Getting Started › Introduction

NestLaravel

The Nx + Laravel microservice framework with Kafka.

NestLaravel gives you a monorepo where every backend microservice is a real Laravel application, all of them sit behind one hardened API gateway, and they talk to each other through Apache Kafka using a single, versioned event contract. Nx orchestrates builds, tests and the dependency graph; the nestlaravel CLI scaffolds and upgrades everything.

npx nestlaravel create my-project
cd my-project
npx nestlaravel generate service orders
npx nestlaravel dev

#Why NestLaravel

You want	NestLaravel gives you
Laravel's productivity per service	Each service is a normal Laravel app with a Domain / Application / Infrastructure / Presentation module
One front door	`apps/api` is the only public interface: authentication, rate limiting, routing
Services that cannot be bypassed	Gateway → service calls are HMAC-signed; services reject anything else (fail closed)
Reliable async messaging	Transactional outbox, `acks=all` + idempotent producer, manual-commit consumer, retries, dead-letter topics, idempotent handlers
A repeatable workflow	`create`, `generate service`, `generate kafka-event`, `dev`, `test`, `build`, `update`
Optional multi-tenancy	`nestlaravel add tenancy` — tenant-scoped Eloquent, jobs, cache, storage and Kafka events

#Architecture at a glance

                  Browser / mobile / third parties
                                │  HTTPS
                     ┌──────────▼───────────┐   PUBLIC
                     │  apps/api  (gateway) │   auth · rate limits · CORS · routing
                     └───┬──────────────┬───┘
        HMAC-signed HTTP │              │ HMAC-signed HTTP          INTERNAL (no public ports)
              ┌──────────▼───┐      ┌───▼──────────┐
              │ orders-service│      │ payments-svc │  … your services (Laravel)
              │  own database │      │ own database │
              └──────┬────────┘      └──────┬───────┘
                     │  events (outbox)     │
                     └────────►  Kafka  ◄───┘     SERVICE-TO-SERVICE

Nx — monorepo, task graph, caching, affected builds (project.json per app).
Laravel — gateway and every microservice.
Kafka — asynchronous integration between services; never a shared database.
CLI (packages/cli) — Node.js, zero runtime dependencies. There is no NestJS runtime in the framework; see ARCHITECTURE.md for the reasoning.

#Requirements

	Minimum	Tested
Node.js	20.11	20, 22, 24
PHP	8.3 (`mbstring openssl pdo tokenizer xml ctype json fileinfo bcmath`)	8.3, 8.4
Composer	2.6	2.x
Docker	recommended (Kafka, Postgres, Redis, image builds)	Docker Engine / Desktop 27+
Kafka	3.6+ (KRaft)	dev image `apache/kafka:4.0.0`
Redis	7+	7
PostgreSQL / MySQL / SQLite	15+ / 8+ / 3	Postgres 16

Laravel ^13.30, Nx ^23.2. php-rdkafka is needed to reach a real broker from PHP — the Docker images include it; on a bare host the framework falls back to a log/null driver.

#Repository layout (this repo is the framework source)

apps/api                  gateway (public)                    packages/cli            the `nestlaravel` npm package
apps/*-service            reference microservices             packages/laravel-kafka  Kafka kit (Composer package)
apps/*-portal             optional Next.js portals            packages/laravel-tenancy optional multi-tenancy package
infrastructure/           Dockerfile, scripts, Postgres init  docs/                   topic guides

Legacy topic guides (modules, queues, redis, portals, …) remain in docs/.

#Development of the framework itself

npm install                                  # Nx
(cd apps/api && composer install && php vendor/bin/phpunit)
(cd packages/laravel-kafka && composer install && php vendor/bin/phpunit)
(cd packages/laravel-tenancy && composer install && php vendor/bin/phpunit)
(cd packages/cli && npm test)

See CONTRIBUTING.md and the release process in DEPLOYMENT.md.

#License

MIT — see LICENSE.

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