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Laravel Nova - First Step Towards Your New CMS!

Laravel Nova is an administration panel that is there for you when you need a clean, elegant, and responsive admin dashboard for your web application. Creating a web application is not a piece of cake. But with Laravel... it is also not easy.

Although with Laravel you will have some amazing features that will help you enjoy your ride to building a successful application. Creators of Laravel are always in pursuit of making the framework more and more developer-friendly. So they have built an awesome admin dashboard that is easy to install in your project and to get started working with.

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Nova is considered a plug-and-play administration panel. It means that you just have to add it to any of your projects and it will start working. It can run CRUD functionality to any of your content types. Basically, Nova does everything that you expect from an administration panel. That is why it can be considered the first step toward your CMS.

Installing Laravel Nova

First, we have to ensure the requirements before starting the installation process. The pre-requisites that we must have before installing Nova are,

  • Composer
  • Laravel Framework 8.0+
  • Laravel Mix 6
  • Node.js
  • NPM

Now for installing Laravel Nova, we first have to include Nova as a composer package repository in our composer.json file,

"repositories": [
    {
        "type": "composer",
        "url": "https://nova.laravel.com"
    }
],
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Next, we have to add laravel/nova to our list of required packages in your composer.json file:

"require": {
    "php": "^8.0",
    "laravel/framework": "^9.0",
    "laravel/nova": "~4.0"
},
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Now we should run the following command to update the composer package,

composer update --prefer-dist
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To finalize the installation, the following commands should be performed,

php artisan nova:install

php artisan serve
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Now if you don't have any Nova admin users registered you should run the following command which will create one admin user,

php artisan nova:user
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Features of Laravel Nova

Nova is packed with a handful of features like,

  • Resource Management
    It provides a full CRUD interface for our Eloquent models. Every type of Eloquent model including pivot tables is supported.

  • Actions
    It allows performing custom tasks in our Eloquent models which are considered actions.

  • Filters
    It helps filter out data from Eloquent models to have a glance at a certain segment of our data table.

  • Lenses
    If we need to customize a resource list more than the filters provide it can be easily done by lenses. Lenses help us take full control over the ELoquent queries.

  • Custom Tools
    It offers CLI generators for scaffolding custom tools. We can generate any type of tools our business requires and start working with them in the Nova Admin Panel.

  • Custom Fields
    Primarily Nova will come with all type of fields generally an admin panel need. But if we want any other information from our users we can define custom field types that will generate custom fields for us.

Cost of Laravel Nova

Laravel Nova comes in two types of packages called Single and Unlimited. The single package allows a one-time payment of $99 which will allow the implementation of Laravel Nova in only one of our projects. And the Unlimited package also requires a one-time payment of $199 which will allow the implementation of Laravel Nova Dashboard in an unlimited number of projects.

For an in-depth understanding of what features Laravel Nova offers us please visit Laravel Nova Documentation

Conclusion

The benefits of Laravel Nova include significant time savings for developers, the ability to easily integrate an admin panel with a good amount of functionalities into existing projects, and a large community that creates high-quality, open-source plugins, extensions, tutorials, and packages. So we can say Laravel Nova is indeed the first step toward building our CMS.

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