I really like this approach. Everything is in source control but it still comes alive thanks to Blade components.
https://spec.tacul.ar/articles/flat-file-blog-in-laravel-with-folio-yaml
Like most side projects, this was born out of frustration. As a developer, I hated getting vague requirements scattered over Basecamp, Jira, Slack and emails. Oftentimes, it was lazy project managers using agile as an excuse for not planning. So I made a tool for building detailed yet readable functional specifications (not just UML weirdos!).
I've noticed recently that specifications are cool again but for the wrong reasons. People write specs primarily for LLMs rather than for other people. Spectacular is aimed at making specifications accessible to everyone: project managers, developers, stakeholders as well as AI coding agents. It has worked great for my clients over the years and I'm pleased to have had time in the last few months to prepare it for public release.
So here it is: Specacular - an open source specification tool built in Laravel and Vue. You can install it locally or just use the hosted version: https://spec.tacul.ar
I hope many of you find it a worthy addition to your workflows.
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Sales pitch over, let's talk code.
It's pretty standard Laravel and Vue (with a few exceptions). The API uses Laravel Actions instead of controllers so any future extensions like MCP services don't need to duplicate code.
The SharesRelation rule is a nifty way to check two models are related via a common ancestor (a User and a Feature belong to the same Project via User->Project->Feature).
'user_id' => [new SharesRelation(User::class, 'feature_id', 'project.features')],
Some might be interested in how a "solo" mode disengages authorisation; Sanctum config takes an array of guards so it will fall back to a custom guard that returns an ephemeral default user and opens the Gate for them.
Sqids (the new version of Hashids) are encoded using an attribute on the trait and a castable is used for foreign keys. The decoding is done in route binding and at the middleware level for input. I found this to be tider than prepareForValidation().
$router->post('requirements/add', static::class) ->middleware('sqids:feature_id,actor_ids.*');
On the Vue side: when I migrated this project from Vue 2 to Vue 3 years ago, Pinia ORM was a bit buggy so I implemented my own lightweight ORM that uses Collect.js. I actually really like it because it works like a very basic Eloquent.
This is my first time releasing a project like this so I'm looking forward to hearing your thoughts. It's getting pretty late so I'll check back in the morning.