Bundles in laravel

 In Laravel, a bundle refers to a package or collection of files that provide additional functionality to your application. Bundles are a way to organize and distribute reusable code in Laravel, similar to packages in other frameworks.

Before Laravel 4, bundles were the primary way of adding third-party functionality to Laravel applications. They allowed developers to easily share and distribute components, extensions, and plugins. However, starting from Laravel 4, the concept of bundles has been replaced by packages.

Packages in Laravel 4 and above are essentially the evolution of bundles, providing a more standardized and modular approach to extending Laravel applications. Packages are typically published on the Packagist repository and can be installed via Composer, which is the standard dependency management tool for PHP.

With packages, you can easily include external libraries or add custom functionality to your Laravel application. Packages can be specific to Laravel or can be standalone PHP libraries that can be used with any framework.

To include a package in your Laravel application, you typically add the package's name and version to your composer.json file and run composer update to install the package and its dependencies.

Laravel has a vibrant ecosystem of packages that cover a wide range of functionality, including authentication, caching, database management, image processing, and more. Some popular Laravel packages include Laravel Telescope for debugging, Laravel Passport for API authentication, and Laravel Nova for administration panels.

Overall, while bundles were used in earlier versions of Laravel, the concept has been replaced by packages in recent versions. Packages provide a more standardized and flexible way to extend Laravel applications with additional functionality.