What packages do you install on every Laravel application you create?

In preparation for my upcoming talk at Laracon 2017, which I'm titling "Custom Laravel," I asked a quick question on Twitter to my followers:

Laravel devs: what are the packages you install on *every* app?

— Matt Stauffer (@stauffermatt) July 14, 2017

I wanted to know for my talk, but I was also just curious for my own purposes. Are there any packages I should check out that everyone else already knows about?

Here's what I found, in order of the number of recommendations I received:

Nearly unanimous support ❤️❤️❤️❤️

Dang, y'all love these packages.

• Laravel Debugbar
  Makes it simple to add the PHP Debugbar, customized and colored for Laravel, to your applications. Dive deep into your call stack, views, database queries, etc.
• Laravel IDE Helper
  Teach your IDE (PHPStorm; I doubt any other IDEs reference it, but I'm not sure) how to handle autocompletion and docblocks for Laravel.
• LaravelCollective HTML
  Laravel's form and HTML generators, archived by the Laravel Collective. Most beloved because of form model binding.

Well-loved packages ❤️❤️❤️

They don't necessarily work on every app, but these still came very highly recommended.

• Fractal or Laravel-Fractal (for making APIs)
• Intervention Image (for modifying and creating images)
• Laravel Dusk (for browser-based testing)
• Doctrine DBAL (for better database modifications)

Received a few recommendations ❤️❤️

These had two or three recommendations—enough to pique my interest, but clearly not globally installed.

• Appstract Opcache
• Laravel-Backup
• Yajra Datatables
• PHPSpec
• PHP CodeSniffer
• PHPMD
• Whoops
• Laravel 5 Repositories
• Laracasts Flash
• Exception handlers (Bugsnag/Rollbar/Sentry)

Just one recommendation ❤️

It's hard to just ignore someone who went to the effort to compose a tweet. Here you go, folks. Only one recommendation for each of these; but someone, somewhere, wanted to recommend it.

• Laravel Permission
• Clockwork
• Laravel Tinker Tools
• Codeception
• Laravel DOM-PDF
• Laravel Excel
• Deployer
• LaravelCS
• PHPCPD
• Laravel Tail
• Laravel 5 log Viewer
• Health Monitor
• Laravel Decomposer

Note: I ignored a few recommendations that were extremely context-specific (Mongo) or which were recommended by the package author. :)

Skeletons

A few folks instead pointed to publicly available app skeletons, each of which has their own unique set of packages and customizations:

• Sebastiaan Luca - Skeleton
• Rappasoft Laravel 5 Boilerplate
• Spatie Laravel Skeleton

At Tighten, we currently don't use a skeleton, but I do have some cool news to share at Laracon that will show how easy it is to do some of this same work, even without a skeleton.

... Elsewhere

There's another post Eric Barnes linked me to where Mike Erickson asked people their one favorite package—similar to this question, but not quite the same. Check it out: What is the one package you install in all Laravel projects?

It looks like they found the same thing as I did: Debugbar and IDE helper are the winners in our community. If you haven't checked them out, be sure to do so!

Outro

Did I miss any absolutely vital packages here? Let me know on Twitter.