In this tutorial we'll use Laravel as an API and Nuxt as a Single Page Application. They can work together, but it's not an easy task at first. If you already tried, getting HMR to seamlessly work is a pain! For that reason I created laravel-nuxt and laravel-nuxt-js.
There are more reasons to use these packages, such as when using Laravel Passport and the CreateFreshApiToken. The middleware will create an api_token cookie on web routes that use the get http verb, and that's a problem if you're not serving your SPA from within Laravel.
Getting started
Install Laravel
Let's start with fresh new Laravel installation:
composer create-project laravel/laravel spa
Go inside the spa directory with your terminal.
Install laravel-nuxt (for PHP)
# cd spa
composer require pallares/laravel-nuxt
This package will be autodiscovered. If you're using old versions of Laravel, just add the service provider in config/app.php file:
<?php
return [
// ...
'providers' => [
// ...
Pallares\LaravelNuxt\LaravelNuxtServiceProvider::class,
],
];
Add a fallback route that will render the SPA page in routes/web.php file. Be sure to remove the default route that comes with the framework:
<?php
// Route::get('/', function () {
// return view('welcome');
// });
Route::get(
'{uri}',
'\\'.Pallares\LaravelNuxt\Controllers\NuxtController::class
)->where('uri', '.*');
Now, your backend is ready to serve the compiled assets that Nuxt will generate for you. Every route that would return a 404 now will serve our SPA page.
Install laravel-nuxt (for JS)
It's time to install the JS package. Replace your package.json file with this:
{
"private": true,
"scripts": {
"start": "laravel-nuxt dev",
"build": "laravel-nuxt build"
},
"dependencies": {
"laravel-nuxt": "^1.0.0"
}
}
Install the dependencies:
npm install
The laravel-nuxt package will install Nuxt for you, along with Vue, vue-router, @nuxtjs/axios, etc. Let's create the nuxt.config.js file:
const laravelNuxt = require("laravel-nuxt");
module.exports = laravelNuxt({
// Options such as mode, srcDir and generate.dir are already handled for you.
modules: [],
plugins: [],
});
From now on, Nuxt will look for the source files in the resources/nuxt directory.
Create a hello world route in resources/nuxt/pages/index.vue:
<template>
<h1>Hello {{ name }}!</h1>
</template>
<script>
export default {
data: () => {
return { name: 'world' };
},
};
</script>
Finally, run:
npm start
Go to http://localhost:8000. You should see this: 
That's it! Laravel artisan's server and Nuxt's dev server are up and working together transparently. Try editing your home page now, it's very enjoyable to see the live reload in action.
Under the hood, Nuxt's dev server is proxying every call to the Laravel's server, including the SPA rendering. Since @nuxtjs/axios module is included (and proxied, too), you can make API calls normally.
Calling the API from the SPA
The SPA will surely need to call our API, so let's add a route to routes/api.php to retrieve the user information:
<?php
Route::get('me', function () {
// Let's return fake information.
return [
'name' => 'John Doe',
];
});
Now, edit resources/nuxt/pages/index.vue:
<template>
<h1>Hello {{ user.name }}!</h1>
</template>
<script>
export default {
// https://github.com/nuxt-community/axios-module
async asyncData({ app }) {
const user = await app.$axios.$get('api/me');
return { user };
},
};
</script>
Voila! Your page should now look like this!
In order to keep the tutorial simple, we aren't using any kind of authentication here. Integrating Passport should be almost trivial here.
Deployment
If you want to deploy your application, just run npm run build. The compiled assets will be placed in the public/_nuxt directory.
You can preview your final app with the well known artisan command php artisan serve.
You may want to add the
.nuxtandpublic/_nuxtdirectories to your.gitignore.
Final thoughts
This is my first tutorial. I hope everything is clear and concise! Please, don't hesitate to ask questions here or create issues in the laravel-nuxt repositories. Thanks!
Top comments (55)
That's an impressive piece of work, a full Laravel/Nuxt integration! How did you get all of this 'magic' working? I'm planning to read your source code to understand how it works under the hood.
Searching for "laravel" and "nuxt" I saw that there were only a few Github projects dealing with this, that's a bit surprising since Laravel has a heavy 'bias' towards Vue.js and SSR (and hence Nuxt.js) seems a good fit for many Laravel projects (especially content-focused apps/websites).
I saw one other Laravel/Nuxt starter repo, but yours seems a bit more clean and lightweight.
Definitely want to try this out (another option would be to go for a pure Javascript approach, using node/express for the API/backend/server part rather than PHP/Laravel).
However the ease of development and the vibrant community are what attract me to a Laravel based solution (compared to for instance Django).
Thanks! I think you'll an easy time reading from the source: there isn't much code and part of it is documented using docblocks.
I also searched for a Laravel&Nuxt integration, but found none that fit my tastes. I expect your feedback on it soon! :)
The ease of development and the code quality is what attracts me to using Laravel as an API too. There are a few things I'd change from Laravel, but I still love it!
I'll create another tutorial about authorization using LaravelNuxt in the next weeks... maybe you'll be interested.
Great job ... what surprised me is that while Laravel "ships" with Vue.js you can hardly find anything about integrating Laravel with Nuxt, even though the two seem a natural combo. Your repo seems to be one of the very few solutions!
What I understood is that in fact you need Javascript on the server (node/express) to support SSR. So what you did (if I understood correctly) is run a separate node/express server and proxy requests between the node server and the Laravel server, right? And then you just code your app in Laravel (the API part) and Vue (the client part), no need to worry about the node/express part.
