Samsara Laravel Package

Product Decisions This Supports

• Build vs. buy on telematics integration: This SDK is a thin Laravel wrapper around Samsara's fleet/telematics API (vehicles, drivers, HOS, safety events, sensors). If your roadmap includes fleet visibility, driver safety scoring, or ELD/HOS compliance, adopting this package lets you buy the integration plumbing and build only the product surface on top — saving weeks of auth, pagination, and resource-mapping work.
• Feature prioritization / scoping: Because the package tracks upstream Samsara API resources, you can scope features (e.g., "live vehicle location on dispatch board," "safety event digest in Slack," "driver HOS alerts") against what the SDK already exposes rather than negotiating a bespoke integration.
• Platform currency decisions: v1.1.0 signals the maintainer is actively tracking Laravel's release train (now Laravel 12.x and 13.x, PHP 8.2+). This informs your own upgrade planning — you cannot stay on Laravel 10/11 if you want this package.
• Delivery roadmap / risk: The 1.x semver with explicit breaking changes (dropped Laravel 10/11, dropped PHP 8.1) tells you the maintainer will drop old framework versions as Laravel does. Plan an annual framework-upgrade line item if you depend on this.
• Use cases: Fleet dashboards, dispatch/dispatch ETA tooling, driver-safety scoring, compliance reporting, IoT/sensor alerting on top of Samsara hardware.

When to Consider This Package

Adopt when all of the following hold:

• You are on Laravel 12 or 13 and PHP 8.2+ (v1.1.0 hard requirement; 10/11 and PHP 8.1 are no longer supported).
• Your product needs read/write access to Samsara's fleet, driver, vehicle, or safety APIs, and you want idiomatic Laravel integration (config, facades/service container) instead of hand-rolling an HTTP client.
• You are comfortable depending on a single-maintainer package for a business-critical integration — verify maintenance cadence and issue responsiveness.
• Your release pipeline can absorb minor-version breaks in practice: v1.1.0 is a minor bump but drops two major Laravel versions, so treat the package's lockfile constraints as a real upgrade cliff.

Look elsewhere (or build a thin internal client) when:

• You are pinned to Laravel 10/11 or PHP 8.1 — this release is a hard cutoff; stay on v1.0.4 or fork.
• You need Samsara API surface this SDK does not cover (check coverage against your feature list before committing).
• You require vendor SLA/support contracts, multi-maintainer governance, or an audited supply chain — the entity factory change (Entity::make() no longer relying on Illuminate\Support\Fluent::make()) is a good sign of care, but it is still a single-maintainer project.
• Your integration is one-off (e.g., a nightly CSV pull); a 30-line HTTP job may be cheaper than a dependency.

How to Pitch It (Stakeholders)

To executives: This is a community Laravel SDK that shortcuts our connection to Samsara's fleet telematics platform. Adopting it converts a multi-week integration project into days of work and lets engineering focus on fleet-facing features (dispatch, safety, compliance) rather than API plumbing. The new v1.1.0 release keeps us current with Laravel 13 and PHP 8.4, so it will not become a framework-upgrade liability in the near term. Risk to flag: it's a single-maintainer open-source package, so we should treat the dependency as "adopt, but abstract behind our own service layer" so we can swap it if maintenance stalls.

To engineering: v1.1.0 adds Laravel 13 support and a CI matrix (PHP 8.2/8.3/8.4 × Laravel 12/13, including --prefer-lowest), which materially improves lower-bound confidence. Breaking changes: Laravel 10 and 11 support removed; PHP 8.1 support removed (min PHP 8.2). It is published as a minor version, so pin the constraint deliberately and confirm our Laravel/PHP versions before upgrading — if we're still on 10 or 11, this is a hold. The internal Entity::make() factory replacing Fluent::make() removes a hidden Laravel 12.9+ dependency, so the package is now cleaner on older 12.x patch levels. Recommendation: adopt behind a repository/service interface, pin to a reviewed version, and track upstream releases as part of our framework-upgrade ritual.