laraengine-lite — Laravel Admin dashboard Template

SHA-256: 08c406c8d22c5ecde06708b28dce7e7e318004716dd74ab8cd7f46962cbd7351

2026-10-14T08:57:55.779Z

# LaraEngine Lite

> 🚀 **Want RBAC, Stripe billing, a scoring engine, and a full membership-tier workflow on top of this?** Check out [LaraEngine](https://laraengine.dev) — the full starter kit this template is extracted from.

LaraEngine Lite is a free Laravel 13 starter kit: Bootstrap auth scaffolding, a custom UI shell, and a couple of small production-grade patterns worth copying — not a stripped-down teaser, a genuinely usable foundation.

It is also built to be a starting point a **coding agent** can follow: conventional Laravel, one obvious way to do things, real docs, and a test suite as a guardrail. Point Claude Code or Cursor at it instead of asking it to invent an architecture from an empty repo.

## Working with a coding agent

- [`AGENTS.md`](AGENTS.md) — the full guide for agents (structure, the working loop, commands, what "done" means); good human orientation too.
- [`CLAUDE.md`](CLAUDE.md) — the quick reference Claude Code loads automatically.
- [`.cursor/rules/laraengine-lite.mdc`](.cursor/rules/laraengine-lite.mdc) — the same rules for Cursor.
- [`docs/conventions.md`](docs/conventions.md) — the one obvious way to do each thing, so generated code stays coherent and PHPStan level 8 stays green.

## What's included

- **Full auth flow** — registration, login, email verification, password reset, and account deactivation (an `is_active` flag that logs a user out mid-session, not just blocks login).
- **Honeypot-protected registration** — a hidden field bots fill in and humans never see, plus a partial-signup capture pattern that records a lead the moment someone types their email, before the form is even submitted, and marks it converted once they finish registering.
- **A working dashboard** — not a stub: it renders your account state, live queue/scheduler health, and a self-service "deactivate my account" action that exercises the `is_active` flag end to end. Replace it with your product's first screen.
- **A custom Bootstrap UI shell** — not the stock Laravel UI scaffolding look, a restyled nav/footer/card system with its own Sass source.
- **Config-driven branding** — set `LARAENGINE_APP_NAME` and `LARAENGINE_DOMAIN` (the name falls back to `APP_NAME`), and every page title, meta tag, nav brand, and footer mention follows. No find-and-replace.
- **A queue-worker heartbeat pattern, both halves** — the queue worker and scheduler each refresh a cache key as they run, and `App\Support\SystemHeartbeat` reads them back into a `healthy` / `stale` / `unknown` signal you can surface from a health check.
- **Security headers by default** — X-Content-Type-Options, X-Frame-Options, Referrer-Policy, Permissions-Policy, and Cross-Origin headers on every response, plus HSTS on HTTPS, covered by its own test.
- **A real Pest test suite (30 tests) and PHPStan level 8**, both passing, plus Pint — not just mentioned in this README. See [`docs/architecture.md`](docs/architecture.md) for what's covered.

## What's not included

Role-based access control, Stripe billing, a scoring/membership-tier workflow, an admin panel, and the scraper/discovery pipeline are part of the full [LaraEngine](https://laraengine.dev) kit, not this free foundation. This repository is deliberately just auth, the UI shell, and the handful of patterns above.

## Tech stack

- Laravel 13, PHP 8.3+
- Blade + Bootstrap 5 (Sass) + Vite — no SPA framework, no Livewire/Inertia
- Database-driven queues (no Redis/Horizon required)
- SQLite by default for local dev; any Laravel-supported database works

## Quick start

Requirements: PHP 8.3+, Composer, Node 18+, npm.

```bash
composer install
cp .env.example .env
php artisan key:generate
touch database/database.sqlite
php artisan migrate
npm install
npm run build
```

Then start the dev environment:

```bash
composer run dev
```

This runs the PHP dev server, a queue listener, `artisan pail` (log tailing), and the Vite dev server concurrently. Visit `http://localhost:8000` and register an account — the default mailer just logs verification emails to `storage/logs/laravel.log` instead of sending them, so grab the verification link from there.

## Documentation

- [`AGENTS.md`](AGENTS.md) / [`CLAUDE.md`](CLAUDE.md) — working here with a coding agent.
- [`docs/conventions.md`](docs/conventions.md) — the coding conventions in full.
- [`docs/architecture.md`](docs/architecture.md) — what ships and where, the request/middleware flow, and each pattern (activation, honeypot + partial-signup capture, the heartbeats, security headers, branding) in detail.
- [`docs/customization.md`](docs/customization.md) — rebranding, building your authenticated area, tuning or removing the partial-signup capture, adding a CSP, wiring the heartbeats into a `/health` endpoint, switching databases, and real mail.
- [`CHANGELOG.md`](CHANGELOG.md) — what changed between versions.

## Testing and code quality

```bash
vendor/bin/pest              # full test suite (30 tests)
vendor/bin/phpstan analyse   # level 8, zero errors
vendor/bin/pint --test       # code style check
```

New tests are Pest functions (`tests/Feature`, `tests/Unit`); the original suites are plain PHPUnit classes. Both run in one pass via `tests/Pest.php`.

## License

MIT. See [`LICENSE`](LICENSE) — use it, modify it, ship it commercially, no attribution required.

---

> 💡 **Outgrowing the free version?** [LaraEngine](https://laraengine.dev) builds on everything here with Spatie RBAC, Laravel Cashier + Stripe billing, a working scraper/scoring pipeline, an admin panel, and a Pest test suite covering all of it.