Celebrating 5 years of Laravel Excel

Patrick Brouwers
Spartner
Published in
2 min readNov 9, 2018

Exactly 5 years ago, on the 9th of November 2013, we made the first public commit to our first open source package: Laravel Excel. At Maatwebsite we had just started working with Laravel 4.0 and needed a standardized way of creating Excel exports in our applications. With some simple wrapper code around PHPExcel, Laravel Excel was born!

A look back

A lot has happened in 5 years time. In the infographic underneath, we have outlined the major milestones we reached.

5 year in tweets

When looking back on those 5 years, it was fun to read back our tweets about Laravel Excel.

Our first milestone. 5 000 downloads!
Listed as trending PHP package on Github!
10 000 downloads milestone
Reaching 1 million downloads
Laravel Excel 3.0 release
Integration with Laravel Nova.
Laravel Excel 3.1 release.

Time to celebrate

Just like after reaching 1 million downloads, we had a nice dinner with the entire team. We believe that building open source software made us grow as developers, but also as people. And that’s reason enough to celebrate this new milestone!

The Maatwebsite team (One colleague missing)

Thank you!

Laravel Excel wouldn’t have reached all these milestones without the Laravel community! A big thanks for using Laravel Excel for all these years. Maatwebsite ❤ you! Many thanks for all the super fun postcards we’ve received! We would love to receive yours as well.

Now we’d love to hear from you! When did you start using it? What you’re using it for? Feel free to share it in the comments!

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Patrick Brouwers
Spartner

Loves building awesome things in Laravel, VueJS and TailwindCss. Working @ Spartner. Maintainer of Laravel Excel.