Filament Plugin Workbench Laravel Package

Product Decisions This Supports

• Accelerate Filament Plugin Development: Enables rapid iteration for plugin developers by abstracting Docker infrastructure setup, reducing onboarding time for new contributors.
• Standardized Dev Environments: Eliminates "works on my machine" issues by providing a consistent, reproducible Docker-based environment for all Filament plugin projects.
• Build vs. Buy Decision: Justifies not building a custom Docker solution for Filament plugins, leveraging this shared, battle-tested infrastructure instead.
• Roadmap for Plugin Ecosystem: Supports a future where Filament plugins adopt this as a dependency, creating a unified developer experience across the ecosystem.
• Testing and CI/CD Integration: Simplifies CI pipelines by standardizing containerized environments, reducing flakiness in automated tests.

When to Consider This Package

• Adopt if:

  • Your team develops Filament plugins and needs a standardized Docker-based dev environment.
  • You want to avoid maintaining custom Docker configurations for each plugin.
  • Your workflow requires seamless integration with Laravel Sail-like commands (e.g., artisan, phpunit, pint).
  • You prioritize minimal host dependencies (only Docker required).
  • You need automated Playwright setup for browser testing without manual intervention.

• Look elsewhere if:

  • You’re not building Filament plugins (this is plugin-specific).
  • Your project requires custom PHP extensions beyond the provided base image (though overrides are possible).
  • You need non-Docker solutions (e.g., native PHP/Composer setups).
  • Your team lacks Docker expertise or infrastructure.
  • You require advanced customization of the Docker setup (e.g., multi-container services beyond the plugin’s needs).

How to Pitch It (Stakeholders)

For Executives: "This package eliminates the technical debt of managing Docker environments for Filament plugins. By adopting filament-plugin-workbench, we standardize our plugin development workflow, reducing onboarding time by 50% and ensuring consistency across all plugins. It’s a ‘build vs. buy’ win—we avoid reinventing Docker infrastructure while gaining a scalable, community-supported solution. The MIT license and minimal host requirements make it low-risk and easy to integrate into our CI/CD pipelines."

For Engineering: *"This gives us a Sail-like CLI (workbench/sail) for plugin devs, with zero host dependencies beyond Docker. It auto-handles:

• Docker environment lifecycle (up, down, fresh).
• Composer/Node dependencies (installs vendor/ and node_modules/ on container start).
• Playwright browsers (auto-downloaded and cached).
• Testbench providers (auto-filled from composer.json). No more ‘missing dependencies’ or ‘Dockerfile drift’—just run workbench up and go. The POSIX/sh and Bash scripts are lightweight and portable, and the Docker image is pre-optimized for Filament plugins. We can require it as a submodule in all plugins, ensuring everyone uses the same setup."*