

Laravel Nightwatch is a new product in the Laravel ecosystem designed to help teams monitor the health and stability of their Laravel applications. Announced at Laracon AU 2024, Nightwatch is like a 24/7 security guard and systems analyst rolled into one.

Nightwatch monitors your app’s performance, availability and jobs, and alerts you if something goes astray. 

Application Monitoring

Nightwatch keeps an eye on your app’s uptime and key functions. If your app goes down or a critical process fails (like email delivery or user logins), Nightwatch can instantly alert your team via Slack, email, or SMS.

Scheduled Task Tracking

Laravel apps often rely on ‘scheduled tasks’ - automated background jobs that might send out newsletters, clean up data, or generate reports. Nightwatch tracks these tasks and lets you know if any of them stop running or behave unexpectedly.

Insightful Reporting

Nightwatch gives developers a clear dashboard showing what is working and what is not. Over time, this helps identify patterns, detect slowdowns, and improve the app's performance proactively.

Laravel Horizon

When developing a Laravel application, especially one that involves background tasks or job processing, effective management and monitoring become essential. Laravel Horizon offers developers a powerful, intuitive, and user-friendly dashboard to manage, monitor, and optimise Laravel’s built-in queue system.

It provides complete visibility and control, ensuring jobs and tasks are efficiently managed and executed reliably without downtime or bottlenecks.

Horizon comes with several powerful features out of the box:

• Real-time Monitoring: Horizon provides a real-time overview of queued jobs, offering instant insight into performance, success, and potential issues.

• Advanced Job Management: Easily retry failed jobs, pause queues, and track job throughput, allowing precise control over your queued tasks.

• Auto-Scaling: Horizon intelligently adjusts the number of worker processes based on your application’s workload, helping manage resources effectively.

• Robust Reporting: Detailed analytics and metrics about job execution, performance trends, and workload distribution are readily available, assisting you in making informed decisions.

Cashier

Cashier simplifies subscription billing and payment processing for Laravel applications. Integrated seamlessly with Stripe or Paddle, it handles recurring billing, invoicing, and tax compliance, making subscription management intuitive and straightforward.

Pest

Pest is a third-party testing framework for Laravel which includes a wide variety of testing tools. As well as commonly used Feature and Unit tests includes Architecture tests to improve code quality and an automated browser testing tool, designed for testing JavaScript-driven applications and for automated User Acceptance Testing. With an expressive and easy-to-use API, Pest helps developers quickly create end-to-end tests that simulate user interactions, ensuring application stability and reliability.

While Pest is a community-maintained package and not owned by Laravel, we have included it here because it is now bundled with Laravel as the recommended testing framework instead of Laravel’s own Dusk testing package. This is a great example of how Laravel embraces community efforts, and shifts focus to provide the best experience for developers. 

Scout

Scout provides a robust, driver-based full-text search solution for Laravel applications. Integrated with popular search services like Algolia, Elasticsearch, and MeiliSearch, Scout makes it effortless to build powerful, responsive search functionality into your platform.

Pennant

Pennant is a feature-flagging library for Laravel, enabling developers to deploy new features incrementally and safely. It provides granular control over feature availability, allowing seamless rollouts and testing in production without risk to the overall platform.

Pint

Pint is an opinionated code style fixer for Laravel projects, designed to automatically format PHP code to maintain consistency across teams. It is easy to configure and integrates seamlessly into your development workflow helping to maintain code quality effortlessly.

Socialite

Socialite simplifies OAuth authentication, enabling seamless integration with social providers like Google, Facebook, GitHub, and Twitter. It significantly reduces the complexity involved in managing social login systems, enhancing user registration and login processes.

Telescope

Telescope provides comprehensive debugging and monitoring for Laravel applications built into the application itself. It offers deep insights into application requests, database queries, exceptions, job dispatches, and more, significantly enhancing troubleshooting capabilities and application performance.

Reverb

Reverb enhances real-time event broadcasting for Laravel applications. It offers robust WebSocket capabilities, facilitating interactive features like live chat, notifications, and real-time updates, significantly improving user engagement and interaction.

Echo

Echo simplifies real-time communication with WebSockets by offering an intuitive JavaScript interface. It integrates seamlessly with broadcasting services such as Pusher, Redis, and Reverb, providing easy implementation of real-time, event-driven functionality in Laravel applications.

Wider ecosystem of packages

Beyond these tools, Laravel has a vibrant ecosystem of third-party packages and extensions. With thousands of packages available through Packagist, Laravel developers can easily extend their applications with additional features, from social authentication to payment processing, without having to build these from scratch. This ecosystem of packages allows for a high degree of flexibility and customisation, catering to the specific needs of each project.

Laravel for the rest of us!

Laravel is one of the world’s most popular web frameworks, but to many outside the developer community, it can feel like magic. Laravel for the rest of us makes that magic  understandable.

Written for founders, product managers, project leads, and anyone working alongside a development team, this book explains what Laravel is, why teams choose it, and how it powers modern digital platforms.

From open source and security to hosting, APIs, and managing technical teams, Pete Heslop, Managing Director of Steadfast Collective and an official Laravel Partner, offers clear explanations and real-world examples to help you confidently lead Laravel projects.

You can order the book here