Vitamin

A highly opinionated packaged boilerplate solution for installing Vite, Tailwind and Inertia (along a few other things) into a Laravel app.

What

Vitamin will install all the bits and pieces needed to get Vite, Tailwind, Vue 3, Inertia and Ziggy working with Laravel while running on a local Valet installation. This is super-duper opinionated, but could be customized to include other stuff.

I've also included some packages that I use often, but they can be removed if you don't need them.

Installation

Like everything Laravel, install Vitamin via Composer:

composer require thepublicgood/vitamin

Once installed, run the Vitamin Artisan command:

php ./artisan vitamin:init

Vitamin will guide you through a few prompts and then install the entire boilerplate including required NPM and Composer packages. You can modify these as you need later, but you should let the process complete.

What gets installed:

The following Composer packages are installed:

The following NPM packages are installed:

Usage

Vitamin will add a few NPM scripts (note that it expects Yarn to be present during installation). To start a new Vite dev server, run:

yarn dev

// or

php ./artisan vitamin:serve

Vite will run a dev server on your local machine on port 3000 (it will automatically increment the port number if 3000 isn't available). Once it's running, you should see something like:

  vite v2.4.4 dev server running at:

  > Local:    http://vitamin.test:3000/
  > Network:  http://192.168.0.10:3000/

  ready in 571ms.

This is the dev server. You'll also need to make sure you create a new Valet link, then you should be able to visit your new project at http://vitamin.test or whatever your Valet address is.

Port number

By default Vite will run on port 3000 but will increment the port number by 1 if 3000 is already in use. Vitamin won't know that the port number has been incremented, but you can specify a port number by changing the port setting in the vitamin.php config file.

return [
	"port" => 3002,
	//...
]

Building for production

To build your project for production:

yarn prod

As simple as that. Depending on the size of your project, building should be a fair amount quicker than Webpack. Once complete, there is a new public/build directory. You'll probably want to add that to your .gitignore file. It's not wize to include compiled assets in your repo.

The View Composer

The heart of Vitamin is a simple Laravel view composer that ensures the correct resources are inserted into the page. The view composer is included with the package, but you can extend it if you want to make changes. For example, if you're using TypeScript, you'll probably want to change the app.js file for an app.ts file and you'll need to update the view composer to point to the correct filename. To do this, create a new AppComposer class in your project and extend the TPG\Vitamin\Composers\AppComposer class. You can then override the $jsPath property:

namespace App\Composers;

use TPG\Vitamin\Composers\AppComposer as VitaminAppComposer;

class AppComposer extends VitaminAppComposer
{
    protected string $jsPath = 'resources/js/app.ts';
}

You'll need to make sure your app binds your new composer instead of the default one. You can do this through the vitamin.php config file which you'll find in your config directory. Simply change the composer config option to point to your new class:

[
    'composer' => App\Composers\AppComposer::class,
]

That's it. Now your app will use your new composer instead of the default Vitamin one. If you need to override the compose method in your view composer, remember to call parent::compose():

public function compose(View $view): void
{
    // Anything custom you need to do goes here...
    
    parent::compose($view);
}

If you're not familiar with Laravel view composers, take a look at the documentation here.

Valet

During development, all assets are served from the dev server running at port 3000. Vitamin includes a custom Valet driver (there should be a LocalValetDriver.php file in your project root) that will ensure that assets served from node_modules are served correctly. I found that this was needed in a few edge cases, which is why I included it. The custom driver extends the default LaravelValetDriver so you shouldn't have any problems running Valet.

Inertia

Inertia is my go to these days, so Vitamin will set it up by default. During initialisation, you're asked where your Vue components are stored. You can customize this location in app.js if you wish. Vite will load your Vue pages from there. The Inertia documentation uses resources/js/Pages, so Vitamin will make that suggestion. However, technically, you can put them anywhere. The only requirement is that the location must be child of the JS path.

Ziggy

Ziggy is a JavaScript route helper for Laravel. If allows you to use your Laravel defined routes from within your JavaScript front-end. It ships with a fairly decent Vue plugin, so it's included by default. Inside your Vue components, you'll have access to route function which you can pass any Laravel defined route name. Something like:

this.route('home');

Vitamin sets up Ziggy routes in the resources/js/routes.js file. This file needs to be regenerated each time your change your Laravel routes. Vitamin does this automatically by creating a simple Vite plugin that will run the yarn routes script each time a Laravel routes file changes. However, if you ever need to rebuild the routes, simply run yarn routes yourself.

TLS Certificates

It's possible to get all of this to work with TLS as well so you can use an https address during development. First, you need to get Valet to secure your site. Valet provides a simple solution for this. If you're serving your site at mysite.test then you can get Valet to generate a new certificate:

valet secure mysite

It will likely ask you for your password. You'll also need to get Vite to do the same thing. The easiest way to do so is to use the mkcert Vite plugin:

yarn add vite-plugin-mkcert -D

Update the vite.config.js file and set server.https to true and add mkcert() to the plugins array:

export default({command}) => ({
    //...

    server: {
        https: true,
    },

    plugins: [
        vue(),
        mkcert(),

        //..
    ],
});

Lastly update the package.json file to tell Vite to run in https mode:

{
    "scripts": {
        "dev": "vite serve --host=mysite.test --https"
    }
}

The first time you run yarn dev, you'll likely be asked for your password so that the mkcert plugin can generate a new certificate. I might add an HTTPS question to the Vitamin setup at some point. If and when I do, I'll update this.

fbrisola/vitamin