Starter Kit Install and Code Analysis

Welcome to the course section where we explore the official Laravel 12 Livewire Starter Kit.

The goal of this section is to create a full CRUD on top of this starter kit, like this:

In this first lesson of the section, we will install Laravel with the Livewire starter kit and familiarize ourselves with its general structure and code.

If you want to follow along with the repository, the link to GitHub will be at the end of this lesson.

Installation

We install a new Laravel project and will choose the Livewire starter kit:

laravel new laravel

We stay with the default values for all the other choices in the wizard, except for the Volt option, where I will choose No.

As a result, we have a regular Laravel homepage with "Log in" and "Register" links at the top.

When we register as a new user, we land on an empty dashboard with a sidebar.

In addition to the layout, we have the "Settings" menu item that allows user profile data:

So yeah, that's all about installation! Simple, huh? Now, let's see what's inside the code.

Project Code Structure: Back-End

I typically start analyzing any Laravel project with Routes.

routes/web.php:

Route::get('/', function () {
    return view('welcome');
})->name('home');
 
Route::view('dashboard', 'dashboard')
    ->middleware(['auth', 'verified'])
    ->name('dashboard');
 
Route::middleware(['auth'])->group(function () {
    Route::redirect('settings', 'settings/profile');
 
    Route::get('settings/profile', Profile::class)->name('settings.profile');
    Route::get('settings/password', Password::class)->name('settings.password');
    Route::get('settings/appearance', Appearance::class)->name('settings.appearance');
});
 
require __DIR__.'/auth.php';

Nothing special here, right? Regular routes, and included route file for the auth routes.

If we look at the Settings Livewire component, we can see familiar PHP code.

One familiar Livewire method that you won't find is render(). When a render() method isn't provided, Livewire...