Supaapps Laravel Api Kit Laravel Package

Product Decisions This Supports

• Build vs. buy for deployment scaffolding. This package turns "write and maintain multi-stage Dockerfiles per Laravel service" from custom platform work into an adoption-and-configure decision. That is a meaningful lever for teams without dedicated DevOps headcount.
• Container-first roadmap. If "deploy anywhere / standardize on containers" is on the roadmap, this release is the unblocking artifact: generated builds now separate build-time and runtime PHP images, so production images don't ship compilers and build tooling.
• Security and compliance posture. Digest-pinned base images give you reproducibility and a defensible answer to "what exactly is running in prod?" — useful for supply-chain review, image-provenance controls, and audit questionnaires. The smaller runtime image also reduces attack surface, which is a decision you can defend in a security review rather than hand-wave.
• Release quality and upgrade policy. CI verification of generated images means regenerating scaffolding after a PHP or generator bump is a testable change, not a leap of faith. This supports a "regenerate, let CI prove it, then ship" workflow instead of hand-patching Dockerfiles.
• Environment consistency / onboarding. Bundled startup and Docker-ignore templates remove a class of first-week setup decisions and "works on my machine" drift across services.
• Version targeting. PHP branch validation means unsupported PHP lines fail fast at generation time rather than producing a broken image at deploy time — a cheaper failure mode and a cleaner developer experience.

When to Consider This Package

Adopt when:

• You are standardizing one or more Laravel apps on containers and want a consistent, reviewable baseline rather than N bespoke Dockerfiles.
• You lack (or don't want to spend) platform-engineering cycles on container scaffolding.
• Compliance or security review requires pinned, reproducible base images and minimal runtime images.
• Your team tolerates pre-1.0 churn and can pin the version.

Due diligence before committing:

• Template extensibility — bundled templates may not cover custom PHP extensions, sidecars, private registries, or exotic build args. Check how much of the output you'd have to override.
• Digest refresh ownership — pinning is only a win if something bumps digests on a cadence; otherwise you accumulate stale, unpatched bases. Decide whether that's a scheduled job or a manual ritual.
• Upgrade surface — this is v0.6.x; treat generated files as artifacts you may need to re-review on each minor bump.

Look elsewhere when:

• You aren't containerizing (Forge, Vapor, bare metal) — the core value doesn't apply.
• You need a 1.0-stable API with deprecation guarantees and long-term support commitments.
• You already have a platform team with golden images, Helm charts, and a paved-road pipeline; this would duplicate or conflict with that.
• You need orchestration, secrets management, observability, or CI/CD beyond Dockerfile generation — this is scaffolding, not a deployment platform.
• Your runtime requirements are non-standard enough that you'd rewrite the generated output anyway.

How to Pitch It (Stakeholders)

To executives: This package generates production-grade container scaffolding for Laravel apps — reproducible builds via digest-pinned images, build tooling stripped out of runtime images, and generated output verified in CI. The business value is speed-to-deploy and a stronger default security posture without hiring platform engineers. It's low-commitment: it emits files you own, not a runtime dependency, so the decision is cheap to reverse.

To engineering: Multi-stage Dockerfiles with separate, digest-pinned PHP build and runtime images; entrypoint and .dockerignore templates bundled rather than tribal knowledge; invalid PHP branch selections caught at generation time; generated images validated in CI so upgrades are testable. Caveats to state plainly: it's pre-1.0 (pin the version, expect template churn), and digest pinning only stays valuable if you own a refresh cadence.