laravel-best-practices

Eager load relationships with with() before iterating over models, and enable Model::preventLazyLoading() in AppServiceProvider during development to throw exceptions on lazy loading. Use withCount() when only relationship counts are needed instead of hydrating related models.

Organize controllers around one resource using standard actions like index, show, store, update, and destroy, and use Route::resource() or apiResource() for matching endpoints. Treat custom verbs like publish as signals to consider a separate resource controller with its own authorization boundary.

Set retry_after longer than the job timeout, use progressive backoff delays for transient failures, and implement ShouldBeUnique when only one instance of a logical job should exist. Make important jobs idempotent since workers can stop after side effects but before acknowledging.

No, validation only establishes the shape and values of input and does not authorize the user. Use policies, gates, or a form request's authorize() method for permission checks, and never pass $request->all() to models with $guarded = [].

Use chunk() or lazy() when processing large datasets with relationships, since cursor() cannot eager load. Use chunkById() or lazyById() when updates during iteration could shift offset-based pagination and cause rows to be skipped or processed twice.

After configuration is cached, Laravel does not load the .env file, so env() calls in application code return null. Read environment variables only in configuration files and access them everywhere else through config().