Opinionated Laravel Skeleton

A opinionated skeleton for Laravel projects based on my own preferences.

It includes the following:

• Standard routes/ directory (Laravel convention)
• Health Check Route (/up) — used by Docker healthcheck
• FrankenPHP Dockerfile with Caddyfile
• Modified composer.json to install Node.js packages
• Modified .gitignore

Added Packages

Look at composer.json

Create a new Project with this Skeleton

composer create-project simonjenny/laravel-skeleton NAME

Note: During project creation, laravel/boost automatically installs Claude AI skills from jeffallan/claude-skills (Laravel Specialist). This gives Claude Code context about Laravel best practices for this project. Remove the boost:add-skill line from composer.json if you don't want this.

GitHub Actions (included as templates)

Every project gets these workflows out of the box:

| Workflow | Trigger | What it does | |----------|---------|--------------| | ci.yml | Pull Request | commitlint + Pest tests + Pint code style | | release.yml | Push to main | Creates a GitHub Release via semantic-release | | docker.yml | GitHub Release published | Builds Docker image, Trivy scan, pushes to GHCR | | dependabot.yml | Weekly (scheduled) | PRs for outdated Composer, npm & Action dependencies |

Commits follow the Conventional Commits format:

feat: add user profile picture upload   → minor release (1.x.0)
fix: fix password reset link expiry     → patch release (1.0.x)
chore: update tailwind to 4.2           → no release

Required GitHub secrets & variables:

• GITHUB_TOKEN — built-in, no setup needed (for semantic-release)
• TOKEN — GitHub PAT with write:packages scope (for pushing to GHCR)
• ENABLE_DOCKER_BUILD — Repository Variable (not secret), set to true to activate docker.yml → Settings → Secrets and variables → Actions → Variables → New repository variable

Recommended branch protection for main:

• Require pull request before merging
• Require status checks: commitlint, tests, pint

Deploy with Docker

Edit compose.yml and set:

• container_name — your project name
• image — your full GHCR image path (e.g. ghcr.io/simonjenny/yourproject:latest)

Create Database and Run Migrations

php artisan migrate

Optionally: Install Filament Admin Panel

composer require filament/filament:"^5.0"
php artisan filament:install --panels
php artisan make:filament-user

Update Languages

php artisan lang:update

Install Laravel Boost

php artisan boost:install