Dummy Laravel Package

Product Decisions This Supports

• Placeholder content for prototyping and internal demos — text@words:30-60 / sentences / paragraphs / title modifiers let designers and PMs specify realistic content volume for wireframes, empty states, and marketing-page mockups without waiting on copy or risking real customer strings in screenshots.
• Build vs. buy for "fake data" utilities — a dummy() helper with image and lorem generation is ~a day of engineering to hand-roll, but the maintenance tail (GD cropping, caching, PHP/Laravel version churn) is the real cost. Adopting a small, tested dev dependency is the cheaper default; building in-house is only justified if you need domain-specific fake entities (invoices, patient records), which this does not cover.
• Scope boundary against Faker and Laravel factories — this package is presentation-layer filler (visible text and images in views, seeders, blade templates). It is not a substitute for fakerphp/faker in test fixtures or factories. Roadmap decision: keep it a dev-only presentation tool, and do not let it drift into test-data generation, where determinism and schema awareness matter.
• Demo/onboarding tooling for your own product — the hosted static demo and folder-only install path are a template for how to ship a "try it without cloning" experience for other internal packages; worth copying for anything with a visual output.
• Dev-environment data hygiene — a sanctioned way to produce obviously-fake content reduces the chance of engineers pasting production copy or customer PII into mockups and shared screenshots.
• Upgrade sequencing — the v2.0.0 floor of PHP 8.3 / Laravel 12/13 is a forcing function that surfaces which teams are still on PHP 8.2 or Laravel 10/11 in their dev containers, independent of production runtime.

When to Consider This Package

Consider adoption when:

• You are on PHP 8.3+ and Laravel 12 or 13 (or using it standalone via Composer, or even folder-only with no Composer at all). Below that floor, v2.0.0 will not install — stay on the 1.x line or skip.
• Your team repeatedly hand-writes "lorem ipsum dolor sit amet" blocks or pulls random images from third-party placeholder services that are slow, rate-limited, or occasionally unreachable in CI/offline environments.
• You need volume-accurate placeholders (a specific word or paragraph count) so layout and overflow bugs actually reproduce — the @words, @sentences, @paragraphs ranges are the real value-add over pasting fixed lorem text.
• You need generated placeholder images locally (GD) without external HTTP calls — useful for air-gapped CI, offline demos, and screenshot tests.
• You want an inexpensive, --dev-only dependency with a documented verification matrix (58 tests × 6 PHP/Laravel combinations) rather than an unmaintained snippet.

Look elsewhere or build in-house when:

• You need structured fake data — users, orders, addresses, monetary amounts, dates with business rules. Use Faker plus model factories. This package generates prose and pictures only.
• Your stack is pinned below PHP 8.3 / Laravel 12 and cannot move this quarter.
• You need deterministic, seedable, snapshot-stable output. The release notes describe per-request caching and atomic image writes, not reproducibility guarantees. If golden-file or visual-regression tests depend on byte-identical placeholders, verify this explicitly before committing — otherwise a hand-rolled deterministic generator is the safer choice.
• You require accessibility-correct, locale-aware, or brand-compliant copy in anything customer-facing. This is dev-time filler; it should never render in a production build.
• Your dependency policy forbids --dev packages that publish assets and config into the app skeleton, or you have a strict allowlist that a single-maintainer package will not clear without a security review.
• GD is unavailable or undesirable in your container images — the image features require the GD extension.

Adoption checklist for the PM: confirm the dev-only scope (composer require --dev), confirm GD is present in dev/CI images, verify the published config/assets path is excluded from production builds, and pin the major version so a future v3 cannot silently raise the PHP floor mid-sprint.

How to Pitch It (Stakeholders)

For executives (one paragraph): This is a small, free, development-only utility that generates placeholder text and images for prototypes, demos, and internal mockups. It replaces ad-hoc lorem-ipsum pasting and third-party placeholder image services with something that runs locally and offline, which removes a recurring source of friction in design reviews and demo prep and eliminates a channel through which real customer content can leak into screenshots. Cost is effectively zero: a dev dependency, no production footprint, no licensing fee, no runtime risk to shipped code. Version 2.0.0 is a hardening release — expanded automated verification across six PHP/Laravel combinations, removal of global session and memory-limit side effects, and proper caching — which materially lowers the "abandoned side-project" risk that normally argues against small dependencies.

For engineering leads: v2.0.0 is a major release with raised floors (PHP 8.3+, Laravel 12/13, GD required) and the removal of native session startup and memory-limit changes — the latter is a good change that removes global side effects, but it means anyone relying on the old behavior must adjust. It is dev-only, so blast radius is limited to local and CI environments; the practical action is a single PR updating the lockfile plus a check that dev containers are on PHP 8.3. Existing dummy(), dumb_luck(), and dumb_question() calls keep working, so migration is close to a version bump. The new counted-text syntax and title casing are additive. Verification is credible (58 tests across six environment combinations, plus fresh-install HTTP checks for Laravel 12, Laravel 13, standalone Composer, and folder-only). The open questions worth a 30-minute spike: output determinism for snapshot testing, GD availability in CI images, and keeping published assets out of the production build.

Recommendation: Adopt as a --dev dependency if you are already on PHP 8.3+/Laravel 12+; upgrade from 1.x with a low-risk version bump. Defer if you are pinned to older runtimes — nothing here is load-bearing enough to justify a platform upgrade. Keep it strictly out of production dependencies and out of customer-facing copy paths.