Laravel Full-Stack Stack Guide for Solo Developers

The Stack

Laravel is the PHP framework that made PHP cool again. I know some JavaScript developers roll their eyes at PHP, but Laravel's ecosystem is unmatched for full-stack web development speed. Forge handles deployment. Cashier handles Stripe. Socialite handles OAuth. Nova handles admin panels. There's a first-party package for almost everything a SaaS needs.

When to Use This Stack

Perfect for: SaaS products, web applications, CRUD-heavy business tools, marketplaces, any product where rapid development matters more than bleeding-edge frontend interactivity.

Not ideal for: Projects where you need heavy client-side interactivity (complex drag-and-drop, real-time collaboration), teams that refuse to write PHP, or serverless-first architectures.

Laravel shines when you want to build fast without making architecture decisions every five minutes. The framework is opinionated in all the right ways.

Why Solo Developers Love It

Laravel Forge makes deployment trivial. $12/month and it manages your DigitalOcean or AWS servers for you. Automatic SSL, deployments triggered by Git push, queue workers, scheduled tasks, database backups. No Docker, no Kubernetes, no CI/CD pipeline to configure. Push to main and your site updates.

Livewire lets you build reactive UIs in PHP. This is the game changer. Instead of building a React frontend, consuming a REST API, and managing client-side state, you write Blade components that update reactively. Dropdown that filters a table? 20 lines of PHP. Modal with form validation? Same. It feels like magic the first time you use it.

Eloquent ORM is a joy to use. Relationships, eager loading, query scopes, model events, mass assignment protection. Eloquent makes database operations read like English. User::with('posts')->where('active', true)->latest()->paginate(20). That's a full query with relationship loading, filtering, sorting, and pagination in one readable line.

The ecosystem is complete. Breeze or Jetstream for auth scaffolding (with team support). Cashier for Stripe subscriptions. Horizon for monitoring queues. Telescope for debugging. Sanctum for API tokens. Socialite for OAuth. You rarely need to search for third-party packages because Laravel has first-party solutions for most common needs.

The Parts Nobody Warns You About

PHP's reputation creates hiring challenges. If you ever need to bring on another developer, the pool of people willing to write PHP is smaller than JavaScript or Python. This is a real consideration even for solo developers thinking long-term.

Livewire has performance limits. For highly interactive UIs with lots of real-time state changes (think a design tool or spreadsheet), Livewire's server-roundtrip model adds latency. For dashboards, forms, and data tables, it's perfect. For complex interactive applications, consider Inertia.js with Vue or React instead.

Forge is great but adds cost. $12/month for Forge plus your server costs (typically $6-12/month on DigitalOcean). It's still cheap, but it's not free-tier like Vercel or Railway. For development, use Laravel Sail (Docker-based local development) to keep things consistent.

Testing culture is strong. Laravel has excellent testing tools (PHPUnit, Pest, Dusk for browser tests). The community expects well-tested code. If you're not writing tests, you'll feel the pain as your application grows. Budget time for testing from the start.

Setting Up the Stack

Install Laravel with composer create-project laravel/laravel your-app. Add Breeze for authentication (composer require laravel/breeze --dev, then php artisan breeze:install livewire). This gives you registration, login, password reset, email verification, and profile management out of the box.

Set up your database (MySQL or PostgreSQL), configure your .env file, and run migrations. Laravel's migration system is excellent. Schema changes are versioned, reversible, and shared across environments.

For deployment, sign up for Laravel Forge, connect your DigitalOcean account, and provision a server. Connect your GitHub repo and configure auto-deployment on push. The whole process takes about 15 minutes and then you never think about deployment again.

Project Structure

app/
  ├── Models/              (Eloquent models)
  ├── Http/
  │   ├── Controllers/     (Request handlers)
  │   └── Middleware/       (Request middleware)
  ├── Livewire/            (Livewire components)
  ├── Jobs/                (Background queue jobs)
  ├── Mail/                (Email classes)
  └── Policies/            (Authorization policies)
resources/
  ├── views/
  │   ├── layouts/         (Blade layouts)
  │   ├── livewire/        (Livewire views)
  │   └── components/      (Blade components)
  └── css/                 (Tailwind entry point)
database/
  ├── migrations/          (Schema changes)
  ├── seeders/             (Test data)
  └── factories/           (Model factories for testing)
routes/
  ├── web.php              (Web routes)
  └── api.php              (API routes)

Cost Breakdown

Not the cheapest option (Django on a VPS is cheaper), but you're paying for deployment automation that saves hours every month. The total is still very affordable for a business generating revenue.

Alternatives to Consider

If you want free hosting: Next.js + Vercel or SvelteKit + Cloudflare Pages. Zero hosting costs on free tiers.

If you want Python: Django is the closest equivalent. Same monolith philosophy, different language. Django's admin is better, Laravel's Eloquent is more elegant.

If you want TypeScript everywhere: Next.js or SvelteKit gives you full-stack TypeScript. You lose Laravel's ecosystem but gain type safety across the stack.

If you want to self-host cheaper: Skip Forge and deploy with Docker Compose on a $4/month Hetzner VPS. More setup work but half the cost.

My Take

Laravel is the productivity king for solo developers who don't mind PHP. The combination of Eloquent, Livewire, and the first-party ecosystem means you spend almost all of your time building features instead of gluing libraries together.

I've watched indie developers ship complete SaaS products in Laravel faster than most React developers can set up their build pipeline. That's not a dig at React. It's a testament to how much Laravel has optimized for developer velocity.

The Forge + Livewire combination is particularly powerful. You get reactive UIs without JavaScript framework complexity and deployments without DevOps knowledge. For a solo developer building a business tool, marketplace, or subscription product, this stack gets out of your way and lets you focus on what matters: shipping something users will pay for.