Introduction

Modular monoliths in Laravel usually rely on nwidart/laravel-modules, InterNACHI/modular or a hand-made app/Modules folder. All of them organise code, but none of them stops the Billing module from reaching into Catalog's models. Six months later the "modules" are just folders.

Cordon Modulith reads your code statically, builds the dependency graph between modules and fails the build when a module:

• uses internal classes of another module instead of its public API (internal_access),
• depends on a module it did not declare (undeclared_dependency), or
• takes part in a dependency cycle (cycles).

It is inspired by Spring Modulith and Shopify's Packwerk, adapted to Laravel conventions.

What it is not

• It does not create, register or load modules. Keep using nwidart, InterNACHI or your own folders.
• It does not run at request time. It is a dev dependency for your terminal, CI, tests and editor.
• It does not check rules inside a module (for example "controllers must be final"). Pest's arch() and PHPStan are great at that.

How it works

1. A resolver finds your modules (name, namespace, path).
2. Every PHP file inside a module is parsed with nikic/php-parser. Your code is never loaded or executed.
3. Every class reference (new, static calls, type declarations, extends/implements, traits, attributes, instanceof, catch, ::class...) is mapped to the module that owns it by namespace. Import statements alone, function calls and constants don't count.
4. References that cross a module boundary are checked by the rules.
5. Known violations can be ignored with a baseline.

Next: install it.