Start Here
Welcome to Volāre. This documentation is large, so do not read it top to bottom. Follow this path instead: each step lists a few pages and what you should be able to do afterwards. Keep the Glossary open in another tab.
What Volāre is, in one minute
Section titled “What Volāre is, in one minute”Volāre sells multi-day trips (flights + hotels + activities) online. There are two main services:
- The Web — byvolare.com, where customers find a trip, pick a
departure date and pay. It is an Astro site in
frontend/. - Arkana — the back office where the team builds those trips, prices them and handles
bookings. It also serves the API the Web reads. It is a Laravel + Filament app in
backend/.
A trip is built like this: a supplier provides hotels and activities → we package them into a tour → the tour is published to a market (a country) as a product → the system pairs the product with cached flights to create bookable offers (one per departure date) → a customer buys an offer and it becomes a booking.
flowchart LR S[Supplier<br/>hotels, activities] --> T[Tour] T --> P[Product by market] F[Flight cache<br/>AerTicket] --> O P --> O[Offers<br/>one per date] O -->|checkout| B[Booking]
Day 1 — Get it running
Section titled “Day 1 — Get it running”- Installation — run Arkana, the Web and these docs locally.
- Development Workflow — branches, commits, PRs.
- MCP Servers — connect your AI tools to the project.
You can now: sign in to Arkana locally, open the Web on localhost:4321, and know how a
change reaches master.
Day 2 — Learn the business through Arkana
Section titled “Day 2 — Learn the business through Arkana”Read the Arkana section with Arkana open next to it. It follows the menu, one page per group: Suppliers, Products, Customers, Flights, Markets, CMS, System.
You can now: explain the path supplier → tour → product → offer → booking, and find each of them in Arkana.
Day 3 — How the system is built
Section titled “Day 3 — How the system is built”- Architecture Overview — the big picture: apps, data, integrations.
- Project Structure — where code lives.
- Backend Overview and Frontend Overview.
- Products System and Offers — the heart of the domain. Skim; come back when you work on them.
You can now: find the service, model and Filament resource behind any Arkana screen.
Day 4 — How it runs in production
Section titled “Day 4 — How it runs in production”- Infrastructure Overview — AWS, environments, servers, the
infra-volarerepository. - Deployment — from a merged PR to code running in production.
- Server Access — getting a shell on a server.
- Health Monitoring and Monitoring and Alerts.
You can now: say which server runs what, follow a release from merge to production, and know where alerts come from.
Day 5 — Go deep on your area
Section titled “Day 5 — Go deep on your area”Pick the section that matches your first task:
| If you work on… | Read |
|---|---|
| Flights | AerTicket, Dynamic Flight Cache, Flight Search |
| Checkout and payments | Checkout API, Checkout Flow, Payment, Booking Lifecycle |
| Suppliers and content | Suppliers, Products by Market, AI System |
| The public website | Frontend Overview, i18n URL Routing, Feature Toggles, CMS API |
| Integrations | Pipedrive, NetSuite, Insurance, Signaturit |
| Infrastructure | the whole Infrastructure section |
Rules everyone follows
Section titled “Rules everyone follows”- Never commit to
master; every change is a branch + PR. - PHP, Composer and Artisan always run through Sail (
./vendor/bin/sail). - Business logic lives in
backend/app/Services/, never inside Filament screens or MCP tools. - Prices are computed once, in the backend. The Web never calculates a price.
- Code, comments, commits and docs are in English.
- When you change a documented behaviour, update its page in the same PR (
/update-docs).
When you are stuck
Section titled “When you are stuck”- Search this site (top bar) — most error names and command names are indexed.
- Artisan Commands lists every operational command.
- Ask in the team chat; mention the page you read so it can be improved.