Packages to make your Laravel development experience awesome.

While developing applications(not necessarily with Laravel), you come across the situation where you need to implement certain functionality. In such cases you shouldn't want to reinvent the wheel if the functionality is been implemented by someone as a package, accepted well by the community and is ready to be consumed. It's a no-brainer. I use to follow the same approach and today in this article, I'm going to list out some of my favorite Laravel packages which have made my experience with development in Laravel delicious.

laravel-backup

This Laravel package creates a backup of your application. The backup is a zip file that contains all files in the directories you specify along with a dump of your database. The backup can be stored on any of the filesystems you have configured in Laravel 5.

Once installed, taking a backup of your files and databases is very easy. You just need to issue this artisan command:

php artisan backup:run

This package requires PHP 7 and Laravel 5.7 or higher.

laravel-mailbox

The package is useful in handling incoming emails in your Laravel application. It features a fluent API that allows you to define custom mailboxes to catch incoming emails.

Here's an example on how you can do the same:

Mailbox::from('{username}@gmail.com', function (InboundEmail $email, $username) {
    // Access email attributes and content
    $subject = $email->subject();

    $email->reply(new ReplyMailable);
});

You can install the package via composer:

composer require beyondcode/laravel-mailbox

laravel-sitemap

This package can generate a sitemap without you having to add urls to it manually. This works by crawling your entire site.

use Spatie\Sitemap\SitemapGenerator;

SitemapGenerator::create('https://example.com')->writeToFile($path);

You can also create your sitemap manually:

use Carbon\Carbon;
use Spatie\Sitemap\Sitemap;
use Spatie\Sitemap\Tags\Url;

Sitemap::create()

    ->add(Url::create('/home')
        ->setLastModificationDate(Carbon::yesterday())
        ->setChangeFrequency(Url::CHANGE_FREQUENCY_YEARLY)
        ->setPriority(0.1))

   ->add(...)

   ->writeToFile($path);

For more advanced usage, check out the documentation here.

You can install the package via composer:

composer require spatie/laravel-sitemap

laravel-opcache

PHP OPCache can make your Laravel app Fly. This package, by Appstract, contains some useful Artisan commands to work with PHP OPcache. The package requires Laravel 5.5 or newer. For older Laravel versions (5.1 or newer), you can use version 1.3.0 of this package.

To use this package, you need to login to your server/vm and run one of the commands.

Clear OPcache:

php artisan opcache:clear

Show OPcache config:

php artisan opcache:config

Show OPcache status:

php artisan opcache:status

Pre-compile your application code:

php artisan opcache:optimize

Use the pacakge programatically:

use Appstract\Opcache\OpcacheFacade as OPcache;

...

OPcache::clear();

You can install the package via Composer:

composer require appstract/laravel-opcache

laravel-mediable

Laravel-Mediable is a package for easily uploading and attaching media files to models with Laravel 5.

It has following features:

• Filesystem-driven approach is easily configurable to allow any number of upload directories with different accessibility.
• Many-to-many polymorphic relationships allow any number of media to be assigned to any number of other models without any need to modify the schema.
• Attach media to models with tags, to set and retrieve media for specific purposes, such as 'thumbnail', 'featured image', 'gallery' or 'download'.
• Easily query media and restrict uploads by MIME type, extension and/or aggregate type (e.g. image for jpeg, png or gif).

Using this package is simple. Upload a file to the server, and place it in a directory on the filesystem disk named "uploads". This will create a Media record that can be used to refer to the file.

$media = MediaUploader::fromSource($request->file('thumb'))
    ->toDestination('uploads', 'blog/thumbnails')
    ->upload();

Attach the Media to another eloquent model with one or more tags defining their relationship.

$post = Post::create($this->request->input());
$post->attachMedia($media, ['thumbnail']);

Retrieve the media from the model by its tag(s).

$post->getMedia('thumbnail')->first()->getUrl();

Install the package using Composer:

composer require plank/laravel-mediable

laravel-menu

This package provides a fluent interface to build menus of any size in your Laravel application.

All classes provide a human readable, fluent interface (no array configuration). Additionally, you can opt for a more verbose and flexible syntax, or for convenience methods that cover most use cases.

Menu::new()
    ->add(Link::to('/', 'Home'))
    ->add(Link::to('/about', 'About'))
    ->add(Link::to('/contact', 'Contact'))
    ->add(Html::empty())
    ->render();

// Or just...
Menu::new()
    ->link('/', 'Home')
    ->link('/about', 'About')
    ->link('/contact', 'Contact')
    ->empty()

Above will output following HTML:

<ul>
    <li><a href="/">Home</a></li>
    <li><a href="/about">About</a></li>
    <li><a href="/contact">Contact</a></li>
    <li></li>
</ul>

You can install the package via composer:

$ composer require spatie/laravel-menu

The in-depth documentation for this package can be found here: https://docs.spatie.be/menu.

Conclusion

I'm sincerly grateful to developers to come up with such packages and making my life easier and I hope it will be helpful to you as well. I'll add more such awesome pacakges here in this article time-to-time whenever I come across one. Until next time, stay tuned!

Originally written at https://www.amitmerchant.com/make-laravel-development-experience-awesome-with-this-packages/