Laravel Nova, a beautifully designed admin panel for Laravel, is the brainchild of Laravel’s creator, Taylor Otwell. It serves as a testament to why businesses are increasingly choosing to hire Laravel developers. This exceptional tool provides a sleek, meta-driven UI for Laravel’s ecosystem, allowing efficient administration of your Laravel application with minimum fuss. If you’re a Laravel developer or if you’re considering hiring Laravel developers for your project, Nova becomes an incredibly beneficial tool.
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In this post, we aim to simplify the process of setting up Laravel Nova, creating a fully functioning admin panel, and showing how to extract maximum benefit from this powerful tool. From discussing the advantages of Laravel Nova to its application in your next Laravel project with real-life examples, we’ve got it all covered. Let’s dive in!
1. What is Laravel Nova?
Laravel Nova is a beautifully designed admin panel for Laravel that can be used for everything from managing users to customizing behavior, controlling resources, and much more. With Laravel Nova, you can manage resources, define metrics, and create custom tools, cards, and fields, making it a powerful tool for Laravel developers.
2. Installing Laravel Nova
Before we begin, it’s worth noting that Laravel Nova is a paid product, and you need to purchase a license from the official Nova website. Once you have your license, you can start by installing Laravel Nova into your Laravel project.
Assuming you have a Laravel application set up, you can install Nova by running the following command:
```bash composer require laravel/nova ```
Next, you will need to register the Nova service provider in the providers array of your `config/app.php` configuration file:
```php App\Providers\NovaServiceProvider::class, ```
Finally, execute the Nova:install Artisan command. This command will publish the Nova assets to your public directory, migrate Nova’s data tables into your database, and install Nova’s Vue components into your `resources/js/components` directory:
```bash php artisan nova:install ```
3. Building the Admin Panel with Laravel Nova
Once you have installed Laravel Nova, you can start building your admin panel. Here’s how to do it.
3.1. Creating Nova Resources
Nova resources are the cornerstone of your Nova admin panel. They correspond to your Eloquent models and contain the fields, actions, filters, lenses, and cards for the resource. Each Eloquent model in your application has a corresponding Nova resource.
Let’s assume we have a Blog model in our application. To create a Nova resource for this model, use the `nova:resource` Artisan command:
```bash php artisan nova:resource Blog ```
This command will create a `Blog` resource in the `app/Nova` directory. Within this resource, you can customize the fields, actions, filters, and more.
```php
<?php
namespace App\Nova;
use Laravel\Nova\Fields\ID;
use Illuminate\Http\Request;
use Laravel\Nova\Fields\Text;
use Laravel\Nova\Fields\Textarea;
use Laravel\Nova\Http\Requests\NovaRequest;
class Blog extends Resource
{
public static $model = 'App\Blog';
public function fields(Request $request)
{
return [
ID::make()->sortable(),
Text::make('Title')->sortable(),
Textarea::make('Body'),
];
}
}
```
In this resource, we have defined three fields: an ID, a Title, and a Body for our blog posts.
3.2. Adding Actions to Resources
Actions are tasks that can be performed on resources. Nova ships with a few actions, but you can easily define your own. For example, you may wish to add an action to publish a blog post.
```php php artisan nova:action PublishBlogPost ```
This command will create a new action class in the `app/Nova/Actions` directory. You can customize this action as needed.
```php
<?php
namespace App\Nova\Actions;
use Illuminate\Bus\Queueable;
use Laravel\Nova\Actions\Action;
use Laravel\Nova\Fields\ActionFields;
use Illuminate\Queue\SerializesModels;
use Illuminate\Queue\InteractsWithQueue;
use Illuminate\Contracts\Queue\ShouldQueue;
class PublishBlogPost extends Action
{
use InteractsWithQueue, Queueable, SerializesModels;
public function handle(ActionFields $fields, Collection $models)
{
foreach ($models as $model) {
$model->publish();
}
}
public function fields()
{
return [];
}
}
```
3.3. Metrics
Metrics provide a way to add simple, aggregate information to your Nova dashboard. Nova ships with three metric types: Value Metrics, Trend Metrics, and Partition Metrics. You can generate these metrics using the `nova:metric` Artisan command.
```php php artisan nova:metric BlogPostCount ```
This command will create a new metric class in the `app/Nova/Metrics` directory. In this example, we have created a value metric to count the number of blog posts.
```php
<?php
namespace App\Nova\Metrics;
use Illuminate\Http\Request;
use Laravel\Nova\Metrics\Value;
use App\Blog;
class BlogPostCount extends Value
{
public function calculate(Request $request)
{
return $this->count($request, Blog::class);
}
public function ranges()
{
return [
30 => '30 Days',
60 => '60 Days',
365 => '365 Days',
'MTD' => 'Month To Date',
'QTD' => 'Quarter To Date',
'YTD' => 'Year To Date',
];
}
}
```
Laravel Nova is an incredible tool for building Laravel applications, providing a robust and flexible admin panel with a lot of customization options. It’s a powerful ally for any Laravel developer, allowing you to administer your underlying Laravel application without any additional hassle.
Conclusion
Laravel Nova presents an excellent platform for creating intuitive and customized admin panels. It’s no surprise why many businesses choose to hire Laravel developers to leverage this powerful tool. With a wide array of features – from managing resources, defining metrics, to creating custom tools, cards, and fields – Laravel Nova revolutionizes Laravel application management.
It caters to both seasoned Laravel developers and those new to the framework by streamlining workflow and simplifying data management. Harnessing Laravel Nova’s potential can give your application a competitive edge. So why wait? Hire Laravel developers and start building your top-tier admin panels with Laravel Nova today!
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