What is the one package you install in all Laravel projects?

Published on May 22nd, 2017 by Eric L. Barnes

Simple question for fellow #Laravel.

What is ONE package you can't live without and install in all projects @laravelphp @laravelnews

— Mike Erickson (@codedungeon) May 21, 2017

Mike Erickson (@codedungeon) asked this question on Twitter, and it had a lot of great responses. I had a gut feeling the Debugbar by Barry vd. Heuvel would win this category and, sure enough, it had the most people recommending it.

Here is a list of all the packages people suggested:

Debugbar
The Laravel Debugbar is a package that allows you to quickly and easily keep tabs on your application during development.

IDE Helper
This package generates a file that your IDE understands so that it can provide accurate autocompletion. Generation is done based on the files in your project, so they are always up-to-date.

Guzzle
Guzzle is a PHP HTTP client that makes it easy to send HTTP requests and trivial to integrate with web services.

Spatie Backup
This Laravel package creates a backup of your application. The backup is a zip file 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 in Laravel.

Laravel Collective
The Laravel Collective is a community organization designed to maintain components that have been removed from the Laravel Framework core.

Socialite
Laravel Socialite provides an expressive, fluent interface to OAuth authentication with Facebook, Twitter, Google, LinkedIn, GitHub and Bitbucket. It handles almost all of the boilerplate social authentication code you are dreading writing.

Laravel Fractal
The package provides a nice and easy wrapper around Fractal for use in your Laravel applications.

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Some of these are very project specific like Socialite, Fractal, and Guzzle, but others like the IDE Helper and Spatie Backup can be useful for any project.

I like to use the Debugbar and an HTTP/2 package. Outside of that, it all depends on the project requirements on what I include.