Product Decisions This Supports
- Feature scoping and time-to-market for form-heavy work. This package is a catalog of ~40 prebuilt Laravel validation rules (IBAN, credit card, IMEI, JWT, base64, slug, hashtag, latitude/longitude, strong password, HTML/no-HTML, casing conventions). A PM can use it to compress "we need validation on this form" from an engineering estimate into a near-zero line item —
composer require plus new ValidIban() in a FormRequest. That meaningfully changes sprint sizing for onboarding, KYC, payments, and profile-editing epics.
- Build vs. buy, decided cheaply. MIT-licensed, Composer-installable, no service dependency, no pricing tier, no seat count. The "buy" side of this decision costs a few hours of integration and review rather than a procurement cycle. Building equivalents in-house is possible but produces a scattered pile of regexes that no one owns; this package centralizes them behind a documented, versioned surface.
- Consistency as a product quality lever. If multiple squads own different forms, error messaging and validation strictness drift. Adopting one rules library makes "invalid card number" behave and read the same everywhere — a small but real reduction in support tickets and QA churn.
- Localization roadmap input. The package ships localized validation messages and accepts community language PRs. If internationalization is on the roadmap, this is a cheap way to test whether localized error copy moves completion rates before investing in a broader i18n program.
- Roadmap signal — regional fit. A meaningful share of rules are Iran/MENA-specific (
ValidIranPostalCode, ValidNationalCard, ValidCartNumberIran, ValidJalaliDate, ValidLandlineNumber). If that's a target market, this is a genuine accelerator. If it isn't, treat those rules as noise and evaluate only the ~20 geography-neutral ones.
- A candidate for "small bets" / tech-debt budget. It reduces bespoke-regex sprawl, which is the kind of quiet maintenance cost that never gets its own ticket. Framing adoption as debt reduction, not a feature, is the honest positioning.
When to Consider This Package
Adopt when most of these hold:
- The product is Laravel 9–13 / PHP 8+, and validation logic already lives in FormRequests or
Validator::extend calls.
- You need several of the generic rules (IBAN, credit card, slug, strong password, IP addresses, lat/long, JWT shape, no-HTML) and would otherwise hand-roll them.
- You serve Iran/MENA users, or you specifically want localized validation messages without owning translation files.
- The team is small and the cost of an external maintainer risk is lower than the cost of duplicated regex maintenance.
- Validation is a UX concern on your critical path (signup, checkout, KYC), not a security control.
Look elsewhere — or build the handful of rules you actually need — when:
- Your stack isn't Laravel, or you're on an older major version outside the support matrix.
- You need internationally robust phone/address/postal validation. Use
giggsey/libphonenumber-for-php (e.g. propaganistas/laravel-phone) rather than a regex-based phone rule; coverage and upkeep are far stronger.
- Compliance or payments review is involved (PCI, KYC). No third-party rule library should be the authoritative check for card or identity data — treat any such rule as a UX pre-filter and keep the real verification server-side with your processor.
- Validation is a differentiator (fraud scoring, risk-based step-up, complex cross-field business rules). That logic belongs in your domain, and a general-purpose rules package will fight you.
- You require vendor SLAs, security disclosure process, or multi-maintainer bus-factor guarantees. This is a single-maintainer project with a modest star count and zero listed dependents — a real signal of limited production proof. That's not disqualifying for a utility library, but it does mean you own the risk.
- The package's rule semantics are stricter or looser than your policy (e.g. "strong password" character requirements). Don't adopt a rule and then argue with it in code review; write your own policy rule.
How to Pitch It (Stakeholders)
For executives (30 seconds): This is a free, MIT-licensed Laravel add-on that gives us ~40 ready-made input-validation rules — bank account numbers, card numbers, phone/IMEI, IP addresses, slugs, password strength — with translated error messages. It removes a recurring, low-visibility engineering task from every form we build, at zero licensing cost and minimal lock-in: it's a thin layer we can replace with in-house code in days if needed. The trade-off is maintainer risk — it's a single-author open-source project without a large installed base — so we'd adopt it behind our own validation layer and pin the version rather than depending on it directly.
For engineering (why yes, and how): Version 2.0 supports Laravel 9–13 and PHP 8+, ships docs, changelog, releases, tests, and static analysis. Usage is a composer require plus new ValidIban() in a FormRequest, with an optional service-container mode if you prefer string rules like required|ValidPhone. Please: (1) pin the version and review upgrades, (2) wrap the rules in our own rule classes or aliases so call sites don't import the vendor namespace, (3) skip the rules we can't defend — notably phone numbers, where we should use libphonenumber, and card/identity checks, where the processor remains authoritative, and (4) contribute fixes upstream where we patch region-specific logic. The library is small enough to audit in an afternoon; do that before it lands in a payment or signup path.
Decision requested: approve adoption as a trial dependency — one squad, one form-heavy epic, two sprints — with success measured by validation-related bug tickets and duplicated regex count trending down. Revisit at the end of the trial with an explicit build-vs-buy call, and confirm we're not adopting it on any path where validation is being relied on as a security control.