Docker Compose is a tool for defining and running multi-container Docker applications. With Compose, you use a YAML file to configure your application’s services. Then, with a single command, you create and start all the services from your configuration.
The features of Docker Compose that make it effective are:
Laravel ships with a solid authentication system out of the box, and most projects are well served by it. But there are situations where you need to authenticate users against something completely different: a legacy database, an external API, an LDAP server, or some other custom data source. Laravel's authentication system is built around a set of contracts and driver hooks that make this surprisingly straightforward to implement.
Symfony is a PHP web application framework and a set of reusable PHP components/libraries. Symfony aims to speed up the creation and maintenance of web applications and to replace repetitive coding tasks. It's also aimed at building robust applications in an enterprise context, and aims to give developers full control over the configuration: from the directory structure to the foreign libraries, almost everything can be customized.
CQRS stands for Command Query Responsibility Segregation. It's a pattern that separates how an application reads data from how it writes data. This approach can help structure code more clearly, especially in systems that deal with complex business logic or need to scale certain operations differently.
Criteria is a framework-agnostic PHP package that simplifies the use of the criteria pattern for filtering, sorting, and paginating data. It helps separate query logic from repositories, making the codebase easier to maintain and extend over time. By using Criteria, developers can handle complex querying needs without spreading filter logic across different parts of the application.
Symfony is a PHP web application framework and a set of reusable PHP components/libraries. Symfony aims to speed up the creation and maintenance of web applications and to replace repetitive coding tasks. It's also aimed at building robust applications in an enterprise context, and aims to give developers full control over the configuration: from the directory structure to the foreign libraries, almost everything can be customized.
A helper class, a small client wrapper or a set of validation rules often starts in one project and ends up copied into the next one. From that point the copies drift apart, a bug fixed in one of them stays open in the rest, and there is no version number to refer to when something changes.
Turning that code into a Composer package removes the copies. The requirements are modest, since a package is a directory containing a valid composer.json file, a Git repository hosting it, and a listing on Packagist that tells Composer where to find it.
Composer is a tool for dependency management in PHP. It allows you to declare the libraries your project depends on and it will manage (install/update) them for you.
Composer requires PHP 5.3.2+ to run. A few sensitive PHP settings and compile flags are also required, but when using the installer you will be warned about any incompatibilities.
Laravel is a PHP framework built around the Model View Controller pattern, designed to make web development more organized and less repetitive. It has become one of the most widely used frameworks in the PHP ecosystem, and its yearly major releases keep bringing refinements to routing, database handling, testing, and application structure. Laravel 13 continues that pattern with a required PHP version bump, additional PHP attributes for controllers and queues, and a first party AI SDK, while leaving most day to day development patterns unchanged. Creating a new Laravel 13 project begins with installing PHP, Composer, and Laravel itself, followed by a short round of configuration that prepares the application for development.
The number of people using a website right now is a common metric. It shows how active the site is at a given moment, and it makes traffic visible while it happens instead of after the fact. Analytics services can report it, but with a delay and outside the application. Redis can keep it inside your own code: each page view records the visitor, and the count is read for the last X minutes, where X is a value from the configuration file that can be changed at any time.
