Eloquent Events vs Domain Events: Why the Framework Hook Isn't Enough

Book: Decoupled PHP — Clean and Hexagonal Architecture for Applications That Outlive the Framework Also by me: Thinking in Go (2-book series) — Complete Guide to Go Programming + Hexagonal Architecture in Go My project: Hermes IDE | GitHub — an IDE for developers who ship with Claude Code and other AI coding tools Me: xgabriel.com | GitHub You wire a listener to Eloquent's saved event on the Order model. When an order is saved, send the confirmation email. It works in the demo. Then a support ticket lands: a customer got two confirmation emails for one purchase, and another got a refund receipt for an order that was never refunded. You dig in. The double email came from a background job that touched updated_at on the order to bump a cache. The bogus receipt came from an admin editing the shipping address, which saved the model, which fired saved , which ran a listener that assumed "saved means the order changed state." None of that was the customer's intent. All of it was persistence. That's the whole problem in one sentence. saved tells you a row hit the database. It does not tell you what happened in your business. What Eloquent events actually fire on Eloquent dispatches creating , created , updating , updated , saving , saved , deleting , deleted , and a few more. Every one of them is tied to a persistence operation on a single model. They fire because you called save() , update() , create() , or delete() , not because a business rule was satisfied. Here is the shape most teams start with: <?php namespace App\Models ; use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Model ; class Order extends Model { protected static function booted (): void { static :: updated ( function ( Order $order ): void { // "the order changed, email the customer" OrderMailer :: confirmation ( $order ); }); } } The listener assumes updated means "something the customer cares about changed." It doesn't. updated fires for any dirty column: a cached counter, a nightly touch() , an admin fixing a typo in t