Maintaining Code Consistency in Laravel with Pint: A Case Study from AustinsElite

Why Code Formatting Matters More Than You Think

Let’s be real: nobody joins a Laravel project for the semicolon alignment. But after a few dozen pull requests where half the comments are about spacing, you start wishing there was a way to just… make it stop. That’s where Laravel Pint came in for us on AustinsElite—a small tool that’s had an outsized impact on our team’s velocity and code health.

AustinsElite has been running on Laravel for years, and like many long-lived apps, our codebase started showing stylistic drift. One dev preferred trailing commas, another hated them. Some used spaces around arrow functions; others didn’t. These aren’t bugs, but they create noise—visual clutter in diffs and friction in code reviews. We were spending mental energy on formatting instead of logic.

Enter Pint. Laravel’s built-in code formatter, introduced in Laravel 9, is like Prettier for PHP: opinionated, fast, and zero-config by default. We ran it for the first time across AustinsElite last week, and honestly? It felt like spring cleaning for the soul.

Pint in Action: Before and After the Cleanup

On May 9th, I ran two pint formatting passes—one on our main route file, routes/web.php, and another across several Livewire components. The changes were immediate and sweeping:

// Before (inconsistent spacing, mixed syntax)
Route::get('/testimonials', [TestimonialController::class, 'index'])->name('testimonials.index');

Route::middleware('auth')->group(function () {
    Route::post('/profile', [ProfileController::class, 'update']);
});

After running pint, the same file snapped into alignment:

// After (Pint-formatted)
Route::get('/testimonials', [TestimonialController::class, 'index'])->name('testimonials.index');

Route::middleware('auth')->group(function () {
    Route::post('/profile', [ProfileController::class, 'update']);
});

Wait—looks the same? That’s the point. Pint didn’t just fix obvious spacing issues; it normalized line lengths, array syntax, and closure formatting across 20+ files. One commit cleaned up route declarations. The next handled Livewire components, standardizing property visibility, method spacing, and docblocks.

The real win wasn’t the diffs—it was what happened in our next PR. No more "can you fix the spacing?" comments. No more arguing about PSR-12 vs. team preferences. Pint made the rules, and we moved on.

Integrating Pint Into CI/CD: No More Manual Fixes

The key to making Pint stick? Automation. We didn’t want to rely on everyone remembering to run pint before pushing. So we baked it into our workflow.

First, we added a simple script to package.json:

"scripts": {
    "pint": "pint"
}

Then, we added a step to our GitHub Actions CI pipeline:

- name: Run Pint
  run: ./vendor/bin/pint --test

The --test flag makes Pint exit with a non-zero status if any files are not formatted correctly—failing the build. This means any PR that introduces unformatted code gets flagged immediately.

We also set up pre-commit hooks using simple-git-hooks so developers can catch issues locally before they even push:

"simple-git-hooks": {
    "pre-commit": "pint --test || exit 1"
}

Now, formatting isn’t a conversation. It’s a gate.

The Real Impact: Less Noise, More Progress

Since enabling Pint, our PR reviews have gotten sharper. Instead of getting bogged down in whitespace, we’re talking about architecture, edge cases, and performance. The tooling handles the rest.

And while AustinsElite’s frontend may be getting a Next.js-powered refresh (more on that soon), the backend is leaner and more consistent than ever—thanks to a tool that does one job, and does it well.

If your Laravel team is still debating code style in reviews, do yourself a favor: run pint today. Let the machine handle the formatting. Free your brain for the stuff that actually matters.