Jalara Starter Kit

A professional Laravel application starter kit with production-ready capabilities. Jalara provides a highly-polished, feature-rich foundation with integrated authentication, role-based authorization, comprehensive application settings, dynamic branding, and a complete testing suite.

Key Features

• Authentication & Account Security: Secure authentication, password reset, email verification, and secure session handling powered by Laravel Fortify, with individual account management.
• RBAC & User Management: Granular roles and permissions system built with Spatie Laravel Permission, alongside an administrative panel for user provisioning, export, and management.
• Runtime Settings & Branding: Dynamic system configuration panels including general parameters, authorization rules, mail server setup, and brand assets customization.
• Notifications: Dedicated notification center supporting multiple delivery channels to keep users informed.
• Direct Messaging: In-app private chat system supporting instant messaging and rich reactions.
• Internal Documentation: Built-in documentation center allowing all authenticated users to read and search, with authoring and management restricted to super administrators.
• Media Processing: Integrated media storage and processing lifecycle supporting queued image processing, optimization, lifecycle tracking, and orphan cleanup.
• Localization: Multi-language support for English and Indonesian with a runtime-configurable default locale.
• Typed Inertia/Vue Frontend: Seamless SPA architecture combining Vue 3 and Inertia.js 3, powered by Laravel Wayfinder for end-to-end type-safe routing.

Prerequisites

Before setting up Jalara Starter Kit, ensure your environment meets the following requirements:

System Prerequisites

• PHP: ^8.5 (Composer dependencies require this version)
• Composer: ^2.0
• Node.js: Version ^24.x recommended
• pnpm: ^11.0 (pinned via pnpm-lock.yaml)
• Database: SQLite (recommended for local development), MySQL, MariaDB, or PostgreSQL
• Laravel Installer: ^5.31
• ext-intl: Required. Month names in documents are read from ICU so they match what the browser renders.
• A Chrome or Chromium binary: Required only for PDF export, at runtime.

PDF export at runtime

PDF export renders through Browsershot, which drives a real Chrome from Node. Two things follow, and neither is optional wherever documents are generated:

• node_modules must be present in production, because Browsershot shells out to Node and requires the puppeteer package. It is a runtime dependency, not a build-time one.
• A Chrome or Chromium binary must exist, and LARAVEL_PDF_CHROME_PATH must point at it. Puppeteer's own browser download is declined in pnpm-workspace.yaml, so no browser is fetched during pnpm install.

Nothing in CI catches a missing browser: the Pest suite fakes rendering, and only the end-to-end job runs a real one, pointed at the Chromium that Playwright installs. A misconfigured server therefore fails on the first document a user asks for, not in the pipeline.

Chromium's sandbox needs unprivileged user namespaces, which Ubuntu 23.10+ and most containers deny. Prefer granting the namespace permission over setting LARAVEL_PDF_NO_SANDBOX=true; the test suite sets that flag for itself, and production should not inherit it.

Agent & MCP Prerequisites (for AI-assisted development)

• Laravel Boost MCP: Version ^2.0 for framework context, database query execution, and schemas
• Serena MCP: For semantic search, precise code refactoring, and code memories
• Context7 MCP: For non-Laravel library documentation queries
• shadcn MCP: For searching and managing shadcn-vue components

Installation & Quick Start

Jalara installs as a community starter kit through the Laravel installer (version 5.31 or newer). Run the following command:

laravel new my-app \
  --using=https://github.com/tomylana93/jalara-starter-kit \
  --database=sqlite \
  --pnpm \
  --no-boost \
  --no-interaction

After installation, set up the development server:

composer run dev

For detailed explanations of the installation flags, how to configure the environment, setup the Super Admin, or run background processes (scheduler, queue, broadcasting), see the Setup & Technical Documentation.

Technology Stack

Backend

• Core Framework: Laravel 13
• PHP Version: PHP 8.5
• Authentication Engine: Laravel Fortify
• Authorization Engine: Spatie Laravel Permission
• Settings Store: Spatie Laravel Settings

Frontend

• SPA Bridge: Inertia.js 3
• UI Library: Vue 3
• Styling: Tailwind CSS 4

Testing, Quality & Linting

• Backend Testing: Pest 5
• Frontend Testing: Vitest
• End-to-End Testing: Playwright
• Static Analysis & Refactoring: Larastan & Rector
• Formatting & Linting: Pint (PHP), ESLint & Prettier (Frontend)

Quality Assurance

Jalara is built with stability and software quality as first-class citizens. The codebase is backed by a comprehensive, multi-tiered validation suite spanning unit, feature, and end-to-end verification powered by Pest, Vitest, and Playwright. The project enforces a minimum application coverage threshold of 80%.

To maintain code standards, we utilize:

• Larastan & Rector for static analysis and automated refactoring of backend PHP code.
• Pint for PHP code formatting.
• ESLint & Prettier for frontend code linting and formatting.

Contributing & Releases

Guidelines for branching, tiered CI checks, commit conventions, and release automation are documented in the Contributing & Releases Guidelines.

License

This project is open-source software licensed under the MIT License.