Migrating a PHP App to Laravel

18 items · Technical · Hard difficulty · 2 hours

Step-by-step checklist to move a legacy PHP app into a modern Laravel structure.

• Audit codebase and dependencies

  List PHP version, libraries, custom frameworks, and deprecated code.

• Export database schema and constraints

  Dump schema, FK relations, and indexes for model mapping.

• Create new Laravel project scaffold
• Install required Composer packages

  Add auth, queue, and DB drivers needed for your app.

• Configure environment (.env) and app settings

  Set DB, cache, queue, mail, and APP_KEY values.

• Set up version control and branch strategy

  Create a migration branch and define CI hooks and reviews.

• Map legacy routes to Laravel routes

  List endpoints, HTTP verbs, and middleware equivalents.

• Create controllers and map actions

  Group related endpoints into controllers and actions.

• Extract business logic into service classes

  Move domain logic out of controllers into reusable services.

• Create Eloquent models and relationships

  Define models, casts, fillable, relationships, and accessors.

• Write database migrations and seeders

  Translate schema to Laravel migrations and create seeders.

• Run data migration scripts and verify integrity

  Migrate production data and validate row counts and FK integrity.

• Convert PHP views to Blade templates and update assets

  Replace includes, echo syntax, and update asset paths.

• Implement authentication and authorization with Laravel

  Use Breeze/Jetstream or guards and map roles/permissions.

• Migrate queues, jobs, and scheduled tasks

  Map cron jobs to scheduler and legacy jobs to Laravel jobs/queues.

• Port tests to Laravel's PHPUnit TestCase

  Convert or rewrite unit and feature tests to Laravel format.

• Configure CI/CD and deployment for Laravel

  Update build, run migrations, and set env handling in deployment.

• Run end-to-end QA, performance tests, and create rollback plan

  Smoke test endpoints, load test, and document rollback steps.

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