🚀 Introducing Xetaravel-Counts: A Laravel Package to Automatically Maintain Your Relation Counters

When building medium or large Laravel applications — ERP systems, CRMs, business platforms, SaaS dashboards — you often run into the same recurring need: keeping *_count fields in your database in sync with your Eloquent relations.

Typical examples:

A category needs its articles_count
A user needs its roles_count
A material needs its parts_count
A part needs its materials_count
A tag needs posts_count etc.

Laravel’s withCount() is great for on-the-fly counting, but in many cases you want a real column stored in the database for:

much better performance (dashboards, APIs)
avoiding constant COUNT(*) queries
sorting and filtering without subqueries
reporting and exporting
analytics

👉 That’s exactly why I created Xetaravel-Counts, a lightweight package that automatically keeps your *_count fields up-to-date with zero boilerplate code.

🎯 Why Xetaravel-Counts?

Because doing this manually is painful:

repetitive observers
forgetting edge cases (delete, restore, relation changes…)
risk of race conditions if using manual saves
duplicated logic across models

With this package, all you need is:

a trait, and
a tiny configuration And everything becomes fully automatic.

🔧 Key Features

✅ Automatic handling of belongsTo relationships

Example: Article → Category The trait will automatically:

increment on creation
decrement on deletion
update the old & new parents when the relation changes
re-increment after restore() when using SoftDeletes

✅ Automatic handling of belongsToMany relations (pivot)

Example: Material ↔ Part Using a special Pivot trait:

increments/decrements on attach() and detach()
handles sync() properly
suitable for bulk operations

All without writing a single observer.

🔒 Reliable thanks to Atomic SQL updates

The package uses Eloquent’s:

increment()
decrement()

These generate atomic SQL updates like:

UPDATE materials SET parts_count = parts_count + 1 WHERE id = ?;

This avoids concurrency issues and ensures accurate counters even under heavy load.

🚀 Example Usage

belongsTo (Category / Article)

class Article extends Model
{
    use HasRelatedCount;

    protected static $countedRelations = [
        'category' => 'articles_count',
    ];
}

belongsToMany (Material / Part)

class MaterialPart extends Pivot
{
    use HasBelongsToManyCounts;

    protected static array $countsConfig = [
        'material' => 'parts_count',
        'part' => 'materials_count',
    ];
}

That’s it — no extra logic in your controllers or services.

⚙️ Installation

composer require xeta/xetaravel-counts

No configuration needed — auto-discovery enabled.

📦 Typical Use Cases

ERP systems (stock, materials, parts, incidents…)
CMS/blog (posts, comments, tags)
Marketplaces (categories, products, vendors)
Social networks (likes, followers, messages)
SaaS admin panels (tickets, licensing, usage stats)

If your app uses Eloquent relationships, there is a very high chance this package will save you time and prevent bugs.

📚 Full Documentation

Available on GitHub: 👉 https://github.com/XetaIO/Xetaravel-Counts