What does vendor mean?

In fact, the vendor directory is related to third-party applications that make up the requirements of your application.

What is a 3rd party and how important is it to traditional app development?

This directory has no direct relationship with Laravel, as commented in the other answer. In PHP projects this directory is quite common because it is the directory where Composer , the dependency manager in PHP, uses to organize the third-party codes.

The first example project, rktlet , uses the package management system Glide , which also sets the vendor directory to store the dependencies. The second project, ytd , does not seem to use any management system, but still uses the vendor directory by choice, following custom of the community itself.

In short, the% directory generally stores third-party project dependencies - this is how most package managers work - but there is no guarantee of that. Projects may exist using the vendor directory even though it has no relation to the dependencies. I can pretty much store my JavaScript files from my page in a vendor directory. It works, it can only get confusing and therefore, such practice is not encouraged.