Installation

Require the package. The service provider, the Approvals facade alias and the global approvals() helper are auto-discovered — nothing to register:

composer require roundly-consulting/approvals-for-laravel

php artisan vendor:publish --tag="approvals-migrations"
php artisan migrate

Publish-only migrations

The migrations are not loaded automatically — php artisan migrate creates nothing until you have published them. The seven files land in database/migrations with timestamps that preserve their order, so migrate creates the four tables and applies each schema change after the table it alters:

Do the models that give or receive approvals use UUID or ULID keys? Set key_type before you migrate — it types every polymorphic id column (see Models & schema).

Upgrading from 1.0.0

Version 1.0.1 adds migration 0007. Publish it — the migrations you already published stay as they are — and migrate. It only acts on PostgreSQL with key_type uuid, where every decision on a request failed under 1.0.0; everywhere else it does nothing:

php artisan vendor:publish --tag="approvals-migrations"
php artisan migrate

MySQL: migrate failed with SQLSTATE 1071

Up to 1.1.0, 0001_create_approvals_table failed on MySQL 8 with utf8mb4 (SQLSTATE 1071, “Specified key was too long; max key length is 3072 bytes”): its approvals_actor_approvable_status_index came to 3076 bytes. Version 1.1.1 fixes the migration in place — the index now covers actor_id, actor_type, approvable_id and approvable_type, and status keeps its own index. MySQL does not roll DDL back, so the failed run left an empty approvals table behind. To recover, update the package, republish the migrations over your copies, drop that table and migrate:

composer update roundly-consulting/approvals-for-laravel
php artisan vendor:publish --tag="approvals-migrations" --force
php artisan db                   # then: DROP TABLE approvals;  (empty, left by the failed run)
php artisan migrate

Every other install — PostgreSQL, or MySQL on utf8mb3, where the old 0001 ran — needs nothing. It keeps the five-column index under the same name, which serves the same queries, and no later migration touches it.

Config (optional)

The package runs with zero host configuration. Publish the config only when you want to change a default:

php artisan vendor:publish --tag="approvals-config"

The only publish tags are approvals-migrations and approvals-config — the package ships no views or translations.

Next steps

• Add GivesApprovals to the model that decides and HasApprovals to the model that is decided on.
• Add RequiresApproval to anything that needs sign-off from several approvers.
• Record your first decision with the Approvals facade.