While Laravel’s a fantastic framework, I don’t think anyone would ascribe Plays Well with Others as a core tennant of the project. i.e. Using individual Laravel components like the Eloquent ORM in your own projects is never a straight forward affair. They’re just not designed for that use case.
This makes projects like WouterJEloquentBundle
a life saver if you’re using Symfony. From the README
The WouterJEloquentBundle claims to integrate the Eloquent ORM into the Symfony framework.