Back to Basics: Laravel Pagination in 2 Minutes

Laravel has a lot of useful functions in the core, one of them is a simple pagination for your table list of entries. Let’s see how it works.

Let’s say we have a list table of authors, with this code.

/app/Http/Controllers/AuthorsController.php:

    public function index()
    {
        $authors = Author::all();
        return view('authors.index', compact('authors'));
    }	

And /resources/views/authors/index.blade.php:

        @forelse($authors as $author)
        
        @empty
            
        @endforelse
    

    

        

            
First name
            
Last name
            
Actions
        
    
    

            
{{ $author->first_name }}
            
{{ $author->last_name }}
            

                Edit
                

                    
                    {{ csrf_field() }}
                    Delete
                
            
        

                
No entries found.
            

Here’s the visual result of it all.

What if we have more entries and need to have pagination?
First, we use paginate() method in Controller instead of all():

    public function index()
    {
        $authors = Author::paginate(5);
        return view('authors.index', compact('authors'));
    }	

Next – to display the pagination in our list in the file resources/views/authors/index.php we just use method links() like this:

    
    ...
    
    {{ $authors->links() }}	

In case of 1-5 entries, it won’t display anything, but beyond that we will see something like this:

Guess what – if we click “Page 2” link or the arrow to the right, it will actually work!

As you can see, paginator will add a GET parameter to the URL ?page=2, and we don’t need to add any custom code to make it work. Isn’t that awesome?

Of course, you can perform a lot of customizations with this pagination – move the page length to config, change URL parameters and add your own ones, apply different styling than default etc. But I will leave it for you to play around, if you wish. More information about pagination in Laravel can be found in the official documentation.