10 Laravel packages that might save your day
Tags: laravel, composer, packages
Published: 2022-02-11 08:56:22

Here's a relatively short list with 10 Laravel packages that might help you in your current or future project. These are packages that I am or have been using or tested and I practically fall in love with them.

This is not a ranking, so the order it's not relevant at all!

## 1. [protonemedia/laravel-form-components](https://github.com/protonemedia/laravel-form-components)
If you're using blade and want to handle forms easily, this is the go to. You have all the components you need, support for Bootstrap, Tailwind Forms and even for Livewire. 

An alternative to this is the good old [laravelcollective/html](https://github.com/LaravelCollective/html), but using this is pretty primitive these days. But hey, it works! 

## 2. [pestphp/pest](https://github.com/pestphp/pest)
Testing is a must, but sometimes is a painful process. Do you hate writing test classes? Say no more! Pest is a beautiful PHPUnit wrapper that brings joy to any developer that uses it. I know that this sounds like a cheap teleshopping commercial, but it's that good and simple. Give it a try.

## 3. [laravel/horizon](https://github.com/laravel/horizon)
You have probably heard of this because it's a Laravel product. So if you're running an app that uses Redis a lot, you might need this. It helps you monitor your queues and scale up your workers.

## 4. [mcamara/laravel-localization](https://github.com/mcamara/laravel-localization)
This is probably the most popular localization package out there. Helps you run multilanguage sites in no time and has support for a lot of Laravel versions, so even if you still run v4 or v5 (which you shouldn't) you can plug this in right away.

## 5. [tighten/ziggy](https://github.com/tighten/ziggy)
I've talked more about Ziggy an its implementation in my [Setting up Laravel with Inertia.js + Vue.js + Tailwind CSS](https://dev.to/geowrgetudor/setting-up-laravel-with-inertiajs-vuejs-tailwind-css-21pc) article. Basically you can use it to pass your web routes into the DOM's head. Now you can easily access them from your Vue/Svelte/React frontend. Heck, you can even retrieve your routes from an Ziggy Api endpoint if you don't want to print them in your DOM.

## 6. [barryvdh/laravel-snappy](https://github.com/barryvdh/laravel-snappy)
This is just a Laravel service provider for Snappy. If you don't know, you can use Snappy to screenshot or save a web page to PDF. It uses <u>wkhtmltopdf</u> under the hood.

An alternative and a more popular solution to this is of course [spatie/browsershot](https://github.com/spatie/browsershot) which does the same thing but using headless Chrome. I used to use Snappy years ago, but now I use Browsershot.

## 7. [nunomaduro/larastan](https://github.com/nunomaduro/larastan)
Just a PHPStan wrapper for Laravel that helps you finding errors in your code. Depending on how your write your code, it might not catch everything, but it's really useful if you want to maintain an error free app and a specific code quality standard.

## 8. [spatie/laravel-backup](https://github.com/spatie/laravel-backup)
We're back to [Spatie](https://github.com/spatie)... because Spatie builds awesome packages. Actually, I don't even know if there's a project I've been working on that doesn't have a Spatie package installed.

The title says it all. You get backups for your whole project. You can save them on your disk or even S3 and you have a few artisan commands you can leverage to your needs.

## 9. [worksome/envy](https://github.com/worksome/envy)
This is something that I've discovered a few days ago. It's basically a took that scans for your missing ENV vars. You should always keep your `.env.example` up to date.

## 10. [livewire/livewire](https://github.com/livewire/livewire)
Livewire is a great too to build a modern interfaces without the need of Vue or React or Svelte. So you get to use Blade with some custom components that are updating in real-time because **Live**wire, get it? It's an awesome tool and just like Inertia, it brings simplicity to the Laravel ecosystem.

## Final thoughts
There are many other awesome packages that worth being mentioned, but I've picked just a few of them for now. What do you think about them? Which one have you used and what else do you recommend? Let me know in the comments.

Cheers! ;)

#### Support & follow me
| [![Buy me a coffee](https://img.shields.io/badge/Buy_Me_A_Coffee-FFDD00?style=for-the-badge&logo=buy-me-a-coffee&logoColor=black)](https://www.buymeacoffee.com/geowrgetudor) | [![Twitter](https://img.shields.io/badge/Twitter-1DA1F2?style=for-the-badge&logo=twitter&logoColor=white)](https://twitter.com/geowrgetudor) | [![GitHub](https://img.shields.io/badge/GitHub-100000?style=for-the-badge&logo=github&logoColor=white)](https://github.com/geowrgetudor) | [![Linkedin](https://img.shields.io/badge/LinkedIn-0077B5?style=for-the-badge&logo=linkedin&logoColor=white)](https://linkedin.com/in/geowrgetudor) |
| ------------- | ------------- | ------------- | ------------- |