Light version/profile (combined with Laravel IDEA or vsCode)

[barryvdh]

So currently there are 2 options available for free for Laravel in the most popular editor:

• https://github.com/laravel/vs-code-extension
• https://blog.jetbrains.com/phpstorm/2025/07/laravel-idea-is-now-free/

And larastan does a lot of magic itself already.

They do a lot of similar stuff, so what functions of IDE helper can we use to support these extensions, and perhaps make it easier for phpstan/larastan to understand our code.

Models

• We probably only need to add the attributes from the database, not the relations itself
• relationship/scopes can be inferred from static analysis, so not needed?
• magic methods can also be inferred, so not needed?
• The meta and _ide_helper file are probably also not needed?

So do we just need a php artisan ide-helper:models --minimal of --properties-only option?

[barryvdh]

Hmm as far as I can see the laravel IDEA also generates some helper codes with the model, which imho is uglier then adding it to the model directly. So I think the models command is probably fine as-is. Just the ide-helper:generate and meta file are a bit useless in that case.