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Philosophy

Chronicle is built around a small set of strong design constraints.

Append-only ledger​

Entries are immutable once written.

Chronicle intentionally does not provide APIs to:

  • update entries
  • delete entries
  • rewrite history

If a correction is needed, it should be recorded as a new entry.

Explicit intent​

Every entry must include:

  • actor
  • action
  • subject

Chronicle avoids vague audit events. The package is optimized for deliberate, domain-specific logging such as user.email_changed rather than generic “something changed” records.

Low magic​

Chronicle intentionally avoids:

  • automatic model observers
  • hidden logging hooks
  • implicit activity recording

Every Chronicle entry should be an explicit developer decision.

Stable contracts​

Chronicle treats its verification and export structures as durable contracts. Export manifests are versioned so downstream tooling has a clear compatibility boundary.

Transport agnostic​

Chronicle is designed to work equally well in:

  • HTTP requests
  • queue workers
  • CLI commands
  • background jobs

The logging model is not tied to a specific Laravel runtime path.

Tamper detection over illusion​

Chronicle does not pretend to make your database impossible to tamper with.

Instead it focuses on something more realistic and more useful:

making tampering detectable through deterministic hashing, append-only semantics, checkpoints, and exports.