Laravel Packages

A Flat-File Database Driver for Eloquent

Published
A Flat-File Database Driver for Eloquent image

Orbit is a flat-file database driver for Eloquent by Ryan Chandler.

You can think of it as a general-purpose "flat-file CMS for any of your applications." It can be added to any Laravel Model class and allows you to store data in flat files on a disk.

Here's an example from the readme of defining a model for usage with Orbit:

use Illuminate\Database\Schema\Blueprint;
 
class Post extends Model
{
use \Orbit\Concerns\Orbital;
 
public static function schema(Blueprint $table)
{
$table->string('title');
$table->string('slug');
$table->timestamp('published_at');
}
}

Orbit is a simple-to-use package that can add flat-file support to any Laravel model class. It allows you to store data in flat files on disk instead of a generic SQL database. Think of it as a general-purpose flat-file CMS for any of your applications!

Getting started is straightforward: given the above model, here's what the flat files look like in a project:

The screenshot is an example of the markdown driver; in Orbit it supports the following drivers out of the box:

  • md -> Orbit\Drivers\Markdown
  • json -> Orbit\Drivers\Json
  • yaml -> Orbit\Drivers\Yaml
  • md_json -> Orbit\Drivers\MarkdownJson

You are free to define custom drivers using the given interface contained in the Orbit package.

Learn More

You can learn more about this package, get full installation instructions, and view the source code on GitHub.

Also, Ryan has recently started a 60 second Laravel series on YouTube to teach you things about Laravel in 60 seconds or less. Check out the first one here:

Paul Redmond photo

Staff writer at Laravel News. Full stack web developer and author.

Sponsored

laravelcloud logo
Laravel Cloud

Easily create and manage your servers and deploy your Laravel applications in seconds.

Visit Laravel Cloud

The latest

View all →
Image Dominant Color and HEIC Support in Laravel 13.24 image

Image Dominant Color and HEIC Support in Laravel 13.24

Read article
Official Laravel Zed Extension: LSP for PHP & Blade image

Official Laravel Zed Extension: LSP for PHP & Blade

Read article
Laravel Head: Manage Meta Tags, Open Graph, and JSON-LD image

Laravel Head: Manage Meta Tags, Open Graph, and JSON-LD

Read article
PhpStorm 2026.2 Released image

PhpStorm 2026.2 Released

Read article
Laravel Doctor: Diagnose Your App With One Artisan Command image

Laravel Doctor: Diagnose Your App With One Artisan Command

Read article
CPX: The Composer Package Executor for PHP image

CPX: The Composer Package Executor for PHP

Read article