





Since my last Laravel 4 packages showcase, I have gotten a few suggestions and discovered some more packages myself.

The following list of packages will make your Laravel development life a lot easier and faster!

Without further ado, let’s dive right into this list and see how we can increase our productivity even more with Laravel 4. (Hey that rhymes!).

This is a package to integrate PHP Debug Bar (https://github.com/maximebf/php-debugbar) with Laravel. It includes a ServiceProvider to register the debugbar and attach it to the output. You can publish assets and configure it through Laravel. It bootstraps some Collectors to work with Laravel and implements a couple custom DataCollectors, specific for Laravel. It is configured to display Redirects and Ajax Requests. (Shown in a dropdown).

This makes debugging your PHP applications just as easy as it is to debug JavaScript by logging in the console. It allows you to get the same output you would get from a print_r(), view queries, … all without cluttering up your web application with ugly debugging messages and variables.

Get it here

Basset (Better asset management) for Laravel is no longer maintained, luckily there is asset-pipeline! This is an all-round great package for asset management. It allows you to pre-process things like coffeescript, sass, less, …

It works very similar to the asset pipeline for Rails.

It also allows for you to easily put your javascript and CSS into your template using just a single line of code. I use this in every single one of my projects and I can highly recommend it!

Get it here







This package eases the process of writing tests for a Laravel application by offering:

A Factory utility (quickly create and populate models)

Model test helpers (assertValid, assertBelongsTo, etc.)

Controller test helpers (assertSee)

Assert and Should PHPUnit wrappers

As if testing wasn’t easy enough yet with Laravel, this definitely will take the edge off!

Get it here

Confide is a authentication solution for Laravel4 made to eliminate repetitive tasks involving the management of users: Account creation, login, logout, confirmation by e-mail, password reset, etc.

Confide aims to be simple to use, quick to configure and flexible.

Get it here

Entrust provides a flexible way to add Role-based Permissions to Laravel 4.

Even though it’s not needed. Entrust works very well with Confide in order to eliminate repetitive tasks involving the management of users: Account creation, login, logout, confirmation by e-mail, password reset, etc.

Confide together with this package, make a very great alternative for Sentry, which I mentioned in my last article.

Get it here

That’s all, folks!

I hope you have enjoyed the list, and that they will help you make life easier and speed up your development!