- What is jackiedo/cart used for in a Laravel application?
- It creates and manages carts such as shopping carts, recently viewed lists, and compared items inside a Laravel app. It provides multiple cart instances, item attributes, conditions, taxes, fees, weight handling, and session persistence. It is a lightweight in-request cart, not a full commerce platform with catalog, inventory, checkout, or payment features.
- How do I install jackiedo/cart in a Laravel project?
- Install it with Composer and publish the package configuration using php artisan vendor:publish. If you use the database driver, you must also publish and run its migration in every environment, including CI and preview environments. The session driver works without that database migration but still depends on your Laravel session configuration.
- Can jackiedo/cart handle multiple carts per user or session?
- Yes. The package supports multiple cart instances, so you can keep separate carts for shopping, comparison, wishlist, or recently viewed items. Cart identity is resolved per session or user, and you choose which instance to read or modify. You remain responsible for any guest-to-authenticated or multi-device merge design.
- How does jackiedo/cart calculate taxes, discounts, fees, and conditions?
- The package stores items and calculates subtotals and totals, while conditions for tax, discount, shipping, and similar modifiers are applied by your application code at read time. That means you own tax and discount correctness, including rounding and per-item versus per-cart allocation. Treat the package as a cart data structure, not as the authority for pricing rules.
- Which storage drivers does jackiedo/cart support?
- The documented storage paths are session and database drivers. The database driver requires publishing and running a migration, and your deployment process must run it in every environment. With the session driver, verify that your chosen Laravel session backend, such as Redis, database, or cookie, and your load-balancing topology behave as expected.
- Is jackiedo/cart compatible with Laravel 11 and Laravel 12, and how should I test upgrades?
- Compatibility is not verified by the provided material, and the last release was February 2023. Test Composer installs with --prefer-lowest and --prefer-stable on your target Laravel and PHP versions, then run your cart behavior tests in CI. A stale major-version constraint can block framework upgrades, so make this a release gate.
- Does jackiedo/cart manage products, inventory, or checkout?
- No. It does not provide a catalog, inventory reservation, checkout orchestration, or a payment state machine. Cart items store a buyable identifier and a price snapshot, but the package does not resolve your Product model. You must handle hydration, price refresh, unpublished or deleted products, and everything after the cart.
- How should I handle guest-to-authenticated cart merging with jackiedo/cart?
- Plan the merge explicitly because the package resolves cart identity per session or user but does not remove the need for merge rules. Decide how quantities combine, when prices refresh, and what happens to conflicting item attributes or conditions. Add tests for two tabs, multiple devices, and concurrent writes if you use the database driver.
- What are the production risks of using jackiedo/cart?
- The main risks are lifecycle and maintenance rather than code quality: it is a small, single-maintainer package with an old last release and little downstream battle-testing. Cart totals have a high blast radius because a wrong total is a revenue and trust incident even before money moves. Mitigate by wrapping it behind a narrow internal CartService interface and testing upgrade paths, so replacement is a small project rather than a rewrite.
- What alternatives exist to jackiedo/cart for Laravel carts?
- There is no dominant first-party Laravel cart abstraction, so teams often choose between a small package like this, an internal cart service, or a full commerce platform with catalog and checkout. If the storefront is headless or the cart must be shared across services, an API-first cart service is a better fit than an in-request package. Evaluate alternatives against your need for inventory, checkout, payment state, and cross-service durability.