I. Introduction
With a massive community of developers, Laravel has many VS Code extensions that allow developers to leverage the power of Laravel. Laravel is the most popular PHP framework, built by Taylor Otwell and based on Symfony.
This post covers my nine best visual studio code extensions for Laravel developers to explore in 2024 and improve their coding workflows.
II. 9 Best VS Code Extensions For Laravel Developers
#1: Laravel Blade Snippets
The Laravel blade snippets extension adds syntax highlight support for Laravel Blade to your VS Code editor. Furthermore, it also has a set of triggers that, when typed, fetch the respective blade snippets. This also makes your blade templating easier and faster.
#2: Laravel Snippets
It adds snippets for the Facades like Request::, Route:: etc. Besides, this package also gives Laravel snippets to use in VSCode when building our applications. Instead of typing out longer Laravel commands, you just use prefixes like: Auth, Cache, Config, Route, Mail, View etc.
#3: Laravel Blade Spacer
Trying to add spaces within your blade views can often be nagging and irregular. This extension automatically adds spacing to your blade templating markers.
#4: Laravel Artisan
Laravel Artisan makes running artisan commands a breeze when using Laravel in VS Code.
To use it, you need to trigger the VS Code command palette using Ctrl+Shift+P and then type Artisan, and the artisan commands will appear to be executed.
#5: DotEnv
VS Code extension is used to highlight the syntax of your .env file, which could be quite handy for spotting some problems.
#6: Laravel Extra Intellisense
The Laravel Extra Intellisense extension provides auto-completion for Laravel in VSCode. The extension comes with auto-completion for:
- Views and variables
- Route Middleware
- Configs
- Env Variables
- Route names and parameters
- Laravel mix functions
- Translations and translation parameters
- Validation rules
#7: GitHub Copilot
This is essentially an AI pair programmer that gives suggestions on what it thinks you’re going to write in your code. It can even write complete methods and classes for you that are hundreds of lines long.
But how is Copilot able to do that? GitHub Copilot has been trained on billions of lines of open-source code on GitHub using Open AI codex and machine learning. So it has been trained to recognize patterns, and with that knowledge, it can predict what the developer intends to write.
#8: Laravel Go-To View
Laravel Go-To View allows you to go from your Controller or Route to your view.
You can use Ctrl or Alt + click to jump to the first matched Blade View file.
#9: Laravel Go-To Controller
Laravel Go-To Controller extension allows you to find and go to a specific controller. This can be especially helpful when handling massive code bases with many files.
Press Alt + click on the controller’s name in your routes file, and it will navigate you to the respective controller file.
III. Conclusion
I hope this list helps you get your Laravel mojo going for 2024. If you are looking for Vs Code for PHP, Python or Javascript, have a look at the other comprehensive lists I have made for you below.
