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Explaining Laravel Package Ecosystem

by DžurisJune 5th, 2020

Too Long; Didn't Read

There were 47337 Laravel packages identified from 23167 different developers. The distribution is quite even with lots and lots of small players in the Laravel scene. There are only 317 developers that get 317 or more daily downloads and the same number is 3003 monthly downloads. The most popular packages are most prevalent on this list followed by integration. The number of packages that are made by the top 3927 developers is far more than would be if Price's law was obeyed here. For example, out of 5.65 million daily package downloads, 2.85 million are split among laravel, illuminate, nesbot, spatie, fideloper and barryvdh.

Companies Mentioned

featured image - Explaining Laravel Package Ecosystem

Packages play a big role in the Laravel scene. How big and which packages? To find it out we took the data from the Packagist.org API and filtered out the Laravel packages.

How did we identify the Laravel packages? By looking at

composer.json

. We classified a package as belonging to the Laravel ecosystem if

name

description

keywords

type

fields contained the string

laravel

. We also considered it to be a Laravel package if it has

laravel/framework

or any of the

illuminate/*

subtree splits as a dependancy. And finally — the

laravel

key in

extra

field is also a trigger.

While these criteria do not guarantee a package to be Laravel-only, they do show that the package was made with Laravel in mind.

The most popular packages

By naively looking at the list of the most downloaded packages, we see quite a bit of unexciting results — core packages and packages with a plenty of uses outside Laravel projects.


| Package                 | Monthly downloads |
|-------------------------|-------------------|
| nesbot/carbon           | 4084214           |
| laravel/framework       | 2987907           |
| laravel/tinker          | 2455355           |
| fideloper/proxy         | 2376631           |
| nunomaduro/collision    | 1510258           |
| intervention/image      | 1099989           |
| facade/ignition         | 966800            |
| facade/flare-client-php | 934651            |
| composer/installers     | 803222            |
| illuminate/support      | 756189            |

Perhaps a more interesting toplist would be one with these "false positives" removed. We manually filtered out the top 30 packages that are made for Laravel projects and are installed deliberately. We also loosely classified the purposes of those packages.

|    | Package                            | Monthly | Total    | Purpose |
|----|------------------------------------|---------|----------|---------|
| 1  | maatwebsite/excel                  | 680466  | 17769696 | port    |
| 2  | laravelcollective/html             | 678048  | 21785383 | helper  |
| 3  | barryvdh/laravel-ide-helper        | 644297  | 18918427 | dev     |
| 4  | barryvdh/laravel-debugbar          | 625080  | 19404288 | dev     |
| 5  | laravel/passport                   | 552633  | 10099903 | auth    |
| 6  | beyondcode/laravel-dump-server     | 530901  | 11035024 | dev     |
| 7  | sentry/sentry-laravel              | 455879  | 8440070  | integ   |
| 8  | laravel/ui                         | 433850  | 1599042  | auth    |
| 9  | barryvdh/laravel-cors              | 400920  | 10823255 | helper  |
| 10 | laravel/socialite                  | 394471  | 10166784 | auth    |
| 11 | laravel/slack-notification-channel | 385921  | 7172937  | integ   |
| 12 | tymon/jwt-auth                     | 359693  | 9107092  | auth    |
| 13 | barryvdh/laravel-dompdf            | 349572  | 8006731  | port    |
| 14 | laravel/helpers                    | 337956  | 1692185  | helper  |
| 15 | spatie/laravel-permission          | 308453  | 5224001  | auth    |
| 16 | laravel/horizon                    | 304864  | 4599598  | integ   |
| 17 | laravel/dusk                       | 256261  | 4542482  | dev     |
| 18 | laravel/nexmo-notification-channel | 238192  | 6080124  | integ   |
| 19 | laravel/telescope                  | 227966  | 2289576  | dev     |
| 20 | bugsnag/bugsnag-laravel            | 223167  | 6544766  | dev     |
| 21 | yajra/laravel-datatables-oracle    | 212985  | 5644721  | integ   |
| 22 | aws/aws-sdk-php-laravel            | 212260  | 7070121  | integ   |
| 23 | orchestra/testbench-core           | 199780  | 1864659  | dev     |
| 24 | orchestra/testbench                | 195269  | 2279889  | dev     |
| 25 | symplify/package-builder           | 193661  | 1484783  | dev     |
| 26 | laravel/scout                      | 177270  | 3391042  | integ   |
| 27 | barryvdh/laravel-snappy            | 156741  | 3651684  | port    |
| 28 | webpatser/laravel-uuid             | 153883  | 4774711  | helper  |
| 29 | spatie/laravel-medialibrary        | 149290  | 2293823  | helper  |
| 30 | spatie/laravel-activitylog         | 148932  | 2387978  | dev     |

