Celebrating 5 years of Laravel Excel - Patrick Brouwers

Exactly 5 years ago, on the 9th of November 2013, we made the first public commit to our first open source package: Laravel Excel. At Maatwebsite we had just started working with Laravel 4.0 and needed a standardized way of creating Excel exports in our applications. With some simple wrapper code around PHPExcel, Laravel Excel was born!

A look back

A lot has happened in 5 years time. In the infographic underneath, we have outlined the major milestones we reached.

5 year in tweets

When looking back on those 5 years, it was fun to read back our tweets about Laravel Excel.

Over 5000 https://t.co/OnMqGeVwQH installations! Thank you all for using our package and giving great feedback! pic.twitter.com/xAakP4UlCW
— Maatwebsite (@maatwebsite) April 23, 2014

Our first milestone. 5 000 downloads!

Laravel Excel 2nd popular PHP repo of today, after the awesome @octobercms . Thanks for installing! #Laravel pic.twitter.com/HBHjMHjfCl
— Maatwebsite (@maatwebsite) May 18, 2014

Listed as trending PHP package on Github!

Laravel Excel has hit the 10 000 composer downloads. Thanks for using the package! #laravel @laravelphp
— Maatwebsite (@maatwebsite) May 31, 2014

10 000 downloads milestone

Our @laravelphp Excel Package @maatwebsite just reached 1 million downloads https://t.co/8pmD79LzGY Thanks for using the package! #laravel
— Patrick Brouwers (@patrickbrouwers) June 3, 2016

Reaching 1 million downloads

Very happy with all the nice responses from the @laravelphp-community about the new Laravel-Excel 3.0 release. The release was the last push to go over the 6 million @packagist downloads! #Laravel pic.twitter.com/97ciKkAqfc
— Patrick Brouwers (@patrickbrouwers) March 19, 2018

Laravel Excel 3.0 release

Time to celebrate

Just like after reaching 1 million downloads, we had a nice dinner with the entire team. We believe that building open source software made us grow as developers, but also as people. And that’s reason enough to celebrate this new milestone!

The Maatwebsite team (One colleague missing)

Thank you!

Laravel Excel wouldn’t have reached all these milestones without the Laravel community! A big thanks for using Laravel Excel for all these years. Maatwebsite ❤ you! Many thanks for all the super fun postcards we’ve received! We would love to receive yours as well.

Now we’d love to hear from you! When did you start using it? What you’re using it for?

Originally posted at: https://medium.com/maatwebsite/celebrating-5-years-of-laravel-excel-d0416eebca20