- Is fisharebest/webtrees a Laravel package?
- No. Despite appearing on Packagist and depending on a few Illuminate components, webtrees is a standalone, server-rendered PHP application. It ships its own bootstrap, container, router, session handling, authentication and migration runner, and it exposes no service provider, facade or publishable config. Treat it as a separate product, not as a Composer dependency for a Laravel app.
- Can I run composer require fisharebest/webtrees inside an existing Laravel application?
- That is not a supported integration path. webtrees expects to own the request lifecycle, and running it beside Laravel gives you two competing auth systems, two session stores, two migration timelines and two view layers. If you need its functionality, deploy it as a separate sidecar application on its own virtual host or subdomain.
- Which Laravel or Illuminate versions does webtrees depend on?
- webtrees consumes illuminate/database for query building and Blade for templating as independently versioned Composer dependencies. Those constraints are pinned by the project itself, not by your application's framework version, so they can and do diverge from what your Laravel app requires. Read the composer.json constraints and check them against your installed framework before assuming compatibility.
- Does webtrees support PHP 8 and modern Laravel versions?
- The runtime requirement is PHP 8.x with MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL or SQLite, which is infrastructure-compatible with most Laravel deployments. Framework version support is a different question entirely, because webtrees is not a Laravel application and does not track Laravel release cycles. Check the pinned illuminate/* constraints and the project's stated end-of-life policy for the PHP minors it supports.
- Is there a REST or JSON API I can call from Laravel?
- There is no first-party REST or JSON API. The core application is HTML-in, HTML-out, so machine integration realistically goes through GEDCOM 5.5.1 import/export, direct reads against an internal schema with no stability guarantee, or an in-process module registered on webtrees' own router. Only the GEDCOM file contract is defensible for long-term integration.
- What database backends does webtrees support?
- webtrees supports MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL and SQLite, so it fits typical Laravel infrastructure without change. Note that its schema is not a Laravel migration set you can fold into your app's migrations, and its models are GEDCOM-record-backed and keyed by xref IDs rather than auto-increment primary keys. Querying those tables directly is possible but carries no compatibility guarantee across upgrades.
- What does the GPL-3.0 license mean for a commercial Laravel product?
- GPL-3.0 is viral copyleft: linking or distributing a derivative inside a proprietary product can trigger source-disclosure obligations. A sidecar deployment with no linking is a materially different risk profile from extracting classes and shipping them in your codebase. Get legal sign-off before reusing any code, and rule out casual code extraction early.
- How does webtrees handle privacy for living people and GDPR-style requirements?
- The data model is deliberately about living individuals, and privacy rules apply per-tree, per-person and per-user with role-based visibility. A misconfiguration or a faulty module is a personal-data incident, not a cosmetic UI bug. If you run it, treat privacy settings, backups and access reviews as compliance work rather than configuration.
- Is webtrees actively maintained, and what is the latest release?
- The release metadata in package records conflicts with the description of a maintained 2.x product, showing a 2016 date that is almost certainly stale or mis-scraped. Verify the actual latest tagged release and the trailing-twelve-month commit cadence directly on GitHub Releases and Packagist before making any build decision. An eight-year-old release would be a hard blocker; a bad metric is a data-quality problem you must resolve first.
- What are the alternatives if I only need genealogy data and GEDCOM interop in Laravel?
- Separate the narrow need from the large bet: a genealogy data model plus GEDCOM interop is extractable, while a collaborative genealogy product is a much bigger commitment. Options include a GEDCOM parsing library with your own Eloquent schema, a hosted commercial genealogy API, or running webtrees purely as a reference implementation or sidecar appliance. Given GPL-3.0 and the missing API contract, most Laravel teams should keep webtrees out of the dependency graph.