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Crater Laravel Package
bytefury/crater
Crater is a free, open-source invoicing and billing app for freelancers and small businesses, built on Laravel and Vue. Create invoices, estimates, expenses, payments, and reports, with multi-currency support, recurring invoices, and a REST API.
Open Source Invoicing Solution for Individuals & Businesses
Frequently asked questions about Crater
- Can I install bytefury/crater as a Composer package inside my Laravel app?
- No. Crater is a full self-contained invoicing application, a Laravel REST API backend plus a Vue single-page-app frontend, not a reusable library or SDK, so pulling it in as a dependency is impractical. Your real options are deploying it as a standalone service, integrating over its REST API, or forking the codebase. Reusing its internal modules such as the invoice domain or PDF pipeline is a fork-and-refactor effort, not a Composer install.
- Is Crater compatible with Laravel 10 or Laravel 11?
- Crater ships with pinned, dated Laravel and PHP version constraints from its 2022-era release, so it does not officially support Laravel 10 or 11 out of the box. Moving it onto a currently supported framework is a modernization project that includes dependency upgrades and a Vue 2 to Vue 3 or headless-API migration. Treat that upgrade as planned engineering work rather than a routine composer update.
- Does Crater have a REST API I can integrate with?
- Yes. Crater exposes a REST API with Sanctum-based authentication covering customers, items, invoices, estimates, payments, recurring schedules, and PDF and export endpoints. The standard integration pattern is to deploy Crater as a standalone service and call that API from your CRM, ERP, or payment systems. There is no plugin or extension ecosystem, so anything the API does not cover becomes a code change in your fork.
- Is Crater's AGPL-3.0 license safe to use for a hosted SaaS product?
- Possibly not. AGPL-3.0 is a product-level constraint: if you modify Crater and let users interact with it over a network, you trigger source-disclosure obligations for your modified version. That can rule out a proprietary hosted SaaS path entirely, so have legal review it before you commit to an architecture. Internal self-hosting or per-client deployments are usually simpler, but still confirm with counsel.
- Is Crater still actively maintained?
- Not really. The last upstream release was 2022-03-06, which means roughly three years without a patch stream, and the Vue 2 frontend has reached end of life. Popularity of around 8.3k GitHub stars reflects historical interest rather than active stewardship. If you adopt Crater you inherit all security patching, dependency upgrades, and CVE response.
- Can I white-label Crater and resell it as my own invoicing product?
- Technically yes, and white-labeling is one of the two viable consumption models, but it is a fork-and-own commitment rather than a configuration toggle. You take on branding, authentication, the deployment pipeline, database, queue workers, cron, and long-term maintenance. Expect pinned Laravel, PHP, and Node versions and make sure a named team is funded to own the fork.
- What are the server requirements to self-host Crater?
- Crater expects a typical Laravel stack: PHP, MySQL or PostgreSQL, Redis, queue workers, and a scheduled-job runner such as cron for recurring invoices and reminders. Docker-based deployment is the lowest-friction starting point for a sandbox evaluation. You also need Node tooling if you plan to rebuild the Vue 2 frontend assets.
- Does Crater support recurring invoices, multi-currency, and PDF generation?
- Yes. Crater covers customers, invoices, estimates, items, taxes, expenses, payments, reports, multi-currency support, recurring invoices, and PDF generation. It is designed as a multi-company application, so the underlying data model is tenant-aware. Validate each feature against your actual requirements in a sandbox first, because any gap can only be closed by forking.
- How do I migrate existing customers and invoices into Crater?
- Import customers, items, tax rules, and open invoices through the REST API where endpoints cover them, and use direct SQL only for schema gaps. Reconcile opening balances and invoice numbering sequences before cutover so historical documents stay consistent. Always run a full dry-run migration against a sandbox deployment first.
- What are the best alternatives to Crater for Laravel invoicing?
- Compare against Invoice Ninja, Stripe Invoicing, and commercial billing platforms, and weigh those against building the invoice domain yourself. Crater's differentiator is being a self-hosted Laravel and Vue application you can fork, which only matters if you actually want to own the product code. If you need an embeddable billing engine inside another stack, a hosted billing API is usually the better fit.
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