Introduction:

Laravel, known for its elegant syntax and developer-friendly features, has become a go-to framework for building robust and scalable web applications. One of the key factors contributing to Laravel's popularity is its rich ecosystem of packages and tools that simplify and enhance the development process. In this blog post, I'll delve into some of the most interesting and useful Laravel packages that can elevate your development experience.

Tools & Packages:

1. Spatie Login Link

   When developing an app that has an admin section (or any non-public section), you'll likely seed test users to login. In large teams that work on many different apps it can be cumbersome to keep track of the right credentials. Is the user account "yourname@company.com", or "test@company.com", or even "admin@company.com"? Is that password "password", or "secret", or something is else? How do I login with a user that has a different role? This package solves that problem by offering a component that will render a login link. When clicked, that link will log you in.

2. Sushi

   Sushi is eloquent's missing "array" driver. Sometimes you want to use Eloquent, but without dealing with a database. This package solves that problem.

3. Laravel Phone

   Phone number functionality for Laravel based on the PHP port of libphonenumber by Google. You can check and validate any phone number.

4. Orchid

   Laravel Orchid is a powerful and easy-to-use solution for creating admin panel and line of business applications. With its code-driven approach, you can quickly and easily create efficient applications.

5. Bagisto

   An Open source Laravel eCommerce platform for building marketplaces, mobile apps, blockchain and headless commerce, powered by Generative AI.

6. Spatie Laravel Backup

   This Laravel package creates a backup of your application. The backup is a zipfile 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. The package can also notify you via Mail, Slack or any notification provider when something goes wrong with your backups.

7. Laravel Reverb

   Reverb is a first-party WebSocket server for Laravel applications, bringing real-time communication between client and server directly to your fingertips. Open source and an Artisan command away - with love from the Laravel team.

8. Laravel Pulse

   Pulse delivers at-a-glance insights into your application's performance and usage. Track down bottlenecks like slow jobs and endpoints, find your most active users, and more.

9. Spatie Laravel PDF

   This package provides a simple way to create PDFs in Laravel apps. Under the hood it uses Chromium (via Browsershot) to generate PDFs from Blade views. You can use modern CSS features like grid and flex box, or even a framework like Tailwind, to create beautiful PDFs.