Sounds pretty nifty, I'll read your source code to understand the details.
Yes I would definitely be interested in your authorization tutorial with LaravelNuxt!
Hello Cristian I have a question, when I see the source code of my view, I don't see the rendered text of Hello Eduardo, why? help me please.
thepracticaldev.s3.amazonaws.com/i...
Hello Eduardo. What you're seeing is the generic page that Nuxt provides to you (it's always the same because there's no server side rendering). When the JS is loaded, the Vue Router will render the correct HTML (depending on the actual URL).
Hello Cristian. But the major feature to use nuxt is server side rendering from my point of view. How can I achieve that with laravel-nuxt and laravel-nuxt-js?
This is not at the scope as for now. If you want to use SSR you'll need to solve some problems like starting node from within PHP and passing some data. laravel-nuxt offers a simple and easy solution to get started, but without SSR.
What's the point of using Nuxtjs if not for ssr?
You can still benefit from:
vue routing is not working as in nuxt working . how can i config vue routing .. ? looking for solution thanks.
I've deployed an application built with laravel-nuxt. But after I've deployed it gives me alot of 404 error messages.
searching for files with random letters and numbers in it.
In the /_nuxt/ file. But my _nuxt file is no longer in the ./public folder, it's in a sibling folder to the root, named public_html. How can I fix this?
Did you change the configuration to change the public directory? The /_nuxt directory should be accessible publicly, so it should be at public/_nuxt, along with the index.php.
Yeah but I've deployed it to shared hosting so I was needed to place everything in my public folder into public_html So my folder structure does look like this now
-app
---everything except public folder
-public_html
---everything that was in the the public folder
So i need to change the path, when I try to launch my website it gives me 404 errors on the wierd file names. looking for it in myHostAddress/_nuxt/
But instead it should look for it in myHostAddress/myName/public_html/_nuxt
This happened directly after i built it and launched even if I keep the same folder structure, it seeks in myHostAddress/_nuxt/ instead of myHostAddress/myName/MyApp/public
Been trying to solve it for days now..
Do I need to build a new application, because this does not support shared hosting?
Really good app. But it is also possible to create Laravel single page app without using vue-router, but that would mean using Laravel for backend rendering. This may not be that efficient but it is easier to do.
It's not working for me. When I run
npm startand open localhost:8000, it showsError occured while trying to proxy to: 127.0.0.1:8000/. There was no other process that occupying that port. What could be the problem? ([HPM] Error occurred while trying to proxy request /favicon.ico from 127.0.0.1:8000 to 127.0.0.1:8001 (ECONNREFUSED) (nodejs.org/api/errors.html#errors_...)Hi, why I cant add vuetify in this laravel-nuxt? After I follow your instructions, I added nuxt/vuetify by running:
then I add the buildModules in nuxt.config.js it looks like this:
`
then I run: npm start and it gives me error:
`
What did I do wrong? Can you please help me? Thanks! :D
Hi, Cristian!
Do you have any idea why baseURL it is recognized only when using "npm run build" and "php artisan serve" commands? When I run "npm run start" the baseURL it is not using the provided value
axios: {
baseURL: development ? 'devsite/api' : "livesite/api"
},
Found a solution: browserbaseURL should be provided also.
axios: {
baseURL: development ? 'devsite/api' : "livesite/api",
browserBaseURL: development ? 'devsite/api' : "livesite/api"
},
Oh, great!
It fails at
npm startcommand:@ start /Users/mathewparet/eclipse/workspace/getitdone
laravel-nuxt dev
/Users/mathewparet/eclipse/workspace/getitdone/node_modules/laravel-nuxt/bin/laravel-nuxt-dev.js:52
...process.env,
^
SyntaxError: Unexpected token ...
at createScript (vm.js:74:10)
at Object.runInThisContext (vm.js:116:10)
at Module._compile (module.js:533:28)
at Object.Module._extensions..js (module.js:580:10)
at Module.load (module.js:503:32)
at tryModuleLoad (module.js:466:12)
at Function.Module._load (module.js:458:3)
at Function.Module.runMain (module.js:605:10)
at startup (bootstrap_node.js:158:16)
at bootstrap_node.js:575:3
npm ERR! code ELIFECYCLE
npm ERR! errno 1
npm ERR! @ start: laravel-nuxt dev
npm ERR! Exit status 1
npm ERR!
npm ERR! Failed at the @ start script.
npm ERR! This is probably not a problem with npm. There is likely additional logging output above.
npm ERR! A complete log of this run can be found in:
npm ERR! /Users/mathewparet/.npm/_logs/2018-04-01T14_39_48_780Z-debug.log
gMac:getitdone mathewparet$
Hi there. You need to upgrade your node version: v8 and v9 are tested, but not sure if v6 works.
I can't get it! the api/me should have been requested from the server and pre-rendered before reaching the client side, am I right?
I can see the request in the network inspection, that should make no difference between acyncData and normal data?
please clarify this for me, thanks :).
Hi! There's no prerendering when using laravel-nuxt. The api/me request is sent from client side when activating the JS route.
You should use async data if you need your page to wait to be rendered until the data is fetched.
Hi, I'm having a problem compiling tailwind runnning npm run build, however I can see all the tailwind stuff with nuxt running npm start, I configured the nuxt.config.js file with buildModules: ['@nuxtjs/tailwindcss'], but unable to compile tailwind in the public/_nuxt, Do you have any idea how to have tailwind styles in with npm run build? Thank you, amazing work anyway.
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