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Laravel API Boilerplate

A robust starter template designed to streamline RESTful API development with Laravel 13. This boilerplate comes pre-configured with essential tools and libraries to ensure code quality, documentation, and maintainability.

Why another boilerplate?

Recently I have discovered some baas services and project, e.g. supabase, firebase, pocketbase and Tailbase. They are great and can help developers a lot to sketch up a prototype quickly.

However, AI has been bring in a huge changes with the development workflow, and those baas services' advantages are becoming less obvious. With AI, developers can generate code snippets, database schemas, and even entire modules in seconds. This significantly reduces the time and effort required to build backend services from scratch. And the most important part is that Laravel provides a clean and elegant syntax, making it easier to read and maintain the code, a better development experience and native scalability -- you don't need to worry about outgrowing the platform's limitations and vendor lock-in.

This boilerplate is target to let any developers familiar with Laravel to quickly start a new API project with best practices and essential tools pre-configured, so they can focus on building features and delivering value. it may not suit for all scenarios, but it's a better replacement for those BaaS services for most projects.

🚀 Features

• Framework: Laravel 13 (PHP 8.3+)
• Authentication: Dual token + cookie auth (Sanctum), password / OTP / OAuth, signed-URL email verification
• Configurable security: per-endpoint rate limits, Password::defaults() policy, login email-verification gate
• Standard API envelope: base Controller response helpers plus a global exception → JSON renderer
• API Documentation: Automated docs via Scribe
• Roles & Permissions: Manage access control with Laratrust
• File uploads: Two-phase upload with TTL + scheduled cleanup; works with local or s3
• Data Transfer Objects: Type-safe data handling using Spatie Laravel Data
• Code Quality: Automated code styling with Laravel Pint
• Testing: Comprehensive testing suite with PHPUnit
• AI integration: Laravel Boost MCP and shared agent rules (CLAUDE.md / AGENTS.md / GEMINI.md / .cursor/rules / .github/copilot-instructions.md)

📚 Documentation

Per-feature docs live in docs/. The index links every module — start there or jump straight to what you need:

🛠 Installation

Choose one of the following installation paths.

GitHub Template

Click Use this template on the GitHub repository, create your application repository, then clone it locally. This is the recommended path when you want a fresh Git history and GitHub repository workflow.

Composer

Composer creates a clean application without the boilerplate's Git history, copies .env.example, generates APP_KEY, creates the default SQLite database, and runs migrations.

Git clone

Clone preserves the boilerplate repository history. Remove or replace the origin remote before starting your own project.

Finish a Template or clone installation

SQLite works by default. Configure another database in .env before migration when required.

⚡ Usage

Development Server

Start the local development server:

Or separately:

Running Tests

Execute the test suite using PHPUnit:

Code Formatting

Fix code style issues using Laravel Pint:

Generating API Documentation

Generate static HTML documentation:

📦 Key Packages

• knuckleswtf/scribe: Generates API documentation from your code.
• santigarcor/laratrust: Handles roles and permissions.
• spatie/laravel-data: Powerful data transfer objects.

📄 License

Laravel API Boilerplate is open-sourced software licensed under the MIT license.