r/laravel

I’ve worked on a few Laravel projects where controllers became too heavy over time, especially when the app had payments, notifications, reports, third-party APIs, and admin workflows.

Recently I’ve been trying to keep controllers very thin and move business logic into service classes.

Example structure:

app/

Services/

Payments/

Notifications/

Reports/

Tenants/

Actions/

DTOs/

For simple CRUD, I still keep things straightforward. But for complex workflows, I feel service classes make the code easier to test and maintain.

Curious how others here usually structure larger Laravel apps.

Do you prefer service classes, actions, jobs, repositories, or just keeping logic closer to models/controllers?

Howdy r/laravel!

I've been playing around with nix recently and figured I'd write a bit about what I've been doing with it lately, specifically around how I've swapped to a nix/devenv setup from Herd. Really enjoying this workflow and hope it helps other folks out there tinkering with nix and looking to fine tune it for Laravel development.

Cheers!

We're doing another Laravel Cloud Office Hours stream tomorrow (5/19) at 12pm EDT (4pm UTC) with Devon. This time, we have a special guest, Andy Brudtkuhl, one of our Product Managers for Cloud, joining us to talk about managed queues!

Feel free to drop any Cloud questions in the comments ahead of time, into Slido, or ask them live in chat during the stream.

Submit a question: → https://app.sli.do/event/vbaBss7fHASowVDsu7LbHk

YouTube stream: → https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FmONCjszaDc

Hello guys,

I have a package idea. Released a YouTube video (8 minutes) explaining it, so you can watch here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o29iXqgRFNU

But I will summarize.

Idea: you're working on a Laravel project and you want to test it with large data BEFORE releasing it to production. Yes, you can generate some seeders but wouldn't it be more convenient to make it flexible and convenient to perform such stress test?

So, the workflow of the UI (proof of concept):

1. You choose the Route and its parameters

2. Package detects which DB tables are involved in that specific routes. Then you specify how many records in those tables you want to seed.

3. Package performs the seeding and then loads your chosen route multiple times and provides the data for page load, queries avg/total, etc.

https://preview.redd.it/syso628q8w1h1.png?width=2220&format=png&auto=webp&s=808243559f7d3686cc8662f1e92682bfcb754ea4

https://preview.redd.it/dkjdz18q8w1h1.png?width=2224&format=png&auto=webp&s=a786b7c040b5de6262468f771d13d0d99f779eff

For now, it's a very early stage, nothing released yes, all local on my machine.

But my overall question, I guess, is, would you use such package?

In other words, is it worth spending more time in polishing all the (edge) cases and UI/UX, which, as you all know, is actually 90% of the work lol.

---

Also, that probably would be a freemium package, so some features would be in a paid Pro version, to sustain my time on the tool. Still early to decide which ones, but just want to manage the expectations.

Just found out Laravel artisan commands are written in PHP. For some reason I thought it was another language that’s used to make those terminal commands. Apparently it’s PHP CLI and you can make CLI apps with just PHP. Never knew it.

I've been working on a system called VMMS (Voucher Management & Monitoring System) designed for government offices and companies that still manage document approvals through Excel and email chains.

I wanted to share how I approached a few interesting technical challenges in case it helps anyone building something similar.

Workflow Routing The trickiest part was making the multi-department routing flexible. Each department has a different approval flow, and I needed vouchers to move automatically to the next department once approved. I handled this by building a pipeline system where each voucher has a current stage, and the next stage is determined by the department configuration — not hardcoded logic. This made it easy to add or reorder departments without touching the core routing code.

Role-Based Access I used Laravel's Gate and Policies to handle three separate panels — Admin, Staff, and Client. Each role only sees what's relevant to them. Keeping the authorization logic in Policies rather than controllers kept things clean as the system grew.

Real-Time Pipeline Tracker I used Laravel Events and Listeners to trigger updates whenever a voucher moved stages, which also powered the automated email notifications at each step.

Staff Performance Leaderboard This was actually a last-minute addition but turned out to be one of the most appreciated features — just a simple query aggregating completed vouchers per staff member per period.

Live demo if anyone wants to see it in action: https://vmms-app-production.up.railway.app/login

Happy to answer any questions about the architecture or implementation decisions!