Installation

Require the package. The service provider is auto-discovered and registers the global Reviews facade alias, and its two Roundly dependencies — Media Library for Laravel and Enums for Laravel — plus the package toolkit are installed automatically:

composer require roundly-consulting/reviews-for-laravel

php artisan vendor:publish --tag="reviews-migrations"
php artisan vendor:publish --tag="media-migrations"
php artisan migrate

Publish-only migrations

The package loads no migrations of its own, so a bare php artisan migrate creates nothing until you have published them. reviews-migrations publishes the reviews and review_votes tables; media-migrations publishes Media Library’s media table, which stores review photos.

If your authors, subjects or voters use UUID or ULID keys, publish the config and set key_type before you migrate — see Database schema.

Optional publishing

The config file is optional — every key has a sensible, mostly env-backed default. Publish it only to override:

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

Translations (the validation and moderation messages) and the JSON resources (to reshape the API output) publish separately:

# Translations → lang/vendor/reviews
php artisan vendor:publish --tag="reviews-translations"

# JSON resources → app/Http/Resources/Reviews
php artisan vendor:publish --tag="reviews-resources"

Cached aggregate columns are opt-in and have their own tag — publish that stub once per reviewable table (see Cached aggregates):

php artisan vendor:publish --tag="reviews-aggregate-migrations"
php artisan migrate

The complete set of publish tags is reviews-config, reviews-migrations, reviews-translations, reviews-resources and reviews-aggregate-migrations.

Next steps

• Add HasReviews to the models people review and CanReview to the models that write reviews.
• Create your first review with Reviews::for($subject)->by($author).
• Decide on moderation: keep the pending queue, auto-approve, or plug in a moderator.