Laravel Conventions

These are non-negotiable personal conventions unless explicitly overridden by the user.

Models

No model observers, ever — Never use Laravel model observers or listen for Eloquent model events (creating, saved, etc.). Dispatch explicit domain events instead. This is non-negotiable. If they already exist for a given model, mention it to the user, but keep building.

If you are adding timestamps with millisecond precision, make sure that you write a $dateFormat on the model or in the cast. Otherwise, the precision is silently discarded on DB writes.

Always set the $table value. This avoids Laravel having to compute the table name every time it's needed.

Logging

Use Context@scope() liberally if important contextual data exists in a parent but not within the children, and the children are writing logs. This allows for maintaining contextual information inside of function calls without needing to pass that data to child functions.

Context::scope(function() use ($user) {
    Context::add('user', $user->id);

    $this->somePrivateMethod($user);
    // ...
});

Helper Methods

Prefer new Collection() over collect(). This reduces an extra stack and indirection.

Using tap() is rarely the right call for readability.

Prefer CarbonImmutable::now() over now().

Dependency Injection

Prefer dependency injection to using facades. For large projects, test suite time is always a concern, and using facades disallow writing pure PHPUnit tests.

Testing

Use Model::factory()->make() whenever possible. Database writes are often unnecessary inside of tests.