I suggest making it in a copy of laravel and not as a package.

Ah, I think I have answered my own question, after a bit more Googling... :-)

The answer is to fork laravel/laravel and then add a second upstream to it. http://robots.thoughtbot.com/keeping-a-github-fork-updated You can then pull those changes from the forked repo to the local copy.

I can then add workbench to the .gitnore file of the main app, and separately add a new .git repo for the package itself within the workbench folder.

I think that's right, if anyone else knows of any improvements, then let me know!

^ erikisme - I did consider that, but that means each time a new release of Laravel is made I'll have to compare and copy changes over. While I have only detailed a few changes below and shouldn't be making many more, I'd rather let Git do the hard work wherever possible :-)

For anyone else who wants to know...

• Forked laravel/laravel with a git checkout for v4.1.18
• Made the new package
• I then updated app/config/workbench with my name and email address
• Added my provider to app/config/app.php
• Updated .gitignore was update to prevent workbench from being tracked.
• Package has been made and a second git repo initialised at workbench/MeAsVendor/MyProjectName

All that remains is to write some code :-)