Made with Pepper tech stack and architecture

Made with Pepper is a Laravel application designed for ordinary PHP hosting. Buyers receive compiled assets and Composer dependencies in the release package, so production does not require Composer, npm, Vite, Node.js, or command-line access.

Backend

Component	Technology
Language	PHP 8.4+
Framework	Laravel 13
Database for fresh installations	MySQL 8.4, MariaDB 10.11, 11.4 and 11.8
ORM	Eloquent
Mail execution	Database outbox for documents and reminders; invitations send during the request. No queue worker needed
Cache	File driver by default
Session	File driver by default
Mail	SMTP or Resend API

Frontend

Component	Technology
Screens	React 19 with Inertia 3 and TypeScript: Home, documents, customers, items, engagements, purchases, tax periods, files, people, teams, imports, reports, settings, sign-in and the installer
Recurring schedules and public quote responses	React 19 with Inertia 3
PDFs, emails and error pages	Blade. The error pages carry their own styles and need no compiled assets
UI primitives	Base UI
Styling	Tailwind CSS 4
Build tooling	Vite
Icons	Phosphor, bundled
Charts	The pages draw their own charts as SVG. Made with Pepper bundles no chart library
Fonts	Bundled Figtree for working text, IBM Plex Mono for amounts and references, and IBM Plex Sans Arabic for Arabic. CJK text uses system fonts

Every interactive screen is a React page. Inertia loads the pages from Laravel routes. The pages share the navigation, fonts, colors and icons. The React pages run in the browser only. Made with Pepper has no server-side rendering and no Node.js process. The installer also runs before a database exists.

Invoice and financial libraries

Purpose	Package
PDF rendering	`barryvdh/laravel-dompdf`
Money calculations	`brick/money`
EPC QR codes	`chillerlan/php-qrcode`
Audit log	Built-in audit log service
Roles and permissions	`spatie/laravel-permission`
CSV import/export	`league/csv`

Design constraints

Made with Pepper does not require Redis, Horizon, Octane, server-side Chrome, Puppeteer, Composer, npm, Vite, Node.js, or CDN access in production. The default configuration must work on shared hosting.

Runtime assets are local only. Made with Pepper does not load fonts, scripts, styles, icons, chart libraries, installer assets, or PDF assets from CDNs.

For buyers

Upload the release package and visit your domain. You should not need Composer, npm, Vite, Node.js, or command-line access for a normal installation.

The release package includes:

vendor/ with Composer dependencies
public/build/ with compiled frontend assets
A root .htaccess for Apache shared hosting accounts that cannot point the document root to public/
.env.example as the configuration template

The release package does not include node_modules/ or a production .env file.

For developers

The release package includes the PHP source, Blade views, migrations, language files and React, TypeScript, JavaScript and CSS source. You can change them for your own installation. The PDF, email and error-page templates are Blade views.

The frontend build inputs are:

resources/js/ and resources/css/
package.json and package-lock.json
vite.config.ts and tsconfig.json

To change the frontend:

Extract a copy of the release package on your development computer.
Install Node.js and npm. The package build uses Node.js 22.21.1 and npm 10.9.4.
Open a terminal in the extracted package directory.
Install the locked dependencies:
```
npm ci --ignore-scripts
```
Change the files in resources/js/ or resources/css/.
Build the assets:
```
npm run build
```
Upload the rebuilt public/build/ directory to your installation.

Test your changes on a separate copy before using them with live invoice data. Keep a copy of the previous assets for recovery.

The build, dev and typecheck npm scripts support frontend changes. The internal test suite and lint configuration are private and are not included. The package includes the font and library licenses.

Made with Pepper is developed with Composer and Node.js. You do not need them to install or run it, because the package includes the built assets and the PHP dependencies.