How to Build Variable-Duration Appointment Slot Scheduling in Laravel

A Laravel developer has outlined a gap-based approach to appointment scheduling that handles services of varying durations, such as 15-minute consultations and 60-minute procedures. Rather than generating fixed time slots, the method treats a doctor's availability as a continuous timeline and identifies open gaps between existing bookings. The algorithm retrieves all booked appointments within a working window, calculates the free intervals between them, and checks whether each gap is long enough to fit the requested service. Overlap detection logic ensures that only genuinely available start times are returned, with configurable increment intervals of 5, 10, or 15 minutes. The approach is implemented using Laravel's Eloquent queries and Carbon date handling to iterate through the schedule and build a list of valid slots.