A comprehensive guide to the Laravel UI package

Table of contents:

• Introduction to the Laravel UI package
• Installing Laravel UI
• Installing Laravel UI with authentication
• Customizing the CSS and JavaScript Laravel UI provides

Introduction to the Laravel UI package

When working on a web project destined to get some users, having a user-friendly interface is necessary.

That’s where Laravel UI comes into play. It offers a basic yet effective starting point for incorporating some CSS and a JavaScript framework into your Laravel projects. It even supports scaffolding pages related to the authentication of your users.

Now, before you continue, please note that while Laravel UI is still maintained, it’s also an old package that have better alternatives such as Laravel Jetstream and Laravel Breeze. For instance, Laravel UI does not support as many authentication features as these two.

But I noticed that people are still looking for it, so I told myself that I should write a small article about it anyway!

Installing Laravel UI

Getting started with Laravel UI is straightforward:

composer require laravel/ui

This command installs the Laravel UI package. Next, you can install the frontend scaffolding of your choice. The package supports Bootstrap without JavaScript or Bootstrap combined with Vue.js or React:

php artisan ui bootstrap
php artisan ui vue
php artisan ui react

Installing Laravel UI with authentication

Installing the authentication part of Laravel UI is completely optional. If you want to use it, you can install it using the --auth flag:

php artisan ui bootstrap --auth
php artisan ui vue --auth
php artisan ui react --auth

Now, you have a basic user interface for user registration and authentication and you can customize it to your liking.

Customizing the CSS and JavaScript Laravel UI provides

After installing Laravel UI, you can dive into customizing the CSS and JavaScript.

Laravel uses Vite out-of-the-box for handling these aspects.

If you are still using a CSS preprocessor like Sass, or Less, Vite streamlines the process and you can learn more about it on the official documentation of Laravel.

For JavaScript, Laravel allows flexibility. You can use Vue.js, React, or anything else and even go without JavaScript.

The setup with Laravel UI just makes it easier to integrate these technologies seamlessly into your project.

Here’s what the Vite configuration file looks like when using Vue.js:

import { defineConfig } from 'vite';
import laravel from 'laravel-vite-plugin';
import vue from '@vitejs/plugin-vue';
 
export default defineConfig({
    plugins: [
        laravel({
            input: [
                'resources/sass/app.scss',
                'resources/js/app.js',
            ],
            refresh: true,
            detectTls: true,
        }),
        vue({
            template: {
                transformAssetUrls: {
                    base: null,
                    includeAbsolute: false,
                },
            },
        }),
    ],
    resolve: {
        alias: {
            vue: 'vue/dist/vue.esm-bundler.js',
        },
    },
});