An enterprise-focused Laravel starter kit for Northwestern University projects. This opinionated project provides what you need to build secure, maintainable web applications or API-driven services.
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Modern web development extends beyond routes, controllers, and views. Before any business logic can take shape, teams must establish authentication flows, authorization layers, API conventions, auditing, CI/CD pipelines, frontend patterns, monitoring, and a maintainable project structure. These concerns take time and lead to duplicated effort across projects.
The Northwestern Laravel Starter handles this baseline work up front with a production-ready architecture, so teams can start building features instead of infrastructure.
Important
This starter kit is designed primarily for applications built within Northwestern University’s ecosystem. If you're outside Northwestern, you may not be able to use the project as-is. The architecture and patterns may still be useful as reference material. Contributions from the community are welcome.
composer create-project northwestern-sysdev/northwestern-laravel-starter your-project-name
cd your-project-nameVisit the documentation for complete installation, configuration, and usage guides.
- Domain-Driven Design: Code is grouped by business concerns for modularity and maintainability.
- Action-Based Business Logic: Single-responsibility action classes encapsulate discrete operations for reusability and testability.
- Flexible Configuration: Fine-grained settings for authentication methods, API features, Northwestern integrations, and application behavior.
- Multi-Authentication Methods: Support for Entra ID SSO, Access Tokens, and passwordless email-based verification codes.
- Role-Based Access Control: Fine-grained role and permissions system with a built-in management interface.
- User Impersonation: Secure ability to troubleshoot user-specific issues and simulate user experiences.
- Advanced Access Token Management: Cryptographically secure tokens with CIDR-based IP restrictions, rotation, time-bound validity, and automatic expiration notifications.
- API Request Logging & Analytics: Request tracking with performance metrics, failure analysis, and probabilistic sampling.
- Request Tracing: Automatic trace ID propagation for correlation across logs, audits, and error reports.
- Standardized Error Responses: RFC 9457 compliant machine-readable error response formats.
- Full Audit Trail: Logs all model changes and user actions with before/after history.
- Secure Data Handling: Sensitive information is hashed or encrypted to limit data exposure risk.
- Northwestern Directory: Just-in-time user provisioning, automatic data synchronization, and monitoring via the Northwestern Directory service.
- EventHub: Publish events and register webhooks with the EventHub system.
- Modular Filament UI: Ready-to-use administration panel with pre-built tables, forms, and dashboards for managing application data.
- Brand Compliance: Pre-built components, layouts, and styling that adhere to the University's branding guidelines.
- Responsive Design: Consistent user experience across devices with various screen sizes.
- WCAG 2.1 Accessibility: Built with accessibility best practices.
- Local Development: Schema-validated database snapshots, configuration validation, and database rebuild utilities.
- Testing: Parallelized PHPUnit execution and end-to-end testing with Cypress.
- CI/CD Ready: Pre-configured GitHub Actions workflows for static analysis, formatting, and automated testing.
- Health Checks & Monitoring: Built-in health checks to monitor critical system components.
- Analytics Dashboards: Pre-built dashboards for API request metrics and login activity.
Numerous open-source packages power this starter kit. Special thanks to the Laravel community and Northwestern University IT.