laravel-best-practices

laravel-best-practices is a conventions-and-patterns reference for building Laravel 13 applications. It packages 31 rules across seven prioritized categories (architecture, Eloquent/database, controllers/routing, validation, security, performance, and API design) so that an agent generating or reviewing Laravel code produces scalable, maintainable results that follow community-accepted patterns rather than ad-hoc code.

Each rule lives in its own Markdown file with a consistent structure: an impact rating, a bad example, a good example, and a rationale. Coverage includes extracting business logic into service and action classes, repository and DTO patterns, event-driven decoupling with listeners and queues, feature-folder organization, Eloquent practices (eager loading to prevent N+1 queries, chunking, query scopes, casts, soft deletes, pruning, and pgvector-based vector search), resource controllers and form requests, and layered validation techniques including conditional, array, and after-hook rules. A dedicated security rule covers protecting against mass assignment. The SKILL.md provides a quick-reference index and essential code snippets such as a controller wired to a form request.

The skill targets Laravel and PHP developers (Laravel 13.x, PHP 8.3+) writing controllers, models, migrations, services, or APIs, and teams wanting a shared style guide for reviews. Note that the Performance and API Design categories are listed but currently have no rule files, so it is a substantial but still-growing reference. All content is illustrative code and prose guidance; it executes nothing itself.