Laravel Installer 5.31.0 adds a first-party `laravel package` command that scaffolds a complete, ready-to-develop package from a single line — and it's a clean-room alternative to Spatie's long-standing skeleton.
Laravel Installer 5.31.0, released on July 16, adds a small feature with a big quality-of-life payoff: a first-party laravel package command that scaffolds a complete, ready-to-develop Laravel package from a single line in your terminal.
If you've ever started a package, you know the drill — a service provider, a composer.json with the right autoloading, a test harness, static analysis, a formatter, and some kind of throwaway app to actually run your code against. It's an hour of plumbing before you write a line of the thing you actually wanted to build. The new command (PR #546 by Joe Tannenbaum) collapses that into one step.
What the command does
Run it with a name and Laravel takes it from there:
laravel package my-new-packageUnder the hood the installer:
- Clones the official
laravel/package-skeletonrepository - Cleans the git history so you start with a fresh repo
- Installs the Composer dependencies
- Runs the skeleton's
configure.phpscript to personalize everything
By default it's interactive — Laravel Prompts walks you through the package name, namespace, author details, and which features you want.
What's in the skeleton
The generated package isn't a bare src/ folder. It comes wired up with the tooling a modern Laravel package is expected to ship with:
- A service provider as the entry point
- Pest 4 for testing, including type-coverage checks
- Larastan for static analysis
- Pint for code style
- A Workbench app (Orchestra Testbench) so you can boot a real Laravel app and exercise your package end to end
Everything is configured and ready — composer test works out of the box.
Picking only the features you need
You rarely need every kind of package resource. The command lets you opt in to exactly what your package will ship, either through the interactive prompts or via flags:
| Flag | Adds |
|---|---|
--config | A publishable config file |
--routes | A routes file, loaded by the provider |
--views | A views directory and namespace |
--translations | Language files |
--migrations | Database migrations |
--assets | Publishable front-end assets |
--commands | An Artisan command stub |
--facade | A facade for your main class |
--boost-skill | A Laravel Boost skill |
So a package that only needs config and a command is one line:
laravel package my-new-package --config --commandsBuilt for automation and AI agents
Because it's part of the installer, laravel package plugs into the same agent-detection flow the laravel new command already uses. Pass the metadata up front — --author-name, --author-email, --package-name, --package-name-human, --package-description, --vendor-namespace, --class-name — and combine it with the feature flags to scaffold a package with zero prompts. That makes it scriptable in CI and safe to hand to a coding agent, which gets structured JSON describing what was created instead of a stalled interactive prompt.
How it compares to Spatie's skeleton
For years, our go-to for spinning up a new Laravel package has been Spatie's excellent package-skeleton-laravel — press Use this template on GitHub, then run php configure.php. It's served us well, so the arrival of a first-party option had us curious how the two stack up. The new official skeleton is not built on top of Spatie's — it's a clean-room, first-party alternative, and the differences are worth knowing.
The biggest one is the service provider. Spatie's skeleton is built on spatie/laravel-package-tools, so your provider extends PackageServiceProvider and describes the package through a fluent configurePackage() method. The official skeleton has no such dependency: its provider extends the plain Illuminate\Support\ServiceProvider and uses the framework's own APIs directly — mergeConfigFrom(), loadRoutesFrom(), loadViewsFrom(), and standard publishing calls. It's more verbose, but there's no abstraction between you and Laravel, and nothing extra to learn.
The other difference is distribution. Spatie's is a GitHub template you copy; Laravel's is a CLI command in a tool you already have installed, with feature selection and full non-interactive support baked in. Neither is "better" — Spatie's laravel-package-tools is still a great abstraction and isn't going anywhere, and we'll happily keep reaching for it. But if you'd rather stay on vanilla framework APIs and scaffold straight from the terminal, there's now a first-party way to do it.
Getting it
The command ships with Laravel Installer 5.31.0. Update to the latest version and you're set:
composer global update laravel/installerThen laravel package your next idea and skip straight to the interesting part.
