// the find
hrshadhin/school-management-system
Another School Management System
A Laravel 6 / PHP 7.2 school management system covering admissions, attendance, exams, grades, leave, and employee management. It's a community edition of a commercial product (CloudSchool), meaning the interesting features — payroll, library, hostel, 40+ reports, SMS notifications — are paywalled in the enterprise branch. Aimed at small schools in South/Southeast Asia wanting a self-hosted admin panel.
The domain coverage is genuinely wide for a free tier: academic year setup, class/section/student/teacher lifecycle, exam rules with grading, and a basic ACL permission grid are all present. The `php artisan fresh-install` command with optional demo data is a thoughtful DX touch that most similar projects skip. The separation of frontend and backend asset pipelines (two separate webpack builds) keeps things organized. Migration history dating back to 2018 suggests the schema has stabilized rather than being a half-finished prototype.
PHP 7.2 and Laravel 6 are both end-of-life — PHP 7.2 since November 2020, Laravel 6 since September 2022. Running this in production means no security patches, full stop. The to-do list openly admits there are zero unit or integration tests ('Like real quick!' has been sitting there since at least 2019). The most useful features — payroll, library, hostel, bulk SMS, 40+ reports — are locked behind the enterprise edition whose source is intentionally hidden (the EE branch is empty). The README's installation steps contain a copy-paste artifact ('Setup application' block repeated four times), which isn't a dealbreaker but signals the project isn't being actively maintained.