Introduction
Our Mission
To further enable the "build it faster" mindset by pre-integrating key tools so that you can stand up fully functional subscription-based applications in minutes, not hours or days.
Setting Expectations
Where We Are Today
Nexus is a project that requires a user to clone a repo, with lots of wiring inside the framework itself. We've intentionally kept the wiring to a minimum, but it's there nonetheless.
My desired endgame here is that Nexus becomes a Composer project, following a common Laravel convention: composer require org/project, followed by an artisan command like nexus:install which sets up the bare-bones pieces, including creation of the first 2 panels (central context) and some of the tenant/ prefixed stuff.
What We Deliver
Nexus gives you an integrated environment for Laravel, Filament, and Tenancy, with very few other customizations. We want to give you room to build your dream without getting in the way.
What We Don't Deliver
We've intentionally avoided billing integration. Why? Every project will have its own needs and preferences in this area. You might want to use Stripe or Paddle or some other completely custom payment solution.
Maybe you want to use Laravel Spark. I contemplated adding Spark to this package so I could get things going much faster, but that would have forced anyone who wants to use Nexus to buy a Spark license. That didn't seem fair.
We will maintain a Laravel-Spark (Paddle) version of Nexus for those who wish to use that, but covering every possible use-case is not feasible or maintainable for us. This might change if the community steps in to provide support.
The Core Tooling
Laravel's "Build It Faster" is achieved by giving you a set of back-end tools and plugins - a broad ecosystem - so that you can create any PHP app extremely rapidly, with reliable tooling.
Filament's "Build It Faster" is achieved by layering interfaces and connections on top of a Laravel project. Combined with some command-line tooling to enable rapid extension, Filament can help you create user interfaces in minutes.
The Tenancy Problem
As great as the above tooling is, there's a gap. Filament's built-in tenancy supports single-database operations. That means you need to add tenant_id to all the relevant tables and ensure that global scopes are applied to all operations to prevent data leakage. This model is fine for some applications.
An alternative approach is to create a new database or schema for each new tenant. The challenges to this approach are that application complexity increases, and data becomes more isolated (you can't join across databases, for instance, since each gets its own connection).
The benefits of this approach are that tenant data is isolated, you don't have to take any additional steps to ensure no leakage between tenants, and migrating a noisy neighbor to dedicated hardware is as simple as making a snapshot, standing up a new database instance, and adding the new connection details to the tenant configuration.
How Nexus Solves It
We use the stancl/tenancy package to deliver multi-database, domain-derived multi-tenancy. This package is compatible with Filament and ensures that all tenant operations happen in a tenant context (connections to database, queues, storage, etc., are scoped).