Here’s the list of packages that make Laravel development even easier.
Development
PHPUnit – require-dev or require in composer.json
"phpunit/phpunit": "~4.0"
and then run tests in cli directly from installed binary:
vendor/bin/phpunit
PHPSpec – require-dev or require in composer.json
"phpspec/phpspec": "~2.1"
and then similar to PHPUnit, run the tests using binary in vendor/bin
vendor/bin/phpspec desc App/Test
Profiling / debugging – laravel-debugbar
IDE auto-completion / PHPDoc – laravel-ide-helper
Faker – use to seed Database with realistic Data.
require-dev or require in composer.json
"fzaninotto/faker": "1.4.*@dev"
and then just get an instance
$faker = Faker\Factory::create();
and use it to fake just about anything.
Laravel 4 Backwards Compatibility
HTML helper – require in composer.json
"illuminate/html": "~5.0"
Update app config with service provider
'Illuminate\Html\HtmlServiceProvider',
and class aliases
'Form' => 'Illuminate\Html\FormFacade', 'Html' => 'Illuminate\Html\HtmlFacade',
In Laravel 5 blade templates for anything that generates HTML (that includes most of the HTML helper package) use {!! !!} instead of {{ }} so that HTML is not converted to entities.
Datatables
laravel4-datatables-package – to make it work with Laravel 5, copy the whole package from vendor into the app folder (anywhere where it will be autoloaded), update service provider and class alias in app config so that they point to the correct namespacees of DatatablesServiceProvider and \Facade\Datatables classes, then comment out the package() call in DatatablesServiceProvider’s boot method
//$this->package('bllim/datatables');)
After that it can be used the same way as with Laravel 4, of course now you’d have to maintain it yourself since it’s a local package.
Datatable – alternative Datatables package.
Search
Solr Laravel-Solarium see lucene.apache.org/solr/
Sphinx sphinxsearch see sphinxsearch.com
dompdf – laravel-dompdf
Snappy / wkhtmltopdf – laravel-snappy
User management
Entrust (roles & permissions)
Confide (authentication & user extras)