haphpiness

These are things in PHP which make me genuinely_happy();

549 Million Laravel Installs

The laravel/framework package has been installed 549,231,950 times via Composer. The Laravel starter project has 84,737 GitHub stars — making it one of the most-starred repositories in any programming language's ecosystem.

549M
Framework installs
84,737
GitHub stars
19,863
Dependent packages

To put 84K stars in perspective: that's in the same league as React, Vue.js, and Angular. This is a PHP framework competing with the most popular JavaScript projects on the planet.

Nearly 20,000 Packagist packages depend on Laravel — an entire sub-ecosystem of tools, integrations, and packages built specifically for it. Forge, Vapor, Nova, Livewire, Inertia, Cashier, Sanctum, Horizon, Telescope, Pulse — the official first-party ecosystem alone covers deployment, billing, real-time, monitoring, and more.

Laravel proved that PHP could have a modern, elegant developer experience that rivals anything in any language. It didn't just keep PHP relevant — it made PHP exciting again.

Source: Packagist.org · GitHub, July 2026

Significance: Renaissance

Laravel is the single biggest reason PHP's reputation changed. It showed that you could write beautiful, expressive, well-tested PHP with a framework that respected developers' time. Half a billion installs later, the evidence is overwhelming: the modern PHP renaissance is real, and Laravel is its flagship.