After some fiddling building a package for a project we've realised there's some issues with doing what we need to achieve as per Laravel 5 package development clarity
Maybe I should rather explain my goal and someone can suggest a direction to head in.
We've built a Laravel 5 application that now needs to be "re-used".
We had to modify Laravel and implement an Eloquent type base model as our data-source is actually C# Web Services. At the point the call would be made to a database we intercept this and make an "API" call to SOAP.
The major difference will be CSS, maybe some JS & content but all the routes/controllers/models will remain the same across all projects. Most configuration comes from endpoints.
Initially we considered creating multiple asset repositories for each site's styling and have a base repo which is the core Laravel project that gets included. This seemed to get quite complex as we couldn't simply just have a repo in a repo due to branching and multiple directory issues.
We then started experimenting with the idea of building the "core" as a Laravel package but we seem to constantly hit walls. The latest problem being including models in the package. For the models to be called we are using the root projects config/composer to access these models instead of just the service provider. It feels like the package is becoming to tightly coupled to the project config.
Are there any better ways of going about what we are trying to achieve?
Edit:
I forgot about the multiple branch solution on 1 repo but wouldn't this get ugly when it comes to feature development? Example:
master (core with releases that get pulled into _site*)
dev (master dev)
feedback-form (eg. master branch feature)
_site1 (root site with releases)
_site1-dev (_site1 dev)
_site1-reskin (eg. _site1 feature)
_site2 (root site with releases)
_site3 (root site with releases)
This leaving quite a bit of destructive merge power in the developers hands? Read access with pull requests maybe a solution to this?
So after some R&D it seems the best solution right now is to have 1 repo with multiple branches. Developers have read access and have each developer creates his own fork. Developers create pull requests and sync to parent repo through "upstream" remote and developers sync each others forks through additional remotes.
Seems a little clumsy but probably "cleanest" option.