A composable, versioned toolkit for Laravel projects

We join a fair number of projects, and we often help teams bring their project up to our standard. This means bringing a lot of the same small pieces from project to project.

In the latest episode of the No Compromises podcast, we rethink our “project standard” repo. Instead of a full Laravel skeleton, we propose a composable library of tool-specific, versioned configs (PHPUnit, Docker, etc.).

We walk through the benefits for greenfield and legacy work, open questions about test organization, and how this approach scales as tools evolve.

• (00:00) - Why we keep our tooling current
• (00:15) - The “project standard” repo is aging
• (01:30) - Reference guide vs installable skeleton
• (02:30) - Supporting old and new stacks (versions, tags)
• (03:30) - Pivot: organize by tool and version, not app
• (04:30) - Example plan: folders for PHPUnit 11/12 (and beyond)
• (05:15) - What belongs where? Tests, traits, and context
• (10:00) - Docker-first thinking; where Horizon config lives
• (11:15) - Open questions: PHPUnit vs Pest vs “testing” folder
• (12:15) - Takeaway: evolve the repo as the tools evolve
• (12:45) - Silly bit