How to Set Up a Laravel Project

The Laravel setup that scales - from first artisan command to production.

Laravel has sensible defaults that get you to a working application quickly. It also has enough flexibility to build yourself into architectural corners if you dont make intentional decisions early. This guide covers the structure Eloquent patterns and queue configuration that keep Laravel projects maintainable at scale.

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The Laravel Architecture Decisions That Matter Early

The most important early decision in a Laravel project: where does business logic live? The common mistake is fat Eloquent models - models with 500 lines of logic relationships and business rules. The better approach: thin models for data representation Service classes for business logic and Action classes for single-responsibility operations. Laravel doesnt enforce this separation so teams that dont make the decision explicitly end up with the fat model anti-pattern.

At Valletta Software, we focus on:

Service classes: business logic lives in app/Services/ - not in controllers or models

Form Requests: validation in dedicated Request classes - not validate() in controllers

Eloquent: thin models - relationships scopes casts - no business logic

Repository pattern: optional but useful for complex query logic - dont over-apply

API Resources: transform Eloquent models for API responses - not raw model serialization

Queues: Laravel Horizon for Redis-backed queues - Supervisor for process management

Events and Listeners: decouple side effects (send email notify Slack) from business logic

The Production Configuration Checklist

The Laravel defaults that need changing before you go live.

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APP_ENV=production APP_DEBUG=false - debug mode in production leaks stack traces

OPcache: PHP OPcache configuration for performance - essential for production

Queue worker: Supervisor config for queue:work - restarts on failure doesnt run in web process

Cache: Redis for session cache and queues - not database driver for any of these

Telescope: disable in production or restrict to admin - logs every request fills your DB

Horizon: dashboard protected by Gate::define - not publicly accessible

Database: separate read replica connection for heavy queries - config/database.php readers

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How to Set Up a Laravel Project - With Engineers Who've Scaled It

Our PHP engineers set up Laravel with Service class architecture Horizon for queue monitoring Redis for sessions and cache and Supervisor for queue workers - production-ready from the first sprint.

Our engineers are trained in today's most powerful tools - Copilot, Claude, Cursor, and AI-assisted tooling - and use them daily to move faster without cutting corners.

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Our PHP engineers set up Laravel with Service class architecture, Horizon for queue monitoring, Redis for sessions and cache, and Supervisor for queue workers.

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