Laravel Actor Trails

Track created_by, modified_by, and deleted_by as JSON objects in your Laravel models, with support for multiple guards and polymorphic actors.

✨ What It Does

This package automatically tracks who created, modified, or deleted your Eloquent models.
Instead of just storing a raw user_id, it stores a self‑contained JSON object with details about the actor at the time of the action:

{
  "id": "16",
  "user_type": "Admin",
  "auth_table": "users",
  "display_name": "Kelly Montannavue"
}

This makes your audit trails:

• Polymorphic → works with multiple authenticatable models (User, Admin, Member, etc.)
• Immutable → keeps a snapshot of the actor’s display name and type, even if the user record changes later
• Automatic → hooks into Eloquent events (creating, updating, deleting)
• Configurable → choose which attributes to store in the JSON

🚀 Installation

You can install the package via composer:

composer require digitalindoorsmen/laravel-actor-trails

Publish the config file:

php artisan vendor:publish --tag="laravel-actor-trails-config"

Generate a migration for a specific table:

php artisan actor-trails:add posts
php artisan migrate

This will add created_by, modified_by, and deleted_by JSON columns to the posts table.

⚡ Usage

Add the HasActorTrails trait to any model you want to track:

use DigitalIndoorsmen\LaravelActorTrails\Traits\HasActorTrails;
use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Model;
use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\SoftDeletes;

class Post extends Model
{
    use HasActorTrails, SoftDeletes;

    protected $fillable = ['title', 'body'];
}

Now whenever you create, update, or soft delete a Post, the actor will be stored automatically:

$post = Post::create(['title' => 'Hello World']);

// Example created_by value:
[
  "id" => 1,
  "user_type" => "User",
  "auth_table" => "users",
  "display_name" => "Alice"
]

⚙️ Config

The published config file (config/actor-trails.php) lets you define which attributes are stored:

return [
    'attributes' => [
        'id' => fn($user) => $user->getAuthIdentifier(),
        'user_type' => fn($user) => class_basename($user),
        'auth_table' => fn($user) => $user->getTable(),
        'display_name' => fn($user) => $user->name ?? $user->username ?? 'Unknown',
    ],
];

You can override this per model if needed.

🧪 Testing

composer test

📜 Changelog

Please see CHANGELOG for more information on what has changed recently.

🤝 Contributing

Please see CONTRIBUTING for details.

🔒 Security

Please review our security policy on how to report security vulnerabilities.

👏 Credits

• Clay Bitner
• All Contributors

📄 License

The MIT License (MIT). Please see License File for more information.