HGA Laravel Presets

This package is intended to be used by employees and colleagues of HGA, but has been made public as the wider community may also benefit from some of these presets. A list of the tweaks we have made are documented below.

App

Models

• Moved the App\User model into an appointed Models folder (App\Models), which we favour the structure of for cleaner code on larger projects
• Updates the User model to break down the "name" column into "first name" and "last name"
• Creates a Role model, including relationship to the User model

Controllers

• Updated the Auth controllers to not redirect to /home because this route no longer exists
• Updated any reference of the User model to be App\Models\User
• Added a PageController.php for handling our default index route to take the closure away from the web.php routes file

Providers

• Updated the default name of the Laravel Passport cookie
• Added a Gate to determine if the user is an admin or not. By default, this option is not used when first running the hga preset
• Added a boilerplate for a View Composer Service Provider. Our recommendation is to use the path App\Http\ViewComposers when creating any view composer as per the commentary.

Traits

• We have, by default, a number of useful traits that we call on in projects - automating Uuids when they're being used for IDs on models as well as the User ID for models requiring the authenticated user's ID when saving
• There's also a handy trait for determining whether a user has a particular role - the naming for this is up for debate as there may be other models beyond the User who could possibly be assigned roles in the future

Config

• Default api driver has been updated from 'token' to 'passport' to reflect our dependancy on the Laravel Passport package
• Default Mailgun endpoint updated to point to the EU server
• Updated to use encrypted sessions and secure session cookies only
  • This configuration means any dev work will have to see the website served using Laravel Valet with a secure TLS certificate in place. Running over HTTP will throw a 419 error.
• Updated any reference of the User model to be App\Models\User

Database

• Updated migrations to reflect the changes on the User model
• Migrations for the Role model and subsequent many-to-many relationship with our App\Models\User model
• Added a UsersTableSeeder.php and a RolesTableSeeder.php to get things started
• Removed the UserFactor.php for the time being

Resources

• Default JS and SASS files have been updated to HGA standard configurations
• Overwrites the default layout structure from Laravel into something more 'us'
• Updates to the authentication scaffolding to account for the "first name" and "last name" options on the User model, but also to the styling because we don't use Bootstrap.
  • This update means you have no reason to run php artisan make:auth

Routes

• api.php has been updated to prefix "v1" to the routes, which is good practice for software to account for when the API evolves over time
• web.php has been updated to include Laravel's Auth::routes() to handle authentication, whilst removing the stock routes created after running php artisan make:auth

Webpack

• By default, versioning is enabled
• Libraries such as VueJS and Axios are extracted to a vendor.js file

Misc

• Includes Laravel Passport middleware for the $web array within App\Http\Kernel.php
• Includes a custom validator strong_password to ensure a weak password cannot be used when registering
• Additional parameters have been appended to the end of the .env file, including:
  • A Google Analytics param to hold the track ID, which will pre-populate the areas within the layouts/app.blade.php view
  • Mailgun parameters
  • Mail parameters
  • Session secure cookie (for ease of access in case Valet is unavailable to you)
• The package.json file has been updated to:
  • Remove
    • bootstrap
    • lodash
    • jquery
    • popper.js
  • Include
    • fontawesome-free
    • es6-promise
    • sass
    • sass-loader
    • vue-template-compiler

API Access

• Our preset ships with Laravel Passport to consume any API created via JavaScript (typically using a VueJS & Axios combination)
• By default, we ignore the Passport migrations because we're not requiring such functionality within our applications, but it's good to know it's there
  • Turning these migrations back on is as simple as commenting out or removing the line Passport::ignoreMigrations(), which is in the register() method of AppServiceProvider.php