I had a Laravel project designed to be white-labeled. Swap an env file, change the domain, and the whole application launches as a completely different product. The problem was the Markdown files.
If you've used Laravel Scout on a project with more than a couple of searchable models, you know the drill. You change something in your toSearchableArray(), and now you need to flush and reimport every model's index. Two commands per model. Manually. One at a time. On a project with ten searchable models, that's twenty commands to rebuild your search indexes.
In May 2024, I published the first version of anthropic-php, a PHP client for Anthropic's Claude API. Nearly two years and 370,000+ downloads later, it's the most installed dedicated Anthropic SDK in the PHP ecosystem. This is the story of why I built it, what it can do, and why I think packages born from real necessity tend to be the good ones.
Eighteen months ago, using Claude or GPT from a Laravel app meant writing raw HTTP calls or using whatever half-maintained wrapper you could find on Packagist. Today there are four solid options, all actively maintained, all with real download numbers behind them. I maintain one of them. anthropic-php and its Laravel companion anthropic-laravel have a combined 597,000 installs on Packagist. I've been building and shipping AI features in PHP since before most of these packages existed. So when people ask me "which one should I use?", I have opinions. They might surprise you. Here's the honest breakdown.
In late 2023, I was working on a large Laravel project and hit a point where the app/ directory had become a mess. Models, controllers, services, policies, listeners, jobs, notifications, all thrown into flat directories with no logical grouping. Everything related to billing lived next to everything related to user management. Finding anything required memorizing file names instead of following a structure. I knew the answer was modular architecture. Break the application into self-contained modules where each module owns its models, controllers, migrations, routes, views, and everything else related to that feature. I'd seen this pattern work in other frameworks and it made perfect sense for Laravel. So I looked at what was available. I tried several packages. None of them clicked. I started building my own solution inside that project. As it grew and I wanted the same structure in my other projects, I extracted it into an open-source package: mozex/laravel-modules.
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