We’ve talked about this a lot, but what can you do? Laravel is made stronger by its wealth of packages and tools. So, once again, we are here to talk about some of the best laravel packages that significantly affect development time, including Laravel Dusk, Laravel Sail, and Laravel Telescope, which can help you cut down your development time and ease a lot of challenges and headaches along the way.

Laravel Dusk

If you are a Laravel developer, you are probably already aware of the fact that there are different Laravel testing options to choose from, such as unit testing, feature testing, component testing, as well as end-to-end testing. End-to-end testing (a.k.a E2E testing) focuses on the application as a whole, from the front-end interface to the back-end functionality. This type of testing ensures that the entire application works properly from the user's viewpoint. This is exactly where the Laravel Dusk package comes into play.

When you are building a particular functionality on an application, it’s highly likely that you want to test how the specific interaction with the user works. This is where you’ll need end-to-end testing. This Laravel package provides developers with helper functions that make it easy to perform end-to-end testing of your applications. With this package, developers can simulate user interactions and test their application's functionality easily and efficiently.

This means that by writing tests with Laravel Dusk, developers can run comprehensive tests on their projects in a matter of seconds, whereas manual testing could take hours to complete. This helps you make sure everything works properly on a project without putting in too much time and effort.

However, it should also be noted that Dusk is an effective solution only in case the entire application is built on Laravel (Backend and Frontend). For applications where the backend is built on Laravel, and the frontend is developed on React, Vue, or Angular, using Cypress for Laravel E2E testing would be the most optimal choice.

Laravel Sail

In the modern development world, docker and container have become very popular technologies due to their ability to encapsulate specific packages, software and dependencies. If you have installed docker and docker engine with docker-compose, you are able to pull any kind of image, such as the Composer image, and easily configure the Composer application with PHP on your local environment. Docker also allows you to set up the dependencies without installing php or composer separately.

The main idea behind Docker is to divide applications into lightweight and scalable containers in the cloud. This approach makes the containers more scalable and ensures they remain lightweight and simple to run. So due to docker’s usability and popularity, Laravel decided to develop an innovative package known as Laravel Sail. 

This is a Laravel package that allows you to set up the application in a fast and effective way locally. For example, if you’re working on five projects, and there are different php versions, switching from one version to another will not be a headache in case you use Laravel Sail. So it comes as no surprise that this package has already gained great approval in the Laravel community. Besides, if you read laravel official installation guidelines, you’ll see that it prioritizes installation via sail.

Overall, Laravel Sail is the package that simplifies development and onboarding processes.

Laravel Telescope

Even though Laravel Telescope is not widely used in Laravel projects, it’s still considered to be a robust tool that complies with different Laravel debugging tools. 

It is a great solution that lets developers look at different components of Laravel to identify and fix any issues before ever committing them to version control. You have a myriad of debugging capabilities like mysql slow queries, logging, exceptions, gates, views, requests/response logging, etc.

By using the Laravel Telescope package, you’ll be able to complete the debugging process simply and efficiently. However, it is important to bear in mind that this tool is intended for development purposes only and should not be used in a production environment. As it is a substantial package, it can have a negative influence on the performance of your application.

It’s also worth mentioning that the package stores a significant amount of data, so it is highly recommended to periodically clean the database by employing the "php artisan telescope:prune” command.

Conclusion

That’s it for now. We hope you give these three packages a go and see the obvious improvement in both your development time and your project’s efficiency. We’ll definitely be back with another episode featuring other cool packages and tools that you can inculcate in your development process to streamline it further.