What is prompts?

Laravel Prompts is a PHP package that lets you add beautiful, user-friendly forms to command-line applications. Instead of making people type raw commands into a terminal, you can present them with interactive prompts that feel more like filling out a form in a web browser, complete with placeholder text and built-in validation. At a high level, the package gives developers a set of tools to ask users for input in a structured way. Rather than building a basic text prompt from scratch and handling all the edge cases themselves, developers can use these pre-built components to create a smoother experience. The idea is to bring the polish of web forms, things like guiding placeholder text and checking that input is valid before moving on, into the terminal. The primary audience is developers building command-line tools in PHP, especially those working with Laravel's Artisan console system (Laravel's built-in way of creating command-line commands). For example, if you're building a tool that scaffolds new projects, migrates a database, or configures an application, you might need to ask the user several questions, what database engine they're using, what their username is, whether they want certain features enabled. This package lets you present those questions in a clean, guided way rather than leaving users to figure out the right format on their own. The README is fairly brief and points readers to the official Laravel documentation site for full details, so it doesn't dive into the specific prompt types available or the exact API. What's clear from the introduction, though, is that the focus is on bringing browser-quality user experience to a place where it's historically been lacking, the command line, which typically offers only the most basic text input.