I start every morning by opening up a GitHub search that shows me all the open pull requests across Laravel's open source ecosystem. It’s kind of like my personal to-do list for the day. Some mornings, there are just a handful, or on a Monday there could be a few dozen waiting for me. I go through them one by one—merge, close, or sleep on it. Sometimes I may need to ask another expert for feedback on a particular PR, like Jess Archer on Prompts or Joe Dixon on Reverb.
Staying personally involved in every pull request is what keeps Laravel’s open source projects feeling like they were written by one author. Plus I really enjoy it!
But it's not one author! With open source, the door is always open for anyone to step in and make an impact on hundreds of thousands of people’s daily lives. It’s really satisfying seeing people walk through that door and contribute because even a small feature can improve the work life of thousands. Open source is all about community-driven innovation.
We’ve been fortunate enough to translate a lot of the success of our core products into hiring more OS engineers, open sourcing products like Horizon, and directly contributing to foundational and 3rd-party projects (see details below).
So I’m excited to see more companies stepping up and publicly committing to support open source, and to personally be part of a movement encouraging more open source contribution and growth.
— Taylor Otwell
Laravel’s Open Source Pledge
At Laravel, we’re proud to join the Open Source Pledge and reaffirm our commitment to the projects and communities that power modern web development. Part of the pledge is making $34,000 ($2k per full time developer at Laravel) in financial contributions to foundational tools and projects. For us that means:
PHP Foundation: The PHP Foundation is essential to maintaining the health of PHP itself, and our contributions help ensure its long-term stability. By supporting the foundation, we’re enabling key features and improvements in PHP, such as the advancements seen in PHP 8.4.
Composer: Composer transformed PHP by simplifying package management. Laravel’s reliance on Composer helps developers easily integrate third-party packages, and supporting Composer ensures this crucial tool continues to thrive.
Vue.js: Vue.js powers many of our key products, including Forge, Vapor, and Nova. Vue.js is also integral to our Breeze and Jetstream starter kits, making it an essential part of the Laravel ecosystem.
Inertia.js: Inertia.js is an integral part of Laravel’s commercial products, like Spark and Nova. It simplifies building single-page applications (SPAs) without requiring a full-blown API, making the development process smoother for teams that want the experience of SPAs while still using Laravel as the backend.
Livewire: We use Livewire extensively in Pulse, Laravel’s real-time performance monitoring tool. Livewire allows us to build reactive, dynamic user interfaces without needing a JavaScript framework, which aligns perfectly with our desire to stay in the PHP ecosystem while delivering modern, interactive experiences.
Spatie: We’ve also benefited immensely from the work of Spatie, a team based in Belgium known for its high-quality open source PHP packages. Their packages, like laravel-permission, laravel-backup, and laravel-medialibrary, have become foundational components in many Laravel applications. Spatie’s contributions have saved countless hours of development time, allowing Laravel developers—including us—to leverage their robust solutions for permissions, media management, and more.
Our Ecosystem Contributions
We also have 2-3 developers dedicated full time to OSS at any given time (not including Taylor), and contribute their time as well as other financial sponsorships to our ecosystem of 1st-party & 3rd-party OS projects (and many on the team contribute part time). This includes:
Laravel Framework: The Laravel framework has been downloaded over 361 million times, making it one of the most popular PHP frameworks globally. Our team maintains a wide range of tools, including Horizon, which provides beautiful dashboards and powerful queue management for Laravel, downloaded more than 49 million times.
Open Source Projects: In addition to the framework itself, Taylor and others on the team have developed many Laravel ecosystem projects, such as Cashier, Dusk, and Sanctum, all of which simplify essential tasks for developers. We are also proud of our contributions to testing through Pest, created by Nuno Maduro.
Looking Ahead
Joining the Open Source Pledge is just one of the ways we continue to invest in the future of open source. By supporting these projects—both financially and through direct contributions—we hope to ensure that the tools developers rely on remain powerful, reliable, and innovative.
