Laravel Best Practices

An opinionated, additive overlay of Laravel best practices for AI coding assistants. Composes alongside Laravel Boost — it does not replace it.

Boost ships an excellent built-in laravel-best-practices skill (19 rules) that covers the mechanics of Laravel and PHP. This package adds the practices Boost is silent on (control-flow opinions, architectural defaults, money-handling, named queues) plus a small set of deliberate opinionated counter-positions (clearly flagged where they exist).

Install

composer require --dev jpswade/laravel-best-practices

Then make sure Laravel Boost is installed and rerun its installer so it picks up the guidelines and skill from this package:

composer require --dev laravel/boost
php artisan boost:install

Boost auto-discovers content from resources/boost/{guidelines,skills}/ inside any Composer-installed package, so the guideline files and the tdd-bug-fixing skill in this package are composed into Boost's .ai/ output alongside Boost's own rules.

Optional: publish the bundled configs

The package also ships a recommended pint.json and phpstan.neon.dist. Publish either or both into your application root:

# Pint config only
php artisan vendor:publish --tag=laravel-best-practices-pint

# PHPStan config only
php artisan vendor:publish --tag=laravel-best-practices-phpstan

# Both at once
php artisan vendor:publish --tag=laravel-best-practices-all

For the PHPStan config, install the matching analysers (suggested in composer.json):

composer require --dev larastan/larastan phpstan/phpstan-strict-rules
vendor/bin/phpstan analyse

What's inside

resources/boost/
├── guidelines/best-practices.md    # four topics in one file (see "Why one file?" below)
└── skills/tdd-bug-fixing/
    └── SKILL.md                    # six-step TDD bug-fix loop
pint.json                            # Laravel preset + strict_types / strict_comparison / is_null / modernize_types_casting
phpstan.neon.dist                    # Larastan + phpstan-strict-rules at level 6 with exception strictness

The single best-practices.md file is structured as four self-contained H2 sections — Control Flow, Eloquent Opinions, Architecture Additions, General Design — each ending with the Boost rules it composes alongside.

Why one file?

Laravel Boost (v2.4.6 at time of writing) ingests at most one guideline file per third-party package — the per-package keying in GuidelineComposer::getThirdPartyGuidelines() overwrites earlier files in the same package, so only the last-sorted file survives. Tracked downstream as issue #1 and upstream as laravel/boost#822.

Until the upstream fix lands, all four topics are concatenated into one file. The topic structure is preserved as H2 sections inside best-practices.md, and we'll split it back once Boost ingests multiple files per package.

Position relative to Boost

This package is strictly additive. Each H2 section in best-practices.md ends with a Composes with Boost block that links to the Boost rule it sits alongside. Where this overlay takes an opposite position to Boost (currently only "avoid database transactions" vs. Boost's database.md), it is flagged in-file so you can remove that subsection if you prefer Boost's default.

The Pint and PHPStan configs are similarly additive: Pint layers four extra rules on top of the standard laravel preset, and the PHPStan config is a baseline you can extend.

Cursor (or any non-Boost setup)

If you are not using Laravel Boost — for example, you only use Cursor and want raw guideline content — you can reference the markdown directly:

vendor/jpswade/laravel-best-practices/resources/boost/guidelines/best-practices.md
vendor/jpswade/laravel-best-practices/resources/boost/skills/tdd-bug-fixing/SKILL.md

Either point a Cursor rule at the file, or copy it into .cursor/rules/. The guidelines themselves are plain Markdown — they do not depend on Boost to be useful.

Adding a new practice

Open resources/boost/guidelines/best-practices.md and add a new ### H3 subsection under whichever ## H2 topic best fits — Control Flow, Eloquent Opinions, Architecture Additions, or General Design. Follow the existing shape:

• An ### H3 title naming the practice.
• A short rationale paragraph.
• Incorrect: / Correct: code blocks.
• If the new practice has a direct Boost counterpart, add a bullet to the section's existing Composes with Boost list.

If the practice belongs to a genuinely new topic (not one of the four existing H2s), add a new ## H2 topic in the same file rather than creating a new .md file — see "Why one file?" for why.

What this package deliberately does not ship

• No .ai/ directory — Boost composes content into the consumer's .ai/ from this package's resources/boost/.
• No service-provider beyond vendor:publish for the two config files. No Artisan commands, no facades, no migrations.
• No content that overlaps Boost's built-in laravel-best-practices/rules/*.md — verified at authoring time.
• No Rector config, no tomasvotruba/unused-public in the baseline PHPStan config (both are referenced from the relevant guideline subsections as opt-in follow-ons).

RFC nature

These are best practices, not coding standards. Coding standards are the things that Pint can mechanically enforce — bracket placement, trailing commas, type-cast syntax. Best practices are the design defaults that need a person (or an AI) to apply judgement.

This package is a working set of opinions. Where the opinions are widely accepted in the Laravel community, they are stated firmly. Where they are deliberately contrarian (e.g. avoiding database transactions by default), they are flagged in-file so you can take the opposite view without rewriting the file.

If you disagree with anything here, open an issue or a pull request — the bar is "is this useful to teach an AI?", not "is this universally correct?".

Licence

MIT. See LICENSE.