Top 11 Laravel Packages To Improve Productivity

Laravel is the most popular PHP framework for back end development that developers prefer to use. It’s increasing popularity is because of its growing developer community and beginner friendliness. It tries to make the process of development easier by simplifying the common practices used in developing major web projects like packages, modules, plug-ins and components. Here you can get the details of what is laravel package and top 11 Laravel packages to use in 2020. 

What Is Laravel Packages?

Laravel is a popular framework to develop web applications as it offers a simple and rapid development environment for developers. Laravel package is a piece of software(code) designed or built to improve the capabilities or functionalities of existing software. Basically it is a script that is installable so as to implement extra features in an application rather than writing from scratch. You can use different ways to access relational databases, can perform dependency injection through these packages.

The best advantage of using Laravel packages is- it allows access to all features that the framework offers to its host application, including routing, migrations, tests, views and other useful features. The next important advantage of a package is Don’t Repeat Yourself(DRY) principle.

Top 11 Laravel Packages To Improve Productivity-

1. Laravel Debugbar-

This Laravel package is basically used for the debugging purpose. It helps users to add a developer toolbar to their applications. There are multiple options available in Debugbar. It will help you to show the queries that your application offers. Related to the route, that you have called will show all the templates and parameters that you have passed.  

You can include messages using the Façade, and it will show under the ‘Messages’ tab in the Laravel Debugbar.

You can install this by using the command below and ensure that the debug mode is on and of course do not use this package into production.

composer require barryvdh/laravel-debugbar --dev

2. Laravel Socialite-

Laravel provides a simple, convenient way to authenticate with OAuth providers by using Laravel Socialite. Socialite supports authentication with Bitbucket, GitLab, Google, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook. This package is an open-source OAuth authentication Laravel Package that helps to integrate with facebook, Twitter and Goggle.

You can use the following command to install the Laravel Socialite Package, 

composer require laravel/socialite
composer update

3. Laravel ide helper-

This package is used to improve the auto complication capability for code editors. It generates the file that is helpful for code editor to understand the project and then accordingly code editors provide IntelliSense for autocompletion. The file about which we are discussing is generally based on the files we have in our Laravel project and it keeps them updated.

You can use the following command to install this package:

composer require --dev barryvdh/laravel-ide-helper

4. Entrust-

Entrust is a laravel that provides a flexible way to add Role-based Permissions to Laravel applications. It creates 4 tables- 

• roles table- to store role records, 
• permissions table- to store permission records,
• role_user table- to store one-to-many relations between roles and users
• permission_role table- to store many-to-many relations between roles and permissions

Code to create a role-

$admin = new Role();
$admin->name = 'admin';
$admin->display_name = 'User Administrator'; // optional
$admin->description  = 'User is allowed to manage and edit other users'; // optional
$admin->save();

Code to assign the roles to the users-

user = User::where('username', '=', 'michele')->first();
$user->attachRole($admin);
Now, you must give permissions to these roles:
$createPost = new Permission();
$createPost->name         = 'create-post';
$createPost->display_name = 'Create Posts';
$createPost->description  = 'create new blog posts';
$createPost->save();
$admin->attachPermission($createPost);

5. Laravel Form Builder-

Form builder is a laravel package inspired by Symfony’s form builder. By using Laravel FormBuilder class creates forms that can be reused and easily modified. Laravel Form Builder package ships with support for Bootstrap 3.

You can use the following command to install the package-

composer require ycs77/laravel-form-builder-bs4

6. Tinker-

Tinker comes in a convenient way when you need to debug something without writing a script and try to execute it on the browser. 

When you work on Laravel applications, you always need to debug or see the value from array, variable, collection or need to checkout records from the database. With tinker you can dump data and load dummy into  application using factories. 

7. Laravel Pusher-

Laravel eases the development of modern applications with real-time interactions by providing event broadcasting system. This event broadcasting system allows developers to share the same event names between the server-side code and the client-side Javascript applications.

Laravel Pusher is an easy and reliable platform to build scalable real-time applications. Pusher emerged as a popular tool to make the apps realtime.

8. Laravel Backup-

This package is used to create a backup of files within an application. It creates a zip file that includes the files in the directories that you specify along with a dump of the database. You can store the backup on any file system. 

Use the following command to create a backup-

php artisan backup:run

9. Laravel excel-

If you want to deal with Excel or CSV files in your laravel projects, this package is useful to you. To import or export Excel or CSV files from your project, this package provides great features. You can directory export from the Eloquent models, collections and Blade views also. 

Laravel excel package has an updated and easy to understand documentation. Command to install laravel excel package-

composer require maatwebsite/excel

10. Bagisto-

This is an open-source Laravel eCommerce package that offers an amazing Laravel user management, multi-warehouse inventory management options and so on. Laravel CMS package includes a built-in user-friendly admin panel navigation, offers functionalities like Multi-Currency, Localization, Access Control Level, Multi-Channel, Payment integration and so on.

11. Laravel Seoable-

Among all SEO packages, Laravel Seoable is a widely used SEO package for Laravel projects. This package offers adequate SEO techniques that calibrate the Laravel applications for search engine rankings. It characterizes some core Laravel functions according to the best practices of SEO, for example, mapping Eloquent attributes to SEO Meta tags, setting custom templates for page title/description, characterizing custom SEO data for applications models and so on.

You can also know the Laravel optimization tips at- Laravel optimization tips that you can’t miss in 2020.

Wrap up-

These are the top 11 laravel packages that you can use to optimize a project’s productivity. With these packages, users can easily perform functional tasks with packages. You can select the best one according to the needs and requirements of the project.