barryvdh/laravel-ide-helper

Laravel IDE Helper is a developer tool that adds autocomplete intelligence to projects built with Laravel, the popular PHP web framework. Laravel uses a lot of dynamic and magic-method tricks, like Facades and Eloquent models with database-driven properties, that code editors cannot infer on their own. This package generates extra PHPDoc files describing those things, so editors like PhpStorm or VS Code can show accurate autocompletion, parameter hints, and type information. Installation is a single composer command: composer require --dev barryvdh/laravel-ide-helper, since the package is only needed during development. The README notes that the current 3.x branch supports Laravel 10 and later, and earlier Laravel versions should stay on the 2.x releases. The main commands are three Artisan console calls. php artisan ide-helper:generate creates an _ide_helper.php file describing all the Facades. php artisan ide-helper:models inspects your Eloquent model classes, reads their database table columns, relations, and getters/setters, and either writes that information directly into the model files or into a separate _ide_helper_models.php. php artisan ide-helper:meta creates a PhpStorm meta file so the IDE knows what concrete classes come back from the service container. The README walks through useful options: -W to write changes directly into model files, -R to reset existing PHPDoc blocks, -M to add a mixin tag instead of full docs (which avoids duplicate-annotation warnings), and -H to include helper files. There are knobs for ignoring certain models, scanning custom model directories, supporting real-time facades, and using an in-memory SQLite connection when the regular database is not available. Users often wire the generate and meta commands into composer.json so they run automatically after each composer update.