Earlier today I’ve released Laravel Stats v2.3.

The big thing in this release is a new “share” feature which I would like to explain further in this post and give you a look at what happend behind the scenes.

A little back story#

Back in 2018 Jason McCreary, the creator of Laravel Shift, gave a talk at Laracon US called “Laravel by the Numbers”. (A written version is available on his website.)

In it, he highlights which packages are installed the most in Laravel applications, if developers use a custom folder structure or which Eloquent Relationships is used the most. Pretty cool.

In the talk, he mentions the stats package and shows data he collected with it through Shift.

I remember we exchanged messages through Twitter, that it would be great to have a public dashboard for this data. It could help the Laravel community in making decision to adopt a certain feature or could be interesting in general.

We both had other things going on in our lives. We did not pursue this idea further.

Last year I’ve built a Laravel Downloads Statistics-dashboard “thing”, as I wanted to know if the stats package should support older Laravel versions. It reminded me once again, that a dashboard with such data is a cool and fun project.

The current year#

Fast forward 2 years. In May 2020 Jason reached out to me and we talked about this stats dashboard again.

After a bit of brainstorming we came up with an idea on how to collect that data and build the metrics dashboard. We’ve built a new optional --shareflag to the package, which will make an API request to Shift with the statistics-data of the project.

#laravel