Overview

Modern web development extends beyond routes, controllers, and views. Before any business logic can take shape, teams must establish authentication flows, authorization layers, API conventions, auditing, CI/CD pipelines, frontend patterns, monitoring, and a maintainable project structure. These concerns take time and lead to duplicated effort across projects.

The Northwestern Laravel Starter handles this baseline work up front with a production-ready architecture, so teams can start building features instead of infrastructure.

[!IMPORTANT]

This starter kit is designed primarily for applications built within Northwestern University’s ecosystem. If you're outside Northwestern, you may not be able to use the project as-is. The architecture and patterns may still be useful as reference material. Contributions from the community are welcome.

Getting Started

composer create-project northwestern-sysdev/northwestern-laravel-starter your-project-name
cd your-project-name

Visit the documentation for complete installation, configuration, and usage guides.

Features

Architectural Foundation

• Domain-Driven Design: Code is grouped by business concerns for modularity and maintainability.
• Action-Based Business Logic: Single-responsibility action classes encapsulate discrete operations for reusability and testability.
• Flexible Configuration: Fine-grained settings for authentication methods, API features, Northwestern integrations, and application behavior.

Authentication & Authorization

• Multi-Authentication Methods: Support for Entra ID SSO, Access Tokens, and passwordless email-based verification codes.
• Role-Based Access Control: Fine-grained role and permissions system with a built-in management interface.
• User Impersonation: Secure ability to troubleshoot user-specific issues and simulate user experiences.

API Features

• Advanced Access Token Management: Cryptographically secure tokens with CIDR-based IP restrictions, rotation, time-bound validity, and automatic expiration notifications.
• API Request Logging & Analytics: Request tracking with performance metrics, failure analysis, and probabilistic sampling.
• Request Tracing: Automatic trace ID propagation for correlation across logs, audits, and error reports.
• Standardized Error Responses: RFC 9457 compliant machine-readable error response formats.

Auditing & Compliance

• Full Audit Trail: Logs all model changes and user actions with before/after history.
• Secure Data Handling: Sensitive information is hashed or encrypted to limit data exposure risk.

Northwestern Integrations

• Northwestern Directory: Just-in-time user provisioning, automatic data synchronization, and monitoring via the Northwestern Directory service.
• EventHub: Publish events and register webhooks with the EventHub system.

Frontend & UX

• Modular Filament UI: Ready-to-use administration panel with pre-built tables, forms, and dashboards for managing application data.
• Brand Compliance: Pre-built components, layouts, and styling that adhere to the University's branding guidelines.
• Responsive Design: Consistent user experience across devices with various screen sizes.
• WCAG 2.1 Accessibility: Built with accessibility best practices.

Developer Experience

• Local Development: Schema-validated database snapshots, configuration validation, and database rebuild utilities.
• Testing: Parallelized PHPUnit execution and end-to-end testing with Cypress.
• CI/CD Ready: Pre-configured GitHub Actions workflows for static analysis, formatting, and automated testing.

Monitoring & Operations

• Health Checks & Monitoring: Built-in health checks to monitor critical system components.
• Analytics Dashboards: Pre-built dashboards for API request metrics and login activity.

Acknowledgements

Numerous open-source packages power this starter kit. Special thanks to the Laravel community and Northwestern University IT.