Laravel has revitalized PHP development. Created by Taylor Otwell and first released in 2011, the framework brought modern development patterns — MVC architecture, an expressive ORM, artisan CLI, and elegant routing — to a language that many had written off. Today, Laravel is the most popular PHP framework by a wide margin and one of the most-starred backend frameworks on GitHub.
The framework’s appeal starts with developer experience. Eloquent ORM makes database work feel natural, Blade templating is simple but powerful, and the Artisan command-line tool generates boilerplate, runs migrations, and handles dozens of routine tasks. Laravel’s documentation is consistently praised as some of the best in any open-source project.
What’s made Laravel a full ecosystem is the constellation of official packages and services around it. Laravel Forge handles server provisioning, Vapor enables serverless deployment on AWS Lambda, Envoyer manages zero-downtime deployments, Nova provides an admin panel, Jetstream offers authentication scaffolding, and Cashier handles subscription billing through Stripe and Paddle.
The Livewire project (by Caleb Porzio, with Laravel’s support) lets developers build reactive interfaces using PHP instead of JavaScript, while Inertia.js bridges Laravel backends with React, Vue, or Svelte frontends without building a separate API.
Laravel’s Herd development environment (for macOS and Windows) makes local setup trivial — install and go, no Docker configuration needed. Laracasts, the official learning platform run by Jeffrey Way, has become one of the best programming education resources on the web.
Companies using Laravel include Disney, Twitch, The New York Times, and thousands of startups and agencies worldwide. Otwell has built a genuine business empire around the framework, with the associated SaaS products generating significant recurring revenue while keeping the framework itself free and open source.
