What is plack.app?

Plack.app is a team chat application similar in style to Slack, built with Laravel on the backend and React on the frontend. Users sign up, create a workspace, and organize their conversations into channels inside that workspace. The project was built live on stream over two days, and the README links to recordings of both sessions for anyone who wants to watch it being built from an empty folder. Each workspace automatically gets a general channel so there is somewhere to talk right away, and users can create, rename, or delete additional channels. Workspaces are private to their owner: if you try to visit a workspace you do not own, you get a plain 404 page rather than any hint that it exists. Account features such as registration, login, email verification, password resets, two factor authentication, and profile settings are handled by Laravel Fortify, a package that provides these common account flows out of the box. On the technical side, the app runs on Laravel 13 and PHP 8.5, using Inertia to connect the backend directly to a React and TypeScript frontend without a separate API layer. Styling uses Tailwind and shadcn components. It uses SQLite as its database by default, so there is no separate database server to install, and even background jobs and caching are stored there too. Bun is used to manage frontend packages. To run it locally you need PHP 8.5 or newer, Composer, and Bun installed, then a single setup command installs dependencies, creates the environment file, runs database migrations, and builds the frontend. Another single command starts the web server, background queue worker, and frontend dev server together. The project enforces strict code quality rules, including 100 percent test coverage and 100 percent type coverage, checked automatically by its test command. The backend code is organized so that controllers stay simple and the actual logic lives in small, single purpose action classes. The project is released under the MIT license and grew out of the author's earlier Laravel and Inertia starter kit.