Explanation of purposes:

auth — authentication and authorization
dev — development and debugging tools
helper — support and simplifaction of work
integ — integration with other services
port — import and/or export in various forma

The development tools are most prevalent on this list followed by integration.

We expeceted to see more of the Spatie packages at the very top, but it turns out that maatwebsite/excel and the tools by Barry vd. Heuvel are more universally used.

Vendor overview

In total there were 47337 Laravel packages identified from 23167 different developers. The distribution is quite even with lots and lots of small players.

Half of packages (23668) were made by the top 3927 developers which is far more than would be if Price's law was obeyed here. 15042 of the developers have only one package published.

If we sort package developers by number of packages, we get to see some quite unheard names. Here are the most prolific package developers along with the download numbers summed over their packages.

|    | Developer                     | Count | Daily | Monthly | Total    |
|----|-------------------------------|-------|-------|---------|----------|
| 1  | socialiteproviders            | 159   | 10645 | 256409  | 5826725  |
| 2  | bantenprov                    | 132   | 0     | 5       | 3160     |
| 3  | spatie                        | 124   | 89124 | 2746665 | 43095685 |
| 4  | railken                       | 119   | 0     | 11082   | 313129   |
| 5  | laravel-enso                  | 95    | 1519  | 29456   | 879635   |
| 6  | amethyst                      | 92    | 1232  | 8118    | 100819   |
| 7  | faustbrian                    | 85    | 152   | 2639    | 52698    |
| 8  | artisanry                     | 78    | 129   | 1190    | 11938    |
| 9  | sukohi                        | 75    | 58    | 1773    | 53805    |
| 10 | anomaly                       | 59    | 198   | 6095    | 974489   |
| 11 | sanatorium                    | 59    | 0     | 0       | 20       |
| 12 | laravel-notification-channels | 54    | 3107  | 99536   | 1621420  |
| 13 | hnhdigital-os                 | 54    | 38    | 1571    | 20304    |
| 14 | arcanedev                     | 53    | 3875  | 127702  | 3293360  |
| 15 | inetstudio                    | 53    | 241   | 3870    | 77009    |
| 16 | larakit                       | 49    | 1     | 410     | 18540    |
| 17 | orchestra                     | 48    | 21569 | 544696  | 7606461  |
| 18 | abuseio                       | 45    | 1     | 951     | 78289    |
| 19 | genealabs                     | 43    | 3219  | 87234   | 1215349  |
| 20 | smorken                       | 41    | 36    | 985     | 14277    |

Apparently there are quite a few developers who make a lot of components and put them up without much advertisement. To see more of the better known names and how they compare, let us sort the list by total downloads.

