Laravel 5 additional resources

Laravel on it’s own is a powerful and autonomous framework. With the additions of Laravel Elixir to manage compilation of CSS and JS in your project and Laravel Homestead that serves as a stand alone sandbox for your own local environment, the framework makes a compelling case for a “turnkey” framework.

Here are some plugins that are part of every laravel project I’ve been working on, and in my mind are ‘core’.

Bower

Bower is basically a simple package manager. For resources like JQuery, Bootstrap, Data-Tables, etc. I like to keep them separate from composer and it’s vendor folder. Bower offers dependency and package management via bower.json

Follow the instruction at bower’s documentation to install bower

we then create the .bowerrc file, it directs bower where to save the resources

cd Projectfolder
touch .bowerrc

{
  "directory": "resources/assets/bower"
}

we then initialize bower. answer all the questions, you can leave them all default

bower init

we then install some resources we want to use in our laravel app.

bower install jquery
bower install bootstrap

as part of my workflow using elixir, I copy the latest JQuery file to ./resources/assets/js/, elixir looks in that folder for js files, and compiles them

//simple path variable
var paths = {
  'resources': {
    'bower': './resources/assets/bower/',
    'js': './resources/assets/js/',
  },
};

elixir(function(mix) {
    mix.copy(paths.resources.bower.'jquery/dist/jquery.min.js', path.resources.js);

    // elixir looks for js files in ./resources/assets/js/
    mix.scripts([
    'jquery.js',
    'other.js',
    ]);
});

at this point you could directly reference JQuery, or all the javascript files you’ve compiled by including it in a header statement like:

<script src="{{ elixir('js/app.js') }}"></script>

WayGenerator / Laravel-5-Generators-Extended

In laravel 4 this package allows to generate models and controllers, all this was fixed natively in laravel5, but this package still has a few helpful custom generators such as:

• make:migration:schema
• make:migration:pivot
• make:seed

the install guide is very comprehensive and can be found here

Faker

Faker is an extension of the ruby’s Faker package, it generates pretty much any fake data you need in a sample application. to install faker, run this at the root of your project

composer require fzaninotto/faker

here’s an example of how I user faker to seed data

use Illuminate\Database\Seeder;
use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Model;
use App\Todo;
use App\Tag;

// Composer: "fzaninotto/faker": "v1.3.0"
use Faker\Factory as Faker;

class TodosTableSeeder extends Seeder {

	public function run()
	{
		$faker = Faker::create();

		foreach(range(1, 20) as $index)
		{
			Todo::create([
			'user_id' => rand(1,4),
			'priority_id' => rand(1,4),
			'title' => implode($faker->sentences(2)),
			'notes' => implode($faker->paragraphs(4)),
			'completed'=> true,
			'active' => true,
			]);
		}
  }
}