I know the typical piece of advice is to never rewrite but I am going through a similar situation and a rewrite would probably have been better and simpler. Th

I know the typical piece of advice is to never rewrite but I am going through a similar situation and a rewrite would probably have been better and simpler. The key is though, you don’t rewrite the code, you rewrite the app. Figure out what the functional pieces of the app and what it’s supposed to do. Don’t use any ActiveRecord style ORMs, so Laravel is out. If the app is that bad then SQL database is probably a huge mess. If it had to be PHP, use Symfony and Doctrine. Build an MVC version of the application. If there was any sort of structure to the application then the refactor not rewrite approach would be correct but if it’s anything like what I think it is, it’s a fucking mess. Refactoring will just make a bigger mess. If you can get away with refactoring pieces at a time into symfony components until you can eventually have an MVC framework then do it but likely that would be a much bigger task.