Migrating Legacy PHP Monoliths to Laravel: A Practitioner Playbook

Abstract

A step-by-step playbook ΓÇö strangler-fig routing, incremental Eloquent adoption and automated regression testing ΓÇö drawn from three enterprise migrations.

Methodology

The study follows a reproducible pipeline with publicly documented datasets and open-source tooling. Full experimental details, code and evaluation notebooks are available on request from the authors.

Key Findings

• Practical, low-cost approaches can match or exceed commercial baselines in the local context.
• Reproducibility and documentation significantly improve adoption by practitioners.
• Results are integrated into the ITA Academia curriculum as case studies.