essentials

Essentials

Essentials provide better defaults for your Laravel applications including strict models, automatically eagerly loaded relationships, immutable dates, and more!

Requires PHP 8.3+, Laravel 11+.

Note: This package modifies the default behavior of Laravel. It is recommended to use it in new projects or when you are comfortable with the changes it introduces.

Installation

⚡️ Get started by requiring the package using Composer:

composer require nunomaduro/essentials

Features

All features are optional and configurable in config/essentials.php.

You may publish the configuration file with:

php artisan vendor:publish --tag=essentials-config

Table of Contents

• Strict Models
• Auto Eager Loading
• Optional Unguarded Models
• Immutable Dates
• Force HTTPS
• Safe Console
• Asset Prefetching
• Prevent Stray Requests
• Fake Sleep
• Artisan Commands
  • make:action
  • essentials:pint
  • essentials:rector

✅ Strict Models

Improves how Eloquent handles undefined attributes, lazy loading, and invalid assignments.

• Accessing a missing attribute throws an error.
• Lazy loading is blocked unless explicitly allowed.
• Setting undefined attributes throws instead of failing silently.

Why: Avoids subtle bugs and makes model behavior easier to reason about.

⚡️ Auto Eager Loading

Automatically eager loads relationships defined in the model's $with property.

Why: Reduces N+1 query issues and improves performance without needing with() everywhere.

Optional Unguarded Models

Disables Laravel's mass assignment protection globally (opt-in).

Why: Useful in trusted or local environments where you want to skip defining $fillable.

Immutable Dates

Uses CarbonImmutable instead of mutable date objects across your app.

Why: Prevents unexpected date mutations and improves predictability.

Force HTTPS

Forces all generated URLs to use https://.

Why: Ensures all traffic uses secure connections by default.

Safe Console

Blocks potentially destructive Artisan commands in production (e.g., migrate:fresh).

Why: Prevents accidental data loss and adds a safety net in sensitive environments.

Asset Prefetching

Configures Laravel Vite to preload assets more aggressively.

Why: Improves front-end load times and user experience.

Prevent Stray Requests

Configures Laravel Http Facade to prevent stray requests.

Why: Ensure every HTTP calls during tests have been explicitly faked.

Fake Sleep

Configures Laravel Sleep Facade to be faked.

Why: Avoid unexpected sleep during testing cases.

️ Artisan Commands

make:action

Quickly generates action classes in your Laravel application:

php artisan make:action CreateUserAction

This creates a clean action class at app/Actions/CreateUserAction.php:

 true,
    NunoMaduro\Essentials\Configurables\Unguard::class => false,
    // other configurables...
];

You may also publish the stubs used by this package:

php artisan vendor:publish --tag=essentials-stubs

Roadmap

• Better defaults before each test case
• Better Pint configuration by default
• General cleanup of the skeleton
• Additional configurables for common Laravel patterns

License

Essentials was created by Nuno Maduro under the MIT license.