README

A canonical TALL-stack app framework for Laravel.

"From apprentice to mage of the web."

Status

Preview — design in progress. This repository is the foundation for the Sparrowhawk framework and its ecosystem. APIs and structure are not yet stable.

Vision

Sparrowhawk is what sits between bare Laravel and Filament / Nova: an opinionated app framework for the TALL stack (Tailwind, Alpine.js, Laravel, Livewire). It provides conventions, a project skeleton, integration glue, and a finite catalog of canonical web-app patterns — without inventing a new DSL on top of Laravel.

You keep writing plain Livewire components, Alpine directives, Blade views, and Tailwind classes. Sparrowhawk supplies the surrounding structure: how things are named, where they go, how they wire up, and what production-grade looks like for the patterns every web app eventually needs.

Five pillars

Conventions — directory layout, naming, and service-provider composition rules
Skeleton — composer create-project yields a production-ready TALL-stack app
Integration glue — auth, permissions, billing, search, notifications, file upload, settings, audit log, i18n, a11y — wired together under one canonical convention
Canonical pattern catalog — a finite, co-tested set of web-app patterns that LLMs and humans both produce reliably
Readability first — minimal magic, explicit code, inspectable views; the generated code itself doubles as documentation

What Sparrowhawk is not

Not an admin-panel auto-generator (that's Filament's space; the Sparrowhawk-native visual builder is Sparrowhawk Studio, a hosted SaaS — see Ecosystem below)
Not a UI component library (that's pinion-ui)
Not framework-agnostic — Laravel-tight by design
Not a new DSL to learn — Blade components are optional, view sources are copy-pasteable (shadcn/ui-style)
Not specialised for any vertical (finance, healthcare, gaming) — focused on the generic patterns shared across web apps
Not optimised for extreme scale (10⁵ RPS, CQRS, event sourcing) — that's outside scope

Ecosystem

Sparrowhawk Labs ships two related-but-distinct brand systems under one roof:

Sparrowhawk — the "wizard tools" axis: the framework itself plus the visual builder built on it
Pinion — the plugin family: UI components, icons, and future companion plugins

Open source

sparrowhawk-labs/sparrowhawk — the framework core (this repository)
sparrowhawk-labs/pinion-ui — Blade UI components (Tailwind v4 + daisyUI v5 + Alpine.js, 11-preset Tune token system)
sparrowhawk-labs/pinion-icons — unified icon system (<x-i> Blade tag, Solar / Fluent Emoji / Pixelarticons)
sparrowhawk-labs/pinion-ui-playground — showcase Laravel app demonstrating the UI catalog

Commercial

Sparrowhawk Studio — the Sparrowhawk-native visual builder, planned as a hosted SaaS. Drag-and-drop assembly that emits canonical Sparrowhawk code (plain Livewire / Alpine / Blade) — same patterns you'd hand-write, generated faster and stitched cleanly into a Sparrowhawk skeleton.

Why two brands

The pinion-* series is the curated plugin family that ships alongside Sparrowhawk. pinion (= primary feather, 風切り羽) is the single wing-feather a sparrowhawk steers with — the metaphor keeps the plugin family rooted to the framework while letting each piece (UI, icons, future plugins) stand on its own as a usable Composer package.

Sparrowhawk and Sparrowhawk Studio share the framework name because they are the same conceptual thing seen from two angles: the OSS framework you write code against, and the SaaS workbench that helps you generate that code visually.

Inspiration

The project draws its name from Ursula K. Le Guin's Earthsea — a story about a young wizard (Sparrowhawk) whose journey from apprentice to mage mirrors the path of a developer learning to wield powerful tools with care. The true name motif fits an open-source framework: name a thing well, and you can work with it.

License

MIT. See LICENSE.

Sponsor

Crafted by Yakaze Tech Studio.

sparrowhawk-labs / sparrowhawk

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