November 24, 2025

Beacon-hq/Bag: Immutable Value Objects for Modern PHP

package

If you've ever wished PHP had cleaner, safer, and more predictable ways to handle structured data, Bag might become your new favorite tool. Created by Davey Shafik, Bag gives you a super lightweight way to build immutable, strongly typed value objects — without the noise, the boilerplate, or the framework lock-in.

And yes… it plays beautifully with Laravel out of the box.

What Is Bag?

Bag is a tiny PHP 8.3+ package that lets you define immutable value objects with:

Strong typing
Built-in validation
Input/output casting
Collection support
Easy composition (nest value objects inside each other)

In other words: Stop passing messy arrays around your app — and start working with clean, predictable objects instead.

Why Use Value Objects?

When your application grows, plain arrays become a silent source of bugs:

Fields get renamed
Data shape changes
Types become inconsistent
Validation logic gets duplicated everywhere

Value objects fix all of that by enforcing structure and type-safety at the edges of your system.

Bag takes that idea and makes it incredibly smooth to implement.

How It Works (Quick Example)

Define a Value Object

use Bag\Bag;

readonly class MyValue extends Bag {
    public function __construct(
        public string $name,
        public int $age,
    ) {}
}

Instantiate It

$data = MyValue::from([
    'name' => 'Davey Shafik',
    'age' => 40,
]);

That’s it — clean, immutable, validated data, every time.