Five Useful Laravel Blade Directives

Laravel is an open-source PHP framework designed to make developing web apps easier and faster through built-in features. These features are part of what makes Laravel so widely used by web developers:

But in this blog, We’re going to look at five Laravel Blade directives you can use to simplify your templates, and learn about some convenient directives that make solving specific problems a cinch! If you’re new to the framework, these tips will help you discover the excellent features of Blade, Laravel’s templating engine.

1 : Check if the user is authenticated

When checking if the user is authenticated, you could check if the user isn’t null:

2 : Check if the user is a guest

The inverse of the authentication, we can check if the user is not authenticated using the guest() method on the auth helper:

But Laravel also provides a @guest directive:

We can also combine those two directives using the else statement:

3 : Include the first view if it exists or includes the second if it doesn’t

Building a website with multiple themes might require including a file if it exists or including another one if it doesn’t, you can easily achieve this with simple blade conditions:

There is a shorter and a much cleaner directive for including the first found template:

4 : Include a view based on a condition

Conditionally including a view based on a condition is useful when you only want to add content based on logic like an authenticated user.

We can more cleanly include a view based on a condition with the ‘@includeWhen’ directive with one line:

5 : Include a view if it exists

If you have custom themes system or you dynamically create your Blade views, then checking if the file exists a mandatory thing to do.

Calling the exists method on the view helper will do the trick:

But it turns out there is a simple way of handling this using the ‘includeIf’ Blade directive: