Laravel Api Problem Laravel Package

Product Decisions This Supports

• Whether to standardize the API error contract. RFC 9457 (application/problem+json, with type/title/status/detail/instance) is the decision point for a roadmap item most teams defer indefinitely: a machine-readable, documented error shape. This package is a low-cost way to close that item on Laravel services.
• Build vs. buy vs. defer. The scope is narrow and the license is MIT, so the realistic comparison is "adopt, vendor/fork, or write ~200 lines in-house," not "adopt vs. build a platform." Low community traction (11 stars) cuts both ways: added diligence burden, but also low fork risk and a small, auditable surface area.
• Client-facing contract decisions. A stable error envelope unblocks generated SDKs, typed error handling in web/mobile clients, partner onboarding docs, and OpenAPI error schema generation. It also determines whether validation errors, auth failures, and rate limits can be handled uniformly by consumers.
• Cross-service consistency. Useful for deciding whether error normalization lives in each service, in a BFF/gateway, or both. type URIs also give you a namespace for a shared error taxonomy across teams.
• Support and observability investment. instance and detail give support and on-call a correlatable reference per failure, which is often the cheapest lever on "customer sent a screenshot, we can't reproduce" tickets.
• Release sequencing. Changing an error payload is a breaking change for any consumer parsing it. This package forces an explicit decision on whether it ships in the current API version or the next major, and whether a compatibility shim is needed during migration.

When to Consider This Package

Consider adoption when:

• You expose a public or partner-facing API on Laravel, especially with more than one consuming team or external integrators.
• You publish (or plan to publish) OpenAPI/SDK artifacts where a predictable error schema reduces client-side guesswork.
• You have multiple Laravel services and want error responses to look identical without each team reinventing an envelope.
• Your current error handling is ad hoc — inconsistent keys, HTML error pages leaking through, framework exception dumps in JSON.
• You're comfortable pinning a version and doing light diligence on a small, single-maintainer dependency.

Look elsewhere or defer when:

• The API is internal with a single consumer — the coordination cost of a breaking change likely exceeds the benefit.
• You already have a documented, tested error contract; migration cost dominates.
• Your architecture is polyglot. This is Laravel-specific, so a gateway-level or language-agnostic approach normalizes errors for all services rather than only the PHP ones.
• You need deep customization — nested validation error maps, localized messages, domain-specific error codes — and would be fighting the package's defaults.
• Procurement or compliance requires vendor support/SLA, or your dependency policy disallows low-adoption libraries. Mitigation: vendor the source or reimplement the small spec surface.
• Verify before committing: how it hooks into Laravel's exception handler, whether it handles validation exceptions and AuthenticationException sensibly, its test coverage, and compatibility with your Laravel/PHP versions.

How to Pitch It (Stakeholders)

To executives: Our API returns errors in whatever shape each endpoint happens to produce, which slows partner onboarding, generates integration support tickets, and blocks us from shipping generated client SDKs. RFC 9457 is the industry-standard error format, and this package implements it on Laravel with minimal engineering effort. The cost is small and contained, the change is reversible, and the payoff is a documented, predictable contract that external teams can build against without asking us questions. The main caveat is that it's an early-stage open-source library with limited adoption, so we'd pin the version and keep the integration thin enough to replace.

To engineering: This is a narrow adapter that renders exceptions as application/problem+json per RFC 9457, wired into Laravel's existing exception handling rather than replacing it. Work involved is small: adjust the exception handler, verify validation/auth/404/429 paths, add contract tests asserting the response shape, and decide versioning for the rollout. Keep an internal abstraction at the boundary so we can swap or vendor the package without touching call sites. Risk is dependency maturity, not technical complexity — we should read the source, pin it, and confirm Laravel/PHP version support before merging.