A Slack-style team chat app built with Laravel and React. You sign up, spin up a workspace, and organize conversations into channels.

plack.app was built live over two days on stream. Want to see it come together from an empty folder? Here are the recordings:

• Day 1 — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zq4vexfE2zs
• Day 2 — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPHN3wHdP8Q

• Workspaces — every user can create and own workspaces. Each one gets a general channel out of the box so there's somewhere to talk from the start.
• Channels — create, rename, and delete channels inside a workspace. Everything lives at readable slug URLs like /workspaces/acme/channels/general.
• Owner-only access — a workspace belongs to the person who made it. If you're not the owner, you get a 404 and never even learn it exists.
• Accounts done properly — registration, login, email verification, password resets, two-factor auth, and profile/appearance settings all come from Laravel Fortify.

• Laravel 13 on PHP 8.5, with Inertia v3 gluing the backend to the frontend (no separate API layer).
• React 19 + TypeScript, styled with Tailwind v4 and shadcn/Radix components.
• Fortify for auth, Wayfinder for typed route helpers on the frontend, and Essentials for stricter Laravel defaults.
• SQLite by default, so there's no database server to set up. Sessions, the queue, and the cache all live in the database too.
• Bun as the package manager and vite-plus as the bundler.

You'll need:

• PHP 8.5+
• Composer
• Bun
• A coverage driver like Xdebug or pcov if you plan to run the test suite (it enforces 100% coverage).

Clone it and run the setup script:

git clone https://github.com/nunomaduro/plack.app.git
cd plack.app

# Installs deps, creates .env, generates a key, runs migrations, builds the frontend
composer setup

Then start everything with one command:

composer dev

That boots the Laravel server, a queue worker, live log output, and the Vite dev server together. Your app is at http://localhost:8000.

The first bun install also downloads Chromium for the browser tests, so give it a minute the first time.

composer dev     # run the app (server + queue + logs + vite)
composer test    # the full check: linting, types, static analysis, and tests
composer lint    # auto-fix code style (Rector + Pint for PHP, vp for JS/TS)

composer test is the same gate CI runs, and it's strict on purpose. If you want to run just one slice:

composer test:unit           # Pest tests, 100% code coverage required
composer test:types          # PHPStan at max level + tsc
composer test:type-coverage  # 100% type coverage required
composer test:lint           # style check without fixing anything

Browser tests run through Pest's browser plugin (backed by Playwright) and live in tests/Browser.

The backend keeps controllers thin and pushes the real work into small, single-purpose Action classes under app/Actions (for example, creating a workspace and its general channel happens in one transactional action). Read-heavy list queries live in app/Queries.

On the frontend, pages are Inertia components in resources/js/pages, and links to backend routes go through the typed helpers Wayfinder generates, so a renamed route becomes a TypeScript error instead of a broken link.

A heads-up if you're new to the repo: it's opinionated about quality. 100% test and type coverage, PHPStan at max level, and strict style rules are all enforced by composer test, so expect the tooling to push back until things are tidy.

plack.app grew out of the Laravel Starter Kit (Inertia & React), built live on stream. Released under the MIT license.