by Jitesh • Updated Mar 29th, 2018

Here, we provide you 5 Best Laravel Packages known for their powerful functionalities that can help you extend your project’s features.

Laravel framework provides a lot of useful functionality out of the box. Due to specific requirements in a project, we can take advantage of the already built package instead of building a new package from fresh.

We recommend these packages because they have had been used by us in many laravel applications.

1. barryvdh/laravel-debugbar
2. spatie/laravel-permission
3. lazychaser/laravel-nestedset
4. spatie/laravel-backup
5. Intervention/image

Let’s take a look at details.

1. barryvdh/laravel-debugbar

We personally recommend this package to everyone. Click here to install the package.

Once it’s installed, the debug bar will be enabled at bottom of the page. The debug bar includes several tabs like Messages, Timeline, Views, Route, Queries, etc as shown n the image below.

Application optimization & debugging processes are handled very easily with this package. Below are a few features of this package.

• Queries tab: Display all executed queries along with their execution time on the particular page
• Views tab: See all the included views for according request with passed parameters
• Route tab: Know all the information about the current route.
• Messages tab: See all the facades logged messages

Check out this wonderful package here: barryvdh/laravel-debugbar

2. spatie/laravel-permission

Spatie provides many Laravel & PHP packages. Laravel framework provides permission management out the box since version 5.1.11. Laravel core has the following features to manage permission.

• Gates and Policy
• @can and @cannot blade directive
•  $this->authorize() method

But sometimes, it’s not easy to handle many permissions and roles with the core functionality. This package is developed based on Laravel’s authorization feature. Not only it is very well documented and maintained but also has a good depth. We can use functions of this package with blade directive, middleware, and multiple guards, etc

Link: spatie/laravel-permission

3. lazychaser/laravel-nestedset

It’s not easy to create tree structure relations using laravel core functions. You have to handle so many things if you want to do so.

This package works on Nested Set Model algorithm. The node traversing and manipulation process are straightforward.

It manages all the relations into a single table. So no need to worry about multiple tables creation and its joining. We can also create a custom field(s) on the same relation table if needed.

The only downside is Nested Set Model algorithm takes time to manage the left and right index during insert/update operations in a table. Therefore, it is not advisable if your tree structure relation has higher update/insert operations.

Read more about this here: lazychaser/laravel-nestedset

4. spatie/laravel-backup

One more nice package provided by spatie team is laravel-backup. It allows application backup and database backup.

To take a full backup(DB+files), use this artisan command:

php artisan backup:run

If you only need to backup the database, use below command:

php artisan backup:run --only-db

Likewise, to take files backup, use the below command:

php artisan backup:run --only-files

To execute artisan commands from your controller, use the “call” method of Artisan facades as shown below:

Artisan::call('backup:run');
Artisan::call('backup:run', ['--only-files' => true]);

In addition, this package also provides several notifications channels to be notified, and fire events for which you can create listeners.

Link: spatie/laravel-backup

5. Intervention/image

Do you want to manipulate & handling of images in your application? If yes, you can use the PHP “Intervention/image” library. It comes with two drivers

• GD Library
• Imagick

The library provides separate installation for Laravel and PHP.

It provides many useful functions like crop, resize, rotate, merging, etc. We can also read image EXIF information easily with this library.

Checkout this package here: Intervention/image

Feel free to share any nice packages. We would love to explore.

Hope this was helpful.

checkout our how to post tweets & images on a twitter account with PHP.

Tags: Laravel php Web Development