Console commands.

Six commands ship with the package. All of them accept a request's public ULID or its numeric key wherever they take a request, because both end up in people's terminals — the first from a URL, the second from a query.

approval:escalate

php artisan approval:escalate

Finds stages whose deadline has passed and applies whatever each one's policy says. Nothing escalates without it:

Schedule::command('approval:escalate')->everyFifteenMinutes();

The sweep is idempotent, so the interval is a floor on how late "late" is noticed rather than a correctness knob. Each stage gets its own transaction, so one misconfigured stage cannot stop the rest from being handled; a stage whose strategy throws rolls back entirely and is picked up on the next run.

Reports escalations, reminders, newly stranded stages, and failures. Exits non-zero if any stage's strategy threw, so a scheduler watching exit codes says something. See SLAs and escalation.

approval:verify

php artisan approval:verify
php artisan approval:verify 01JBK7QK5X8ZW2F0T3D9M4NA6E

Walks each request's hash chain and reports any line or attachment that no longer holds. Reports findings, never repairs. Exits non-zero when anything was found, or when the named request does not exist.

See audit trail and evidence.

approval:doctor

php artisan approval:doctor --limit=50

Finds pending stages whose living assignment holders can no longer meet the required approvals — the stages nobody can finish, which nothing else in the engine will report. Exits non-zero when any are found.

  Found 1 stranded approval stage.
  01JBK7QK5X8ZW2F0T3D9M4NA6E ... Directors: 1 living / 2 required

Fix them with delegation, reassignment, or a resync.

approval:status

php artisan approval:status --limit=10

A count per request state, then the three lists that need attention:

• Overdue — waiting on an approver past the deadline;
• Stranded — living holders cannot meet the required approvals;
• Conflicted — approved every stage, then found the record had changed.

Always exits zero. It is a report, not a check.

  State ............................ Requests
  pending .................................. 7
  approved ................................ 41
  …

  Overdue
  01JBK7QK5X… ......... Finance, due 3 hours ago

  Conflicted, waiting on a person
  01JBK2M9YB… ......................... 2 days ago

Nothing in the package resolves conflicted requests automatically — they stay open until an administrator reapplies or discards the draft.

approval:sync

php artisan approval:sync --dry-run
php artisan approval:sync

Creates and reconciles the workflows declared in approval.definitions. Additive and supported configuration changes are applied; removing or reordering existing stages or approvers is refused, and a refusal aborts the whole sync before writing anything.

Exits non-zero when anything was refused. See workflow definitions.

approval:resync

php artisan approval:resync 01JBK7QK5X8ZW2F0T3D9M4NA6E --operator=42
php artisan approval:resync 91 --operator="App\Models\Staff:7" --prune

Re-runs a pending request's approver rules against the current workflow. This is the runbook entry for "an approver left and their requests are stuck".

Deliberately a command rather than anything automatic: rebuilding a live request's assignments is a decision somebody makes. --operator is required and recorded on the audit trail — shell history is not attribution. It accepts a morph alias or a class name in the type:id form.

Prints the change per stage, exits non-zero when the request or operator cannot be resolved:

  Stage 1 .................................. +1 / -0
    + App\Models\User:9

See delegation and reassignment.

A workable schedule

use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Schedule;

Schedule::command('approval:escalate')->everyFifteenMinutes();
Schedule::command('approval:doctor')->hourly();
Schedule::command('approval:verify')->dailyAt('03:00');

The first is required for deadlines to mean anything. The other two are checks whose non-zero exit is the signal — route them wherever your scheduler's failures go.