标签：#filament

Filament's export action is great. It's quick to set up, supports queued exports, includes column mapping, handles notifications, and keeps a history of generated files through the Export model. For most use cases, it's exactly what you need. But I recently ran into a limitation that the native export couldn't solve. When XLSX isn't really Excel I was exporting financial data or measurements from a Filament table. The export worked. The file downloaded. Excel opened it without any issue. The problem was that every amount was exported as text instead of a real numeric value. For an accountant, that creates several problems immediately: Excel formulas such as =SUM() don't work correctly Selecting a range of cells doesn't display totals in Excel's status bar Conditional formatting based on numeric values becomes unreliable Additional manual cleanup is required before the file can be used Technically the export contained the data. Practically, it wasn't usable. The root cause is simple: Filament's export system is designed around CSV-style exports. That's perfect for many scenarios, but it doesn't expose the full spreadsheet capabilities offered by PhpSpreadsheet and Laravel Excel . On top of that, I also had a second, completely different requirement: a yearly report with one worksheet per month, merged headers, borders, conditional formatting, and custom layouts. Not a table dump but a report. Why not just use Laravel Excel directly? Laravel Excel already solves all of these problems. It's built on PhpSpreadsheet and provides complete control over cell types, number formats, formulas, styling, and multiple worksheets. The obvious solution would have been to abandon Filament's export action entirely and build custom exports from scratch. But that means losing everything Filament already provides: Export modal and options form Column mapping UI Queue handling Progress notifications Download links Export model history I didn't want to rebuild all of that. I simply wanted

For a while, my starter kits didn't include any Docker configuration. The foundation was solid with auth, roles, MFA, Horizon, Logs Viewer, but the deployment side was left to whoever cloned the project. That was a deliberate choice at first. Docker setups vary a lot depending on the infrastructure: some people use a reverse proxy, others have Cloudflare in front, some run on bare metal, others on managed platforms. I didn't want to ship something that would need to be ripped out immediately. But over time I changed my mind. Here's why and what the process taught me. The problem with "just configure it yourself" Leaving deployment out of a starter kit sounds reasonable. In practice, it means every project starts with the same 4-6 hours of Docker work that never really changes. Multi-stage Dockerfile. PHP-FPM config. Nginx with HTTPS. PostgreSQL and Redis wired up. Horizon and the scheduler running as proper services. Healthchecks everywhere so Docker knows when things are actually ready. None of it is so complicated. But it's time-consuming, easy to get subtly wrong, and almost identical from one project to the next. Once I admitted that, the question wasn't whether to include Docker, it was how to do it in a way that's actually useful without being too opinionated about production infrastructure. What I ended up building The setup I settled on covers the full local development stack: A multi-stage Dockerfile : separate stages for Composer dependencies, Node assets, and the final PHP-FPM image. Keeps the production image lean. Nginx with HTTP-to-HTTPS redirect and a self-signed certificate for local dev, already included, no setup needed. PostgreSQL and Redis as services with proper healthchecks. Horizon and the scheduler as dedicated services, not crammed into the main app container. A bootstrap service that runs php artisan migrate --force before the app starts. The Dockerfile uses three stages to keep the final image as lean as possible: FROM php:8.4-fpm-alpine A