As a developer, are you wondering how to avoid rewriting the same code over and over so you can build your websites faster? Laravel packages are exactly the answer you need to streamline your workflow, harden your website and extend what it can do. Read on to learn more about Laravel packages and discover a selection of the best ones.
What is a Laravel package?
Laravel packages are pre-built, reusable modules of code that add functionality to Laravel with no fuss. Thanks to packages, developers save time by relying on solid tools already tested by the Laravel community. That leaves them free to concentrate on what makes their own application specific.
Laravel package vs bundle
The terms “Laravel package” and “bundle” are often mixed up, and the differences between them are fairly subtle. A Laravel package is developed by the community or by a third party, whereas bundles are developed by the Laravel core team. Bundles ship with a fresh Laravel installation, Laravel packages, on the other hand, are not included by default.
10 essential Laravel packages for building your website
Which Laravel package is best depends on the specifics of your project. Rely on the Laravel agency AmphiBee to help you build an efficient, secure website with the packages that suit it best.
Laravel Debugbar
With Laravel Debugbar, the name says it all: this package helps you optimise and debug your Laravel application through its debugging toolbar. Use it to get a feel for how your application performs in real time. It shows you SQL queries, rendered views, errors, the slowest parts of your code and much more. You can even make debugging easier with your own custom messages.
Laravel User Verification
The Laravel User Verification package handles email verification and validation, which makes onboarding the users of your website much smoother. With Laravel User Verification you can tailor the email templates, the verification logic and the user experience to the specifics of your application. It also saves you time and energy while developing, since it fits neatly into Laravel’s authentication and notification systems.
Socialite
Socialite is the go-to package for adding social login to your Laravel application. It supports the main platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Google, letting your users sign in to your website with their social media accounts. Socialite makes integrating OAuth providers far simpler, and keeps the authentication process quick and secure.
Laravel Mix
Laravel Mix is an asset compilation tool for Laravel projects. Use this package to define your build steps more efficiently and improve your workflow. The successor to Laravel Elixir, Laravel Mix fits perfectly with Webpack and saves you a great deal of time managing your front-end assets.
Bagisto
Bagisto is an open source Laravel e-commerce platform that became popular very quickly within the Laravel community. Friendly and simple to set up, Bagisto suits businesses of every size. Use it to save time building online shops or moving physical stores online, and to cut your costs and your staffing needs. Bagisto offers multi-warehouse inventory management, along with features such as payment integration, multi-currency, localisation, access control levels and multi-channel selling.
Laravel-SEO
With Laravel-SEO, you get proper control over the search visibility of your Laravel website. The package lets you add, change and remove your meta tags with ease. You can also use it to generate title tags, OpenGraph tags (Facebook, LinkedIn and so on), Twitter tags, robots tags, structured data (articles, FAQ pages) and even favicons. Laravel-SEO is a genuine ally for improving the visibility and ranking of your Laravel website.
Laravel Telescope
Laravel Telescope is a package designed to make debugging easier. It is a powerful tool whose simple, intuitive interface lets you inspect the emails you send, requests, logs, events and much more. You can read that information in real time to spot problems on your website quickly and take the steps needed to fix them.
Orchestral Testbench
Orchestral Testbench is aimed at developers who build Laravel packages. It lets them write tests for their packages exactly as they would in a Laravel application, but without having to install one. Orchestral Testbench is essential for building Laravel packages and making sure they work properly.
Entrust
Entrust lets you define user roles and assign specific permissions to each of them. Website security improves as a result, since users can only reach the features that match their role.
No Captcha
This package protects your Laravel forms against bots and spam. It gives you an extra layer of security through Google’s reCaptcha validation, along with options for customising the CAPTCHA widget so it sits neatly within your form design. With No Captcha, the quality of the user experience is preserved.
