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Laravel Audit Toolkit

digit7s/laravel-audit-toolkit is a Laravel-native audit engine for synchronous event recording, opt-in Eloquent lifecycle auditing, privacy-first value capture, and read-only queries. Filament is not required.

Features

• Explicit business-event recording through audit()->recordEvent().
• Opt-in Digit7s\AuditToolkit\Concerns\Auditable model auditing.
• Allowlist-first values and metadata with recursive sensitive-key filtering.
• Actor, subject, guard, request, correlation, batch, and impersonation attribution.
• Synchronous persistence with configurable fail-closed or explicitly best-effort fail-open behavior.
• Safe, explicit queue-context propagation without serializing models, credentials, or request payloads.
• A read-only AuditQuery contract for administration and reporting interfaces.

Requirements

• PHP ^8.5
• Laravel / Illuminate ^13.0
• SQLite, MySQL 8.4, and PostgreSQL 16 are verified in the package's GitHub Actions database matrix.

Installation

Install the stable package from Packagist:

Publish the package configuration and migrations, then migrate:

Laravel discovers Digit7s\AuditToolkit\AuditServiceProvider automatically. The migration creates the audit_events table, including original-actor attribution columns.

For unreleased checkout and sibling-package development, see CONTRIBUTING.md. Those workflows are not required for normal Packagist installation.

Quick Start

The audit() and audit_context() helpers are provided by the package. Anonymous or system events may omit actor and subject. Manual arguments take precedence over resolved execution context.

Manual Audit Recording

AuditManager::recordEvent() accepts the event name, actor, subject, before/after values, metadata, category, description, timestamp, source, guard, correlation/batch/request IDs, an explicit value allowlist, connection, original actor, and context-inheritance control. For lower-level composition, use AuditEventData::make() with the AuditRecorder contract.

Event names are limited to letters, numbers, dots, underscores, colons, and hyphens. UUID context identifiers are validated before persistence. A subject selects its resolved Eloquent connection; a subject-less event can set connection: 'name' or audit-toolkit.connections.default.

Writes are synchronous and use the active transaction. The default failure_mode is fail_closed, so a persistence failure is raised to the caller. fail_open is available only for explicitly best-effort telemetry and returns null after logging a warning.

Automatic Eloquent Auditing

Auditing is opt-in per model:

The observer records model.created, model.updated, model.deleted, model.restored, and model.force_deleted. Soft deletes include safe deletion_mode metadata. No-op updates are omitted and only meaningful allowlisted changes are stored.

saveQuietly(), deleteQuietly(), restoreQuietly(), forceDeleteQuietly(), and withoutEvents() suppress these lifecycle events. Query-builder writes, mass updates/deletes, raw SQL, database cascades, and pivot operations are outside the observer boundary; they are not automatically audited.

Field Allowlists and Privacy

Value capture is allowlist-first. By default, no old or new value fields are persisted unless allowedValueKeys or audit-toolkit.privacy.values_allowed_keys is configured. Metadata uses its own allowlist. Sensitive-looking keys are filtered recursively after safe normalization; credentials, tokens, request bodies, arbitrary model attributes, unsupported objects, recursive structures, and unsafe custom cast outputs are not captured.

Allowlist paths use dot notation. For example, payload.safe captures that leaf without unapproved siblings, while allowing payload captures all recursively safe children beneath it. Numeric list indexes are traversed transparently; there is no numeric-index wildcard syntax.

Direct AuditEvent::create() is rejected. Events must go through the recorder pipeline.

Actor and Subject Attribution

AuditReference stores stable type/id references for actors and subjects, so deleted models remain identifiable without serializing model instances. A missing actor is intentionally anonymous; the package does not guess a system identity.

Model hooks include auditActor(), auditGuard(), auditMetadata(), auditSource(), auditCategory(), auditCorrelationId(), and auditRequestId(). Explicit call arguments win over all context resolution.

