DEPENDENCIES.md

Visual Laravel Dependencies (on other Open Source code)

This file exists to document each and every dependency that Visual Laravel relies upon and, where appropriate, give guidance on its use and a link to the documentation.

Because of the breadth of underlying technologies that VL uses, and the immense difficulties in being an expert in even a few of them (much less all of them), this sort file will be essential in helping developers to understand how these packages are used, and pointing them at the documentation they need to be able to both understand existing code and write new code.

Broadly speaking, this breaks down into PHP and JS (node) packages, into development tools, application coding and test coding, though there will undoubtedly be exceptions.

Overall Development Tools

Package (doc-link)	Description
Visual Studio Code	IDE
Docker	A containerised comprehensive development environment
* Devcontainers	An integrated VS-Code/Execution environment + independent services in one or more Docker containers.
* Docker compose
* Docker build
* Laravel Sail	Not an actual dependency, but has been used as inspiration for our own Docker devcontainer environment.

PHP Packages

Core

Package (doc-link)	Description
Laravel (core)	Core PHP technology
* HTTP Client	Used for loading other web pages, based on Guzzle.
* Laravel Sail
Laravel Jetstream	Livewire starter pack with full User/Team scaffolding.
* Laravel Sanctum	Security package
Laravel Tinker
Livewire

Development

Package (doc-link)	Description
Laravel Pint
PHPstan
* Larastan
* PHPstan Livewire
* Bladestan
Faker
PHP-CS-Fixer
Laravel Dusk	Headless browser automated testing
Mockery
Collision
Laravel Mojito
Laravel Pot
Pest
* Pest Laravel
* Pest Livewire
* Pest Watch
* Pest Faker
Rector
Var Dumper
PHPUnit
Laravel Flux
Spatie Ignition
DebugBar
Laravel Telescope	Insights into Laravel transactions - perhaps more of a production insight than a development one.

Node / JS packages

Package (doc-link)	Description
NPM
Bun
Tailwind	Fixed classes combined in HTML rather than in CSS - edit only HTML and not both HTML and CSS. Plus build-time analysis and subsetting.
Classes for: Sizing, Colours, Typography, Shadows, Themes, Responsiveness, Grids, Transforms, Filters, Bundling
* Forms
* Typography
* CSS
* Vite
autoprefixer
axios
Vite
Laravel Vite
NOT YET INSTALLED	NOT YET INSTALLED
Alpine.js	Livewire is built upon Alpine.js for Javascript orchestration.
CodeMirror	Flexible highlighting editor for web pages
Custom Elements Polyfill	Consistent cross-browser support for custom web components
Element behaviours	Alternative to Custom Behaviours

Github Actions

Package (doc-link)	Description
Tests
Linting
Package splitting
StyleCI

Deployments

Package (doc-link)	Description
Unpkg	Fast delivery of NPM packages (complement to Bun)

Documentation

Package (doc-link)	Description
Good Docs Project