JSON file as a data source

I dont think so. But in my opinion you could wrap decoded json data into a collection. That way you can have an api close to that of the eloquent, like the where, get, sum, average, and so forth.

I dunno about doing it with eloquent, but you can pretty easily build a fake rest server around a json file with the json server nodejs package.

I found a work around using https://github.com/Skyscanner/JsonPath-PHP

Actually also found php-json-server https://github.com/Zlob/php-json-server

You can use https://github.com/nahid/jsonq JsonQ is a query builder for JSON data