The best way to spread Christmas Cheer, is singing loud for all to hear.
Buddy The Elf
Since my singing is terrible, I’m going to spread developer cheer by posting my eight favorite Laravel packages of 2014. These are in alphabetical order.
This is included in the Laravel core but it’s worth mentioning because of how much I use it. Dealing with dates has never been easier.
All the behind the scenes information you need to ensure your app is running smoothly and efficiently.
Envoy allows you to run SSH commands on a remote system. I use it for everything from local tasks to deployments.
This makes creating PDF’s nice and simple by wrapping the DomPDF library in a Laravel familiar syntax.
Speed up your workflow with these time-saving generators. It includes commands for almost everything.
If you use PhpStorm then this package is a must have. I use it on all my projects and it makes your IDE play nicely.
Every project seems to have to deal with image uploads in one form or another. Intervention makes image uploading and processing a breeze.
I use this whenever I need to parse markdown. It is fast, consistent, and easy to use.
All the projects I worked on this year, Snappy and one or two side projects, were really focused and I didn’t have a chance to implement a lot of the other packages. Hopefully, that changes over the next year because the community has created so many. I’d love to have the time to explore all of them.
Thanks to everyone who created in 2014!
Did I miss your favorite? Share in the comments.
Eric L. Barnes 
Very nice list – you should probably also add laracasts/commander, which is my absolute favorite one.
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Thanks for sharing. I actually haven’t taken a look at that one yet. I’ll have to add it my list to check out next year.
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Nice list!
I can recommend these as well (they are all L5 compatible)
https://github.com/cviebrock/eloquent-sluggable – to generate slugs
https://github.com/davejamesmiller/laravel-breadcrumbs – provides an easy way to generate breadcrumbs
https://github.com/itsgoingd/clockwork – a very nice debugging helper
I recently made a few packages specifically for Laravel 5:
https://github.com/freekmurze/laravel-tail – brings back the tail command
https://github.com/freekmurze/laravel-backup – can backup your entire L5 app to any of the configured filesystems
https://github.com/freekmurze/laravel-glide – provides very easy integration with Glide in L5
https://github.com/freekmurze/searchindex – to store and retrieve object from Elasticsearch
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Great List!
https://github.com/Zizaco/entrust is a great package for granting users different roles and permissions.
I have used it for multiple projects.
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With [proengsoft/laravel-jsvalidation](https://github.com/proengsoft/laravel-jsvalidation) you can validate your forms using Javascript automatically
– [https://github.com/proengsoft/laravel-jsvalidation](https://github.com/proengsoft/laravel-jsvalidation)
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You may add this in your list:
https://packagist.org/packages/thedevsaddam/laravel-schema
The package is helpful to see the schema information from Application server rather than login into the Database server
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