Multi-Guard Authentication

context.guard_priority can specify an ordered guard set. If more than one configured guard is authenticated and the identity is ambiguous, the package leaves the actor unresolved rather than attributing the event to the wrong user. Request and correlation headers are accepted only when they contain valid UUIDs. IP and user-agent metadata are disabled by default.

Request and Correlation Context

The DefaultAuditContextResolver safely resolves framework context. HTTP requests can receive one package-generated correlation UUID when no valid host value is supplied. Set context.generate_correlation_id to false to opt out. request_id identifies a request, correlation_id groups related work, and batch_id is an explicit workflow identifier.

The precedence order is: call-level value, explicit execution-scoped context, configured resolver, safe framework context, then anonymous/system. Generated identifiers are package values, not trusted claims.

Queue Context Propagation

Queue propagation is explicit and carries only typed actor references and safe identifiers:

The middleware sets queue as the current execution source, preserves the original source, and clears its context in finally, including failed attempts. A job without this middleware inherits no audit context.

Optional Authentication Auditing

The AuthenticationAuditListener is disabled by default. Enable only reviewed native Laravel events in published configuration:

Supported names are login, logout, failed, password_reset, email_verified, current_device_logout, and other_device_logout. Failed-login records omit credentials and raw login identifiers and default to one event per HTTP request. Host-specific security events are not inferred or deduplicated.

Impersonation Attribution

Hosts that already implement account switching can annotate a scope without giving the package control of authentication:

The effective actor remains in actor_*; the initiating administrator is stored in original_actor_*. Nested scopes restore their parent in finally. Account switching and request-input-based impersonation inference are outside this package.

Transaction and Connection Behavior

Automatic callbacks run synchronously on the same connection and transaction as the model save when both use that connection. In fail-closed mode, an audit exception can roll back the enclosing business transaction. The package does not claim atomicity across independent connections or distributed transactions. connections.strict_atomicity can reject ambiguous manual writes.

Querying Audit Events

Use the read-only AuditQuery contract for administration UIs and reports:

The AuditEvent model exposes read relationships and guarded mutation behavior. The package does not provide a mutation API for audit records.

Configuration

Publish config/audit-toolkit.php before changing defaults. Important settings include:

• failure_mode: fail_closed or explicitly best-effort fail_open.
• connections.default and connections.strict_atomicity.
• context.guard_priority, correlation/request headers, generated correlation IDs, IP, and user-agent capture.
• privacy.values_allowed_keys, privacy.metadata_allowed_keys, and privacy.redacted_value.
• authentication.enabled, reviewed authentication.events, and authentication.max_failed_per_request.

Configuration cannot recover values excluded at write time. Host authorization is still required for every audit reader, including the optional Filament companion.

Security and Limitations

The package is privacy-first but is not a compliance certification. It deliberately does not provide automatic pivot interception, bulk SQL auditing, exports, asynchronous audit persistence, restore/revert operations, retention or pruning UI, or hash-chain tamper evidence.

Eloquent guards reject ordinary update and delete operations on stored events, but database-level immutability is not guaranteed. Database principals with write access can still modify or delete rows. Automated retention and pruning are not available in v0.1.0; a future release may add controlled, dry-run cleanup with protected event handling.

Database Compatibility

The package requires PHP 8.5 and Illuminate 13. GitHub Actions verifies the package suite and static analysis on isolated SQLite, MySQL 8.4, and PostgreSQL 16 services. SQLite is also used for local Testbench and benchmark runs. Check the database matrix workflow for the reproducible verification path.

Related Filament Plugin

For an optional read-only UI, install digit7s/filament-audit-toolkit. The Laravel package does not require Filament; it owns recording, privacy, context, storage, and the query contract.

Contributing, Security and License

Run composer validate --no-check-publish, composer check-platform-reqs, composer lint, composer analyse, and composer test before submitting changes. See RELEASE_CHECKLIST.md.

MIT licensed. See LICENSE.