Laravel application skeleton

laravel/laravel is the starter project that composer create-project laravel/laravel and the laravel new installer use to scaffold a new Laravel application. It is not the framework itself — the framework lives in laravel/framework and is pulled in as the laravel/framework Composer dependency declared in composer.json. This repository is the thin shell around that framework: a default directory layout, a ready-to-edit config/, three baseline migrations, a welcome view, and CI wiring.

What you get out of the box

A fresh checkout boots into a working web application that:

• Serves a single route / rendering resources/views/welcome.blade.php (see routes/web.php).
• Exposes a health check at /up, wired in bootstrap/app.php via the health: parameter to withRouting().
• Authenticates against a users table with the App\Models\User Eloquent model (app/Models/User.php).
• Defaults to SQLite for the database, the database driver for sessions/cache/queue, and the log driver for mail and broadcasting (see .env.example).
• Runs PHPUnit 12 with two example tests in tests/Feature/ExampleTest.php and tests/Unit/ExampleTest.php.
• Builds frontend assets through Vite 8 with Tailwind CSS v4 and the Bunny-hosted Instrument Sans font (see vite.config.js).

Who uses it

Every Laravel application that hasn't been heavily customized starts here. The scaffold is intentionally minimal — there is no controller stub, no auth scaffolding (that's Breeze or Jetstream), and no API resource example. The expectation is that you read the Laravel docs and add what you need.

The repository's commit history is mostly upstream maintenance: keeping the skeleton aligned with the current major version of laravel/framework, bumping the supported PHP and Vite versions, and adjusting defaults (cache store, queue connection, session driver, mail mailer) as the framework evolves.

Tech stack at a glance

Concern	Choice
Language	PHP 8.3+ (composer.json)
Framework	Laravel 13.x ("laravel/framework": "^13.7")
Database (default)	SQLite (config/database.php, .env.example)
Session/cache/queue	database driver, persisted in the same DB (.env.example, config/session.php)
Frontend tooling	Vite 8 + Tailwind CSS v4 (vite.config.js, package.json)
Test runner	PHPUnit ^12.5.12 (composer.json, phpunit.xml)
Code style	Laravel Pint (composer.json dev requires; preset laravel per .styleci.yml)
Local dev runner	composer dev (parallel: serve + queue:listen + pail + npm run dev)
Logs (dev)	laravel/pail tailing storage/logs/laravel.log

Quick links

• Architecture — how the request lifecycle flows through public/index.php, bootstrap/app.php, the framework, and back.
• Getting started — install, run, test.
• Glossary — Laravel-specific vocabulary used throughout the wiki.
• Systems — directory-by-directory tour of the skeleton.
• Reference — every config file, every published env variable, every Composer/npm dependency.

Things this skeleton intentionally does not include

• No controllers — app/Http/ ships with only a Controllers/ directory and no files inside it.
• No middleware customization — bootstrap/app.php calls withMiddleware(function ($middleware) { /* */ }) empty.
• No exception handler customization — same pattern with withExceptions(function ($exceptions) { /* */ }).
• No CSRF, throttling, or rate-limiting tweaks beyond framework defaults.
• No CI/CD beyond the .github/workflows/tests.yml matrix that runs php artisan test against PHP 8.3, 8.4, and 8.5.

If you want any of those, add them yourself or pick a starter kit like Breeze, Jetstream, or Laravel Boost (mentioned in README.md for AI-assisted workflows).