Top Laravel Tools for Software Development in 2024

Laravel is one of the most used PHP frameworks for developing complex and scalable web applications. Over 976,000 live websites are built with Laravel.

As we move to 2024, the Laravel framework and its tools continue to advance, and one can find many tools that improve the development process. In this blog, we will describe the most useful Laravel tools for software development and discuss their main features as well as their advantages in creating high-quality applications.

Top Laravel Tools for 2024

1. Laravel Tinker

Laravel Tinker is a REPL (Read-Eval-Print Loop) tool that enables developers to interact with Laravel applications through the terminal. It offers an interpreter shell where you can run PHP code live, making it an excellent tool for testing and debugging. 

You can directly communicate with ORM Eloquent to get the data or change it, check the relations between databases, and try some parts of code without creating a special test script. Tinker improves Laravel development speed by providing fast iterations and immediate feedback, making it an essential tool for developers.

2. Laravel Debugbar

Laravel Debugbar is one of the most effective debugging tools which include a developer toolbar into your Laravel application. In addition to this, there is a toolbar that displays the performance of your application at a given time, database query details, execution time, route data, etc. 

Debugbar enables you to view the request and response information, session overview, and overall status of your application. This tool is crucial for finding out what slows your application down and what causes problems so that they can be fixed before affecting other users.

3. Laravel Nova

Laravel Nova is a beautiful administration panel which makes it easy for you to manage your applications’ data. It provides a neat and clean UI for resource management, CRUD operations, and other administrative functionalities with minimal coding. 

Benefits of using Nova are flexible management of resources, sophisticated filters, and customizable actions. It easily integrates with your Laravel application, thereby enabling you to create unique admin dashboards within a short time.

4. Laravel Horizon

Laravel Horizon is an easy to use dashboard and configuration layer for Redis queues that lets you monitor your queue system in real time. It shows job throughput, run time and failure rate through which the developers get the idea about the performance of background jobs. 

This tool is very important for applications that involve heavy background processing to ensure queued tasks are processed seamlessly. Horizon’s detailed metrics and monitoring capabilities make it a must-have tool for ensuring high performance in Laravel apps.

5. Laravel Mix

Laravel Mix is a tool designed to make it easier to define the Webpack build steps for your application through an API. It deals with the bundling and minification of CSS and Javascript files to ease Frontend dependency management.

Mix supports preprocessors such as SASS and Less and enables users to write modern CSS without much effort. It also includes functionalities such as versioning and cache busing to ensure that your assets are always updated. Laravel Mix allows Laravel development services to manage various frontend assets in a more efficient manner by automating the build process, thus keeping things simple and organized.

6. Laravel Passport

Laravel Passport is an OAuth2 server implementation specifically for API authentication and API token management. It provides comprehensive OAuth2 server functionalities such as, token generation, token cancellation, and token renewal. 

Passport works well with Laravel, so that API developers can implement secure authentication with ease. By using Passport, it is possible to safeguard your API endpoints such that only the rightful users can access them.

7. Laravel Socialite

Laravel Socialite is a convenient package that easily integrates OAuth authentication with various social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Google and LinkedIn. OAuth authentication can be quite complex, and this library simplifies it by providing a neat and developer friendly API for social logins. 

It supports multiple providers, that is, it can easily be used to add social authentication to your Laravel applications. Since Socialite makes the integration of social login options less complicated, it can help in improving UX and possibilities of user registration, making it a helpful tool for contemporary web applications.

8. Laravel Telescope

Laravel Telescope is a sophisticated debugging tool for Laravel applications that helps with real-time monitoring of your application. It logs all requests, exceptions, database queries, queued jobs and everything else, allowing developers to better understand how their application runs. 

Thanks to Telescope, obtained data is organized and easily accessible, which simplifies the process of finding out what went wrong. It is a valuable tool for making sure that your Laravel applications are running as efficiently as possible by providing a detailed overview of your application’s performance and activity. 

9. Laravel Cashier

Laravel Cashier allows users to easily manage subscription billing with Stripe, where it enables the management of customer subscriptions, invoices and payments. It includes all basic functionalities of billing such as coupon management, invoice generation, and trial periods. 

Cashier works smoothly with Laravel and gives developers opportunities to use subscription billing without problems. This way, Cashier simplifies the billing process and at the same time boosts the functionality of e-commerce applications.

10. Laravel Dusk

Laravel Dusk is a browser automation and testing tool that gives the developer the capability to write elegant and simple browser tests. It is built for headless Chrome and has a straightforward API to work with page elements, which makes it suitable for end-to-end testing. 

Using Dusk, you can test how users are able to interact with your application and whether everything is working as planned across various browsers and devices. This tool assists in identifying problems right from the development stage, thus enhancing the quality of your application.

Conclusion

Laravel is still one of the most effective and flexible frameworks for web application development. To get the most out of Laravel, developers and businesses should turn to professional Laravel development services to get assistance in creating the best Laravel projects. Regardless of being a new Laravel user or someone who is already using it for applications, these tools will definitely be useful additions in your arsenal.