2 => Tooling

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Personally I use Visual Studio Code as it has an excellent extension library that appears to have an extension for almost everything due to its strong community. In this entry I am going to cover some of the extensions and tools I've found most useful throughout my time developing my project.

Artisan

This is not technically an extension or plugin but I feel it is worth covering due to its usefulness. If you have used Laravel before you will already know how useful Artisan is. Artisan is an excellent assistive tool for developing Laravel applications, it can be used for generating boilerplate code, controlling database migrations, creating models, accessing Tinker - a PHP CLI playground - and a range of other uses. 

Artisan takes a lot of the work developers normally have to do manually and will do it automatically, all that is required is for the developer to understand where and when to use it. The help functions are also extremely useful and clear while being terse making it fast to read.

PHP Intelliphense 

PHP Intelliphense is excellent, a must have extension for VSCode. It appears to be the most popular autocomplete extension for php on the VSCode extension marketplace, although it is not perfect. It seems to pick up most autocomplete possibilities, but if you are doing things with Laravel like fetching data from your database it may not always be of use although I suspect this may be a VSCode cache issue. This problem means developers may have to have to memorise method names along with their parameters will be required to have to have the documentation nearby. 

Laravel Blade Snippets

Another useful extension for that gives developers minor code generation abilities for Laravels Blade template engine. It's got all the useful blade directives developers may need like @error() @if @section @asset() so developers are not required to remember them all. Type b, wait and then scroll down until you find the snippet you need.
These are by far the most useful tools that I have used while developing my Laravel application, however I am currently still in the early stages of development so there may be more tools that I discover later on that are extremely helpful.

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