Idcard Laravel Package

Product Decisions This Supports

• China-market onboarding and form design. The package validates 18-digit second-generation Resident ID numbers (checksum + structure) and derives birthdate, gender, age, and administrative region from a single input. That directly informs how much friction to put in a registration/checkout form versus how much to defer to a back-end verification step.
• Build vs. buy for identity utilities. The core logic is public and stable (ISO 7064 MOD 11‑2 check digit, birthdate at digits 7–14, gender parity at digit 17, GB/T 2260 region code in the first six digits). What you're really acquiring is a maintained region lookup table plus edge-case handling. This makes it a “borrow/fork” decision, not a strategic vendor decision.
• Age-gating and minors-protection roadmap. Deriving age from the ID is the cheapest path to age-restricted flows (gaming, live streaming, alcohol, financial products), which carry specific Chinese regulatory obligations. If minors' protection is on your roadmap, this package is a reasonable first increment.
• Segmentation and routing. Region and gender fields can feed localization, pricing, logistics routing, or analytics — but only if you accept inferred gender and region at face value, which is a product policy call, not a technical one.
• Scoping the KYC vendor decision. A checksum pass proves the number is well-formed, not that the person exists or owns it. Using this package clarifies the boundary: in-house validation handles data hygiene; a licensed provider handles name–ID matching, document OCR, and liveness. That boundary is a roadmap and budget input.

When to Consider This Package

Adopt (or vendor) it when:

• You are on PHP/Laravel, targeting mainland China users, and need cheap pre-submission validation to cut malformed IDs before they hit a paid verification API.
• Your requirements stop at format validation plus derived birthdate/gender/region — for example, form UX, age gating, or analytics enrichment.
• You are willing to fork it. With 26 stars, zero dependents, and a last release in August 2020, treat it as reference source rather than a live dependency: copy it in, pin it, add tests, and own the region table.
• You can tolerate region-data drift, or you plan to replace the region table with your own cached dataset refreshed from an authoritative source (administrative divisions change; a 2020 snapshot will have gaps).

Look elsewhere when:

• You need actual identity verification. This is not a KYC product, and presenting it as one internally would be a significant misjudgment.
• You need multi-country ID/national-number support — use a broader validation library rather than accumulating single-country packages.
• You need current region data at county-level granularity, or you operate in regulated contexts where an unmaintained dataset is an audit finding.
• You're not on PHP, or you'd rather implement the ~200 lines of checksum logic in-house and own the data outright. For most teams the algorithm is the easy part; the region table is the only real asset here.
• Compliance review flags the dependency posture (single maintainer, no recent activity, no security signal) as unacceptable for a path that touches sensitive personal information.

How to Pitch It (Stakeholders)

To executives: This is a small, MIT-licensed, single-purpose utility that validates Chinese Resident ID numbers and extracts birthdate, gender, age, and region. It improves data quality at the top of our China onboarding funnel and can underpin age-gating and demographic features at essentially zero licensing cost. Two caveats belong in the same breath: it is not identity verification — a valid checksum only means the number is correctly formed — and it has been unmaintained since 2020, so we should vendor it and own the region data rather than take a live dependency. The real cost is not integration; it is the compliance work around storing ID numbers under PIPL (encryption, masking, retention, access controls) and the decision to pair it with a licensed verification provider.

To engineering: Single class, MIT, trivially forkable. The checksum algorithm is stable and standardized; the region lookup table is the maintenance burden and is stale. Recommended approach: vendor the source into our codebase, pin and test it, encrypt and mask ID numbers at rest and in logs, and treat region lookup as a cached dataset we control rather than something the package owns. Do not surface this to product as an identity check — it is input validation only.