Laravel Multisite Laravel Package

Product Decisions This Supports

• Multi-brand / multi-domain expansion. The package answers a real product question: do we spin up a separate application per website, or run one codebase across many hosts? It enables the latter by resolving the active site from the request hostname, with per-site config, views, routes, and database connections. That supports launching a second brand, a regional site, or a campaign microsite without a second deploy pipeline.
• Build vs. buy for site resolution. The core value here is small and well-defined — hostname-to-site lookup, config/route/view namespacing, and per-site DB connection switching. A PM should frame this as "buy a pattern, not a platform." The realistic comparison is roughly 1–3 weeks of internal middleware and bootstrapping work, so the package's worth is mostly a documented convention and a head start rather than a durable dependency.
• Roadmap sequencing for shared-platform investment. Adopting multisite commits the roadmap to a shared-platform model: shared migrations, shared deployment, shared release train. That is a strategic bet that pays off when sites share 70%+ of their product surface and hurts when they start to diverge.
• White-label / agency or franchise hosting. Where each client site is a configured variant of the same product rather than a bespoke build, this supports a per-site onboarding flow (register a site, attach a domain, point at a database) as a productized capability instead of an ops chore.
• Staging, preview, and per-environment site mapping. Hostname-driven detection makes it straightforward to map client-a.staging.example.com and client-a.example.com to the same site configuration, which is a small but real reduction in release friction.
• Data isolation decisions. Per-site database connections push the product toward hard isolation by default. That is a compliance- and enterprise-sales-friendly posture, and it is a decision worth making explicitly rather than inheriting by accident.

When to Consider This Package

Adopt it as a reference architecture when:

• You are running a small, bounded number of sites — think single digits to low tens — that genuinely share a product surface and differ mainly in branding, content, locale, or configuration.
• You are on, or can realistically stay on, a Laravel 5.x-era codebase. The last release was January 2018 and the package has not tracked the framework since; on modern Laravel it is a starting point to fork, not a dependency to install.
• You want hard per-site data isolation via separate database connections, rather than row-level tenancy in a shared schema.
• Your team is comfortable owning and extending the site-resolution layer themselves. Treat the package as readable prior art that encodes a convention (per-site config, views, routes folders) you can adopt while replacing the implementation.
• Sites are deployed together and released together. If the product requires independent release cadence per site, this model fights you.

Look elsewhere when:

• Site count grows past a few dozen, or sites need materially different feature sets. At that point divergence taxes the shared codebase and a per-tenant or per-app model wins.
• You need true multi-tenancy for a SaaS product — tenant provisioning, per-tenant migrations, queue and cache scoping, tenant-aware jobs and commands. A dedicated tenancy package or a first-party implementation covers far more of that surface.
• You are building on Laravel 9+ and expect long-term support. An unmaintained 2018 package is a security and upgrade liability; budget for a fork with a named owner and tests, or plan to write the ~few hundred lines yourself.
• Sites need independent scaling, independent compliance boundaries, or independent on-call. Shared infrastructure cuts both ways.
• You need per-site subdomain routing with shared sessions or cross-site SSO — expect to build that on top.

How to Pitch It (Stakeholders)

For executives: This is a proven pattern for running several websites from one codebase, which is how you avoid paying for N applications, N deploy pipelines, and N security reviews. The commercial case is fastest time-to-launch for new brands, regions, or client sites, plus meaningfully lower run cost per site. The honest caveat is that the specific package is unmaintained — last release in 2018 — so the recommendation is not "install this library." It is "adopt this architecture, using the package as a design reference, and fund a small internal owner for the site-resolution layer." That is a one-time engineering cost, not an ongoing dependency risk, and it still beats standing up a separate application per site.

For engineering: The package gives you hostname-based site detection, per-site config/views/routes, and per-site database connections, with a simple site registry. Treat it as a specification you can read in an afternoon. Concretely: fork or reimplement the resolution middleware against your current Laravel version, keep the folder-per-site convention for config, views, and routes, and decide explicitly whether per-site databases or a shared schema with tenant scoping is right for your isolation and reporting needs. Pin down the operational questions early — how migrations run across sites, how a new site is provisioned, how cache and queues are namespaced, and how local development maps hostnames. Get those right and the pattern scales well into the low tens of sites; plan for the point where sites diverge enough that shared releases become a bottleneck.