|    | Developer         | Count | Daily  | Monthly | Total     |
|----|-------------------|-------|--------|---------|-----------|
| 1  | laravel           | 39    | 364375 | 9832728 | 225867755 |
| 2  | illuminate        | 33    | 244509 | 7210832 | 197044965 |
| 3  | nesbot            | 1     | 179106 | 4084214 | 112631927 |
| 4  | barryvdh          | 19    | 82289  | 2246578 | 63115434  |
| 5  | spatie            | 124   | 89124  | 2746665 | 43095685  |
| 6  | fideloper         | 3     | 100748 | 2376631 | 41313378  |
| 7  | intervention      | 7     | 46259  | 1260102 | 33891504  |
| 8  | composer          | 1     | 10603  | 803222  | 26065561  |
| 9  | league            | 7     | 18996  | 731742  | 24433630  |
| 10 | nunomaduro        | 19    | 68333  | 1734552 | 23394056  |
| 11 | laravelcollective | 6     | 32460  | 710099  | 23285426  |
| 12 | maatwebsite       | 6     | 27955  | 717140  | 18258360  |
| 13 | cocur             | 1     | 19246  | 491761  | 16609476  |
| 14 | jenssegers        | 15    | 24263  | 544700  | 16468485  |
| 15 | beyondcode        | 29    | 14221  | 677724  | 12648233  |
| 16 | laracasts         | 11    | 10352  | 317232  | 12119703  |
| 17 | graham-campbell   | 36    | 11092  | 291114  | 10184667  |
| 18 | facade            | 5     | 67794  | 1915933 | 9860242   |
| 19 | yajra             | 19    | 17794  | 446360  | 9792222   |
| 20 | tymon             | 2     | 11437  | 359693  | 9107116   |

If one sorts this list by monthly dowloads instead, the picture is slightly different.

|    | Developer         | Count | Daily  | Monthly | Total     |
|----|-------------------|-------|--------|---------|-----------|
| 1  | laravel           | 39    | 364375 | 9832728 | 225867755 |
| 2  | illuminate        | 33    | 244509 | 7210832 | 197044965 |
| 3  | nesbot            | 1     | 179106 | 4084214 | 112631927 |
| 4  | spatie            | 124   | 89124  | 2746665 | 43095685  |
| 5  | fideloper         | 3     | 100748 | 2376631 | 41313378  |
| 6  | barryvdh          | 19    | 82289  | 2246578 | 63115434  |
| 7  | facade            | 5     | 67794  | 1915933 | 9860242   |
| 8  | nunomaduro        | 19    | 68333  | 1734552 | 23394056  |
| 9  | intervention      | 7     | 46259  | 1260102 | 33891504  |
| 10 | composer          | 1     | 10603  | 803222  | 26065561  |

These distributions are extremely top heavy. Regardless if you order by daily, monthly or total downloads, more than half of all downloads go to top 6 package developers. For example, out of 5.65 million daily package downloads, 2.85 million are split among laravel, illuminate, nesbot, spatie, fideloper and barryvdh.

We can use something a kin to Hirsch index to assess the depth of the scene. There are only 317 developers that get 317 or more daily downloads. 1118 vendors get 1118 or more monthly downloads and the same number is 3003 for total numbers.

Licensing choices

Our licensing overview is not very precise as various strings are used for the same license, for example

gpl-3.0

gpl 3.0

gpl3

gplv3

, even

gnu general
 public license version 3

and many more for the same license.

Luckily, the main conclusions are clear as the string

mit

is the license of 37502 Laravel packages. 6304 packages are unlicensed, More than 500 packages are licensed under each of Apache 2.0 and GPL 3.0. And there are also few hundred packages with BSD 2, BSD 3 and GPL 2.0.

79% of Laravel packages are MIT-licensed, 14% are unlicensed and the other licenses are each used in used in 2% of projects or less. This is probably in part influenced by Laravel which itself is MIT licensed. Among all of the packages the prevalence of the MIT license is considerably smaller — 60%.

Outside Laravel

The number of packages for different frameworks shows the involvment of the community in the development of the framework tools and how much they are willing to share their code with others. We also counted the abandoned packages and their percentage to see which communities are thriving and which are limping.

|    | Framework     | Packages | Abandoned | Aband. % |
|----|---------------|----------|-----------|----------|
| 1  | Laravel       | 47337    | 2618      | 5,5%     |
| 2  | Symfony       | 39428    | 3362      | 8,5%     |
| 3  | Yii           | 15354    | 552       | 3,6%     |
| 4  | ZendFramework | 7459     | 790       | 10,6%    |
| 5  | WordPress     | 6446     | 480       | 7,4%     |
| 6  | Nette         | 3460     | 342       | 9,9%     |
| 7  | CakePHP       | 2607     | 173       | 6,6%     |
| 8  | Slim          | 1411     | 64        | 4,5%     |
| 9  | Laminas       | 811      | 17        | 2,0%     |
| 10 | Phalcon       | 726      | 40        | 5,5%     |
| 11 | Codeigniter   | 663      | 91        | 13,7%    |
| 12 | Aura          | 450      | 32        | 7,1%     |
| 13 | Kohana        | 341      | 43        | 12,6%    |
| 14 | FuelPHP       | 148      | 12        | 8,1%     |
| 15 | PHPixie       | 73       | 1         | 1,4%     |

On the other hand, the total download numbers are reflective of how much the packages are important in the development of everyday projects.

Please keep in mind that these download numbers represent all of the packages related to a framework not just the core. It’s just like the number of packages listed above. The criteria for classifying a package as belonging to certain framework are here. One package can belong to ecosystems of multiple frameworks.

|    | Framework     | Monthly   | Total      |
|----|---------------|-----------|------------|
| 1  | Symfony       | 366029776 | 8945189030 |
| 2  | Laravel       | 56523199  | 1315681505 |
| 3  | ZendFramework | 50789083  | 1460984224 |
| 4  | Nette         | 14137793  | 295710951  |
| 5  | Laminas       | 9540512   | 134960483  |
| 6  | Yii           | 5662063   | 200378585  |
| 7  | CakePHP       | 4067892   | 112091915  |
| 8  | WordPress     | 3871828   | 96962490   |
| 9  | Slim          | 2123558   | 46196613   |
| 10 | FuelPHP       | 930846    | 32043126   |
| 11 | Codeigniter   | 919926    | 30474042   |
| 12 | Kohana        | 912106    | 31918403   |
| 13 | Aura          | 467771    | 18063339   |
| 14 | Phalcon       | 137762    | 4322810    |
| 15 | PHPixie       | 5353      | 572100     |

It should be noted that the top position doesn't mean Symfony projects download the most packages as some of the Symfony core is used by Laravel and many of the Symfony packages can also be used in Laravel projects.

It is also noteworthy that Zend packages have almost as many monthly downloads as Laravel even though the project is no longer maintained.

As a farewell we shall leave you with the list of most downloaded PHP packages overall.

|    | Package                           | Monthly | Total     |
|----|-----------------------------------|---------|-----------|
| 1  | symfony/polyfill-mbstring         | 7943600 | 210645235 |
| 2  | psr/log                           | 7768451 | 238663129 |
| 3  | symfony/polyfill-ctype            | 7284741 | 110601284 |
| 4  | psr/container                     | 6847606 | 119345271 |
| 5  | symfony/console                   | 6713344 | 199367074 |
| 6  | guzzlehttp/guzzle                 | 6607580 | 168514253 |
| 7  | symfony/finder                    | 6486878 | 176261290 |
| 8  | psr/http-message                  | 6384401 | 164860087 |
| 9  | guzzlehttp/promises               | 6372505 | 149984782 |
| 10 | guzzlehttp/psr7                   | 6350221 | 161806561 |
| 11 | doctrine/instantiator             | 6199120 | 180684872 |
| 12 | symfony/process                   | 6167368 | 169254030 |
| 13 | phpdocumentor/reflection-docblock | 6140913 | 165150240 |
| 14 | monolog/monolog                   | 6109702 | 196673732 |
| 15 | symfony/event-dispatcher          | 6098870 | 190433052 |
| 16 | webmozart/assert                  | 5905460 | 144395517 |
| 17 | doctrine/lexer                    | 5895066 | 157678399 |
| 18 | ralouphie/getallheaders           | 5861396 | 66293788  |
| 19 | doctrine/inflector                | 5743593 | 171588858 |
| 20 | phpdocumentor/type-resolver       | 5706391 | 136101740 |

The data displayed in this article was compiled mainly by Gatis Šūpulnieks in April and May of 2020 as a part of his thesis "Laravel package development and usage".

Relevant sources: