laravel-best-practices

Fix N+1 queries in Laravel by eager loading relationships with with() before iterating, and use withCount() instead of loading collections just to count them. Enable Model::preventLazyLoading() in AppServiceProvider during development to catch violations automatically.

Validate requests in Laravel by type-hinting a dedicated Form Request class in the controller method, which runs validation and authorization automatically. Then use $request->validated() to retrieve only validated data instead of $request->all().

Prefer whereIn with a select('id') subquery over whereHas for relationship filtering, because whereHas emits a correlated EXISTS subquery that re-executes per row. The whereIn approach lets the database use an index lookup without loading data into PHP memory.

Queue notifications and mailables whenever they hit external services like email, SMS, or Slack, since sending synchronously blocks the HTTP response. Implement ShouldQueue on the class and use afterCommit() when dispatching inside database transactions.

Duplicate job execution happens when the queue's retry_after value is shorter than the job's timeout, causing the worker to re-dispatch a still-running job. Set retry_after greater than the longest job timeout and implement ShouldBeUnique to prevent duplicates.

No, deployed migrations should be treated as immutable. Create a new migration to alter the table instead, and write reversible down() methods so migrate:rollback works in CI and failed